Environmental anthropology, Political ecology

This course investigates a wide variety of environmental conservation projects in Africa.  We will examine efforts by colonial and post-colonial states to preserve wilderness in national parks, and how local residents have responded.  We will study projects developed by international organizations which link environmental conservation with economic benefits for local people. Finally, we will look at indigenous African efforts to conserve natural resources and to restore degraded lands.  Throughout the course, we will compare and contrast the perspectives and interests of conservation biologists, government officials, and local residents, among others.

The discussion of issues in political ecology has expanded greatly in recent times, above all as the result of growing concern about far-reaching ecological problems that seem to require an effective political response in the near future. These problems include global warming, ozone depletion, species extinction, desertification, loss of topsoil, depletion of global fisheries, disposal of nuclear waste, global population growth, environmentally-related illness, acid rain, and decline in air and water quality. Concern about disruptions caused by global climate change and the massive global loss of biodiversity has been a major impetus to debates in political ecology.

A B S T R A C T Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore's notion of " shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power. " Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAs – situated in time and space, amid varying relations of power – and how multiple hegemonic practices are con-ceptualised and challenged.

Human interactions with our lived environments have been a subject of inquiry across virtually all academic disciplines, with increased vigour in recent decades as the impact of human interventions on ecosystems and natural resources has become more and more apparent. 

This is nowhere more true than in China, which faces a multitude of environmental challenges ranging from biophysical impacts of climate change, deforestation and water scarcity, to impacts on health and social stability resulting from pollution, land contamination and overexploitation of natural resources. Rapid industrialization over the previous half century and continuing lax environmental oversight have exacerbated these problems exponentially, leaving the country in a position of acute environmental crisis following the state’s pursuit of ecologically unsustainable developmental pathways.

In order to address these manifold issues, it is necessary to understand not only the biophysical and ecological processes which occur naturally within ecosystems, and how they are affected by human intervention, but also how humans relate to their environments, both historically and in contemporary society, and how this relationship affects their actions with regards to protecting and/or exploiting those environments. This question is also relevant at the broader scale of institutional and state actors, who through their control of policy, resources and – particularly in China – discourses, exert a powerful regulatory influence on human interactions with the environment within their jurisdictions. It is also critical to understand the broader political, economic and social forces influencing human interactions with ecological systems, and the effects of changes in such forces and systems over time.     

The current research proposes to address these broad issues through the lens of forests and forest management amongst a specific group of Chinese citizens, the Miao. The Miao are an ethnic minority group who live mostly in forested mountainous areas in southwest China and northern Southeast Asia. They are thus a relevant subject of study in this instance both because of their close association with forests – a key land use and exemplar for broader environmental concerns – and their status as an ethnic minority, with a history, ontology and system of environmental management divergent from the Han norm. This divergence will also be investigated in order to assess state and institutional interventions into forest management practices and, more broadly, state-society relations in the PRC at the periphery and amongst marginalised or subaltern groups such as ethnic minorities.

Engineered for fast harvests and high yields through chemicals, miracle rice triggered a green revolution throughout Southeast Asia and one of the largest anthropogenic disturbances to the nitrogen cycle in the twentieth century. This article considers the green revolution as an event of more-than-human temporalities, an aleatory formation of vegetal, animal, chemical, and human coordinations that has become a world-changing conjuncture. I present the formation as an unintended race— that is, an interplay of differential speeds. I offer a countermodernist account of structural transformation, doing history otherwise, to challenge anthropocentric narratives of progress and call attention to contingent multispecies coordinations that drive modernity's acceleration.

The chapter begins with a brief description of socio-ecological changes in the central Andes between 1985 and 2005, a period marked by troubling developments among silvopastoral areas and women residents. Then, arguing that the conditions and positions of women and forests within their communities do not tell the whole gender story, the analysis expands to consider men and to broaden the spatiotemporal frame. Attention to hierarchies of power and value among differently positioned masculinities reveals that the grueling labor conditions and unfair exchanges to which men community members submit in both product and labor markets are socially constituted and symbolically justified via intersections of gender, spatial and ethnoracial systems that attribute lower value to rural indigenous masculinities relative to more privileged masculine identities. The chapter makes a case for more integral approaches to gender and forestry in order to support efforts to forge socio-ecological systems that may be more satisfying and sustainable for more people and places.

En este trabajo analizo estas formas de coconstitución de luchas sociales y comunes desde la experiencia de 35 años en la Cordillera Central de Puerto Rico de la organización comunitaria Casa Pueblo, la cual no sólo derrotó, tras quince años de lucha, un mega-proyecto minero, sino que transformó su lucha en un proyecto de autogestión comunitaria; una «revolución comunitaria», en palabras de sus líderes (Massol González et al., 2006). Más que probar un planteamiento teórico específico, me interesa aquí explorar las reflexiones que nos ofrecen los propios movimientos en sus prácticas y discursos, que suelen trascender las teorías así como las ideologías de izquierdas (cf. De Angelis, 2003; Martínez Alier et al., 2014; Velicu y Kaika, 2015). Desde la experiencia de Casa Pueblo quisiera argumentar dos cosas. Primero, que los movimientos pro-comunes y por la soberanía – que surgen vinculados a la defensa de territorios par
ticulares – fomentan nuevos modelos de organización social y económica, de gestión del territorio, y de relaciones con la ecología, así como cambios importantes en la política estatal sobre los comunes. Segundo, que la construcción de modelos alternativos de soberanía desde los comunes no reside sólo en el proceso de comunión propiamente. Más bien, reside en un cuestionamiento consciente y continuo a las estructuras jerárquicas-autoritarias del estado y al despojo de los comunes, y, más aún, en convertir ese cuestionamiento en propuestas para proyectos alternativos para una sociedad distinta. De esa forma, las «soberanías locales» se transforman en soberanía popular. Esta experiencia aporta a los planteamientos de De Angelis (2013) sobre la necesidad de ir más allá de la falsa dualidad entre el neoliberalismo (Plan A) y el Keynesianismo (Plan B) como soluciones a la crisis, y pasar por un «Plan C+D», de los comunes y la democracia: los comunes solo pueden expandirse con una nueva política realmente democrática, a la vez que en ellos se sustentan las luchas y las transformaciones políticas. En ese sentido, los comunes son también espacios de creación de resistencias, alternativas, e imaginarios anti-capitalistas (Caffentzis, 2010). Por tanto, es importante entender y analizar más a fondo como surgen nuevos procesos de
Bosque del Pueblo (Fuente: www.adjuntaspr.com/bosque_modelo/)
53ecología Política
En profundidad
comunión y de gestión del territorio como parte de luchas contra los proyectos de despojo del desarrollismo; así como los cuestionamientos de estos movimientos a las estructuras hegemónicas de ‘democracia’ liberal y ‘desarrollo’ capitalista desde el ejercicio en vez de la demanda de la igualdad política y la justicia ambiental (Velicu y Kaika, 2015).

Rituals are said to create identity and avoid change by incorporating what is new into existing structures. They are conservative by nature. The World Cup in Brazil is no exception if we look at it from this perspective. It is a global ritual, following the same rules that do not change, satisfying a global spectatorship and conferring certain kinds of meanings on individual lives. We are all part of this ritual on steroids, this global maelstrom of corruption, dirty handshakes and shameful compromises