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1.
Scale, as concept, has featured prominently in political ecology and remains, even if implicitly, a crucial point of analytical reference. Recent studies, drawing from both human geography and ecology, have sought to demonstrate how scales, rather than pre-existing ontologically, are both socially and environmentally produced. Given the different scales through which social and environmental processes occur, the study of society-environment relations can be improved by analysing varying scalar configurations of interaction. This recent and promising methodological corrective would greatly benefit from a dialogue with world-systems approaches, which integrate diverse scale-producing processes and to some extent overlap in scope with political ecology. World-systems perspectives, by focusing on the long-term systemic character of people-environment relations, effectively connect micro- to macro-scale social and ecological processes and explain long-term internal dynamics and interrelations of systems at different scales. Conversely, world-systems approaches could learn much from political ecologists’ consideration of nonhuman processes into understandings of scale and society-environment relations, which has a long tradition in geography, as well as from the more context-sensitive analytical framework brought to those understandings. Case studies are discussed to demonstrate not only how these two perspectives could be integrated, but also how explanations of environmental change can be thereby improved. Combining the two approaches provides the basis for a more ecologically oriented world-systems paradigm and, in political ecology, for greater sensitivity to socially large-scale systemic processes and, given the originally anti-capitalist underpinnings of both paradigms, for more political coherence.  相似文献   

2.
Brian Pompeii 《GeoJournal》2016,81(3):457-473
Globally, modifications to the landscape have drastically transformed social and ecological communities. The implication of global climate change for small islands and small island communities is especially troublesome. Socially, small islands have a limited resource base, deal with varying degrees of insularity, generally have little political power, and have limited economic opportunities. The physical attributes of small islands also increase their vulnerability to global climate change, including limited land area, limited fresh water supplies, and greater distances to resources. The focus of this research project is to document place-specific human–environmental interactions from a political ecology perspective as a means to address local concerns and possible consequences of global environmental change. The place in which these interactions are examined is the barrier island and village of Ocracoke, NC. I focus on the specific historical-geography of land and water management on Ocracoke as a means to examine relationships between local human–environmental interactions and environmental change. I provide an account of technological changes in potable water procurement and the paralleling development of island growth (i.e. people, buildings, tourism). Then, relying on interviews with island residents, I consider how advancements in local water infrastructure, specifically the installation of an additional reverse osmosis unit, are hinged on anticipated future economic development. Lastly the social dimensions of change are discussed with specific focus on the increase in housing density and overburdened septic drainage fields in relation to changing hydrologic processes with an examination of how all of these factors affect local vulnerability.  相似文献   

3.
Jeremia Njeru   《Geoforum》2006,37(6):1046-1058
Over 24 million plastic bags are consumed in Kenya monthly. More than half of the bags end up in the solid waste stream. Plastic bags now constitute the biggest challenge to solid waste management in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and home to three million people. As a result, plastic bag waste has attracted great political and public attention, especially because the waste has myriad unique environmental problems. This paper seeks to unravel the problem of plastic bag waste in Nairobi through an urban political ecological perspective. Urban political ecology has done much to excavate economic, political, and cultural processes, as well as ecological dynamics that create and re-create urban environments. Little has been done in this context with respect to urban solid waste problems, with the exception of urban political ecology of environmental justice. However, research done within the context of urban political ecology of environmental justice has mainly focused on solid waste problems in the Western World, particularly USA. Drawing on research conducted in Nairobi, as well literature on business and politics, and solid waste management in Kenya, this paper examines the nature of plastic bag waste problem, its political–economic roots and implications for environmental justice.  相似文献   

4.
Current theorising in human geography draws attention to the relational emergence of space and society, challenging ideas of difference that rely on fixed identities and emphasising the importance of the everyday in the production of social inequalities. Similarly, feminist political ecology has emphasised the role of ‘nature’ or ‘environment’ in the production of subjectivities such that ideas of gender and nature arise in relation to each other. In this paper I build from these insights to explore the ways in which the embodied performance of gender, caste and other aspects of social difference collapse the distinction between the material and the symbolic. Symbolic ideas of difference are produced and expressed through embodied interactions that are firmly material. Through this kind of conceptualisation, I hope to push forward debates in geography on nature and feminist political ecology on how to understand the intersectional emergence of subjectivities, difference and socio-natures. Importantly, it is the symbolic meanings of particular spaces, practices and bodies that are (re)produced through everyday activities including forest harvesting, agricultural work, food preparation and consumption, all of which have consequences for both ecological processes and social difference. Through the performance of everyday tasks, not only are ideas of gender, caste and social difference brought into view, but the embodied nature of difference that extends beyond the body and into the spaces of everyday life is evident. I use ethnographic evidence from rural Nepal to explore the ways in which boundaries between bodies, spaces, ecologies and symbolic meanings of difference are produced and maintained relationally through practices of work and ritual.  相似文献   

5.
Global environmental change shapes places and people through ongoing transformation of ecological, socioeconomic, political, and cultural phenomena. One region construed as highly vulnerable to global environmental change, particularly anthropogenic climate change, is the North. Recent research about human communities in Western arctic and subarctic places revolve around vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change, focusing on loss of the ability to pursue traditional livelihoods, threats to ecosystems sustaining human communities and the need to adapt to new environmental regimes. Fewer studies address Russia and the perceptions and emotions related to climate change. To understand how people of the Russian North engage with climate change, I conducted ethnographic research in two rural and remote communities in subarctic alpine Kamchatka, Russia in 2009–2010. Local narratives about climate change largely reflect climate skepticism, and anthropogenic climate change is rejected as explaining environmental changes because: (1) climate is considered as naturally and cyclically changing, (2) humans are not considered a large enough force to alter natural climate cycles, (3) environmental problems are solvable with technology and (4) there is a lack of knowledge about climate change science. Thus, perceptions and emotions about transformation focus on other realms—socioeconomic, political, cultural—that are perceived as more critical to everyday life in the present and near future. Here, I describe these narratives and place the regional understanding of climate change in greater context to explain resistance to imagining environmental transformations due to climate change.  相似文献   

6.
An archaeology of fear and environmental change in Philadelphia   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  
Alec Brownlow 《Geoforum》2006,37(2):227-245
This paper examines how mechanisms of social control function to mediate human-environment relations and processes of environmental change in the city. Using the Fairmount Park System of Philadelphia as a case study, I argue that a history of social control mechanisms, both formal and informal, maintained viable socio-environmental urban relationships. Their decline over the last several decades has produced a legacy of fear towards the city’s natural environment that has had, and continues to have, profound socio-spatial and ecological implications. I argue that these changes have their origin in a set of racially motivated decisions made during the volatile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s and that African American women, in particular, have been impacted disproportionately by their consequences. Fear of crime in the natural environment and suspicion of environmental change have resulted in the exclusion of local women and children from what was, historically, a politically and socially viable public space. In this context, urban ecological change is locally understood as more an issue of social control than one of environmental concern.  相似文献   

7.
Across the rural American West, the restructuring of rural capitalism has transformed production landscapes into those increasingly structured by the development and consumption of natural and cultural amenities. This project used principles from symbolic interactionism, ethnographic methods, and the analytical framework of regional political ecology to understand the role of environmental learning in negotiating the new management regime associated with amenity-based capitalism in rural Fremont County, Colorado. The study found that most amenity residents participate regularly in social learning about the environment through a variety of interpersonal and organizational behaviors. In addition, they are responding collectively to environmental risks and opportunities associated with wildfire, noxious weeds and invasive grass species, prospective uranium mining, and restoration of cultural-landscape features. Ultimately, the practices of environmental learning concern how private properties and assets will be managed relative to the social construction of the environment as an amenity for personal consumption. Conservation and management prospects in this and other rural areas in the postindustrial world can be enhanced by understanding the microsociology of exurban geographies and by engaging the social forms and processes related to this distinctive landscape construction.  相似文献   

8.
Skilled international migration is as an important process of both contemporary globalization and the global city. The establishment of a transnational elite of expatriate labour in international finance plays a vital part in the accumulation of capital within international financial centres (IFCs). Expatriate labour has become a major determinant of the IFC, creating financial capital through complex social relations, knowledge networks, practices and discourses. The principal argument being made in this paper is that expatriates are major agents in the accumulation and transfer of financial knowledge in the IFC, and that such processes are undertaken through expatriate global–local knowledge networks and other social practices. The paper is divided into three major parts. Following a discussion of transnational elites as expatriates in global cities, which also conceptualises their contribution to the spatialization of financial knowledge networks, the empirical study investigates the working, social and cultural knowledge networks and practices of British expatriates in Singapore. Finally, the paper revisits the conceptual work on transnational elites and suggests that expatriates were deeply embedded in global–local relations in the workplace and the business/social sphere through interaction with local ‘western educated/experienced' Singaporeans, but were disembedded from the local in the home and other household social spaces due to the invisibility of the local population in their interactions. Both the theoretical and empirical analyses suggests that expatriates are flow in the Castellian spatial logic of the network society.  相似文献   

9.
B. McCusker  E.R. Carr 《Geoforum》2006,37(5):790-804
Land use change and livelihood systems are often analyzed separately or with one “driving” the other. This “driver-feedback” relationship has been buttressed by approaches to social process that are often far too static. Actors are confronted with a bundle of choices that they must negotiate as they create pathways of change. These choices are always bound up in relations of power and the knowledges that are the conditions for and results of these relations. We suggest that land uses and livelihood are different manifestations of the social processes by which individuals and groups negotiate the everyday conditions that shape their lives. We propose a framework that extends current understandings of the relationship between land use change and livelihoods by treating social relations of power as the entry point into this complex relationship. We underpin our arguments with empirical examples from South Africa and Ghana that locate power/knowledge relations in the context of social change in both study areas.  相似文献   

10.
Milan Bufon 《GeoJournal》1993,30(3):235-240
The article represents an attempt to explore the dimensions of border landscapes on the basis of some recent theoretical and methodological geographical trends in approaching such kind of regions and in the case of a special part of the current Italo-Slovene transborder area — the Gorizia section. Here, the contradiction between the stability of trans-border cultural and social links and the lability of the political partition seems to be particularly sharp. As a consequence, the border population try to reproduce the traditional spatial and social milieu in which it used to live before changes in international political framework occurred. Field methods for the detection of local social and cultural trans-border relations are then introduced, disclosing both the extent and qualities of the Gorizia trans-border region.  相似文献   

11.
Recent scholarship examining environmental governance and solid waste management (SWM) in Hawaii has demonstrated the complexities of managing refuse in a remote, ecologically sensitive archipelago. Despite decades of calls for intensive recycling, composting, incineration, and other non-landfill disposal technologies, most islands of Hawaii continue to rely on sanitary landfilling. On Maui, a minor bureaucratic scandal centered on landfill permitting triggered the formation of an ad hoc entity intended to change SWM once and for all – the Solid Waste Resources Advisory Committee (SWRAC). I mobilize scholarship on waste governance, and in particular the ‘modes of governing’ framework to interrogate the decision-making processes of the SWRAC, evaluate their outputs, and consider the reasons for their ultimately limited impact on SWM governance on Maui. Based on a close reading of SWRAC meeting minutes and documents, I identify several factors, including the lack of clear goals or targets for SWRAC activity; a flawed, consensus-oriented decision-making process; and a failure to contextualize SWM within the broader environmental and cultural terrain of Maui. Taken together, I contend that these three problem areas underline the significance of seriously incorporating and harmonizing competing conceptions of ecological identity into both the ‘modes of governing’ framework and the scholarship of environmental governance more broadly.  相似文献   

12.
Vulnerability is registered not by exposure to hazards alone; it also resides in the resilience of the system experiencing the hazard. Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb recurrent disturbances, such as natural disasters, so as to retain essential structures, processes and feedbacks) is important for the discussion of vulnerability for three reasons: (1) it helps evaluate hazards holistically in coupled human–environment systems, (2) it puts the emphasis on the ability of a system to deal with a hazard, absorbing the disturbance or adapting to it, and (3) it is forward-looking and helps explore policy options for dealing with uncertainty and future change. Building resilience into human–environment systems is an effective way to cope with change characterized by surprises and unknowable risks. There seem to be four clusters of factors relevant to building resilience: (1) learning to live with change and uncertainty, (2) nurturing various types of ecological, social and political diversity for increasing options and reducing risks, (3) increasing the range of knowledge for learning and problem-solving, and (4) creating opportunities for␣self-organization, including strengthening of local institutions and building cross-scale linkages and problem-solving networks.  相似文献   

13.
Matthew T. Huber 《Geoforum》2009,40(1):105-115
In this paper, I present a theoretical argument that fossil fuel represents a historically specific and internally necessary aspect of the capitalist mode of production. Despite sustained attention to distributional conflicts between international capital and energy rich nation-states, few historical-materialists have paid attention to the relations between fossil fuel and capital accumulation in industrial capitalist societies. In opposition to ecological economic notions of fixed thermodynamic “laws”, I first propose a dialectical conception of energy as embedded in dynamic social processes and power relations. Second, I review the historical importance of the energy shift from solar or biological sources of energy (muscles, wind, and water) to fossilized sources of energy (coal, oil, and gas). I then demonstrate how attention to fossil fuel energy forces a reexamination of the core insights of ecological Marxism and the political economy of nature. In the core argument of the paper, I reconsider the shift from biological to fossil energy as internal to the generalization and extension of capitalist social relations from two basic vantage points - (1) capitalist production based on wage labor; (2) the spatial conditions of capitalist circulation. I conclude by asking whether it is accurate to conceptualize capitalism as a “fossil fuel mode of production” and highlight the political urgency of a historical materialist perspective that takes seriously the importance of energy to the reproduction of capitalist social relations.  相似文献   

14.
This paper seeks to explore the complex relationships between land cover, environmental change and forced migration in the middle valley of the Senegal River, attempting both to identify the nature of environmental impacts of forced displacement with specific reference to land cover, and to examine the social, political and economic circumstances in which these are exacerbated or reduced. The study concludes that change in land cover caused by the presence of refugees is not a major cause for concern in this area, despite the vulnerability of the natural environment. Significant factors in reducing negative impacts include the dispersal of the refugee population, and cultural and social proximity of the refugee and local populations surveyed. At the same time, observed changes in land cover need to be treated with caution, given the often cyclical nature of environmental change, and the range of factors associated with it.  相似文献   

15.
Jill Harrison   《Geoforum》2008,39(3):1197-1214
Recent research suggests that many key strands of California’s agrofood activism appear to accommodate, rather than confront, the neoliberalization of environmental governance, and that such accommodations might problematically constrain the transformative potential of activists’ work. In this paper, I examine the case of pesticide drift activism in California, which, as an exception to this trend, provides a provocative and useful case study for interrogating the influence of neoliberalization on social/environmental activism. I argue that California’s pesticide drift activism can be understood as a reaction to the spaces of sacrifice created and exacerbated by the failure of unionization-based pesticide reform efforts, a promising but compromised regulatory apparatus, longstanding farmworker powerlessness, neoliberal regulatory rollback, and neoliberalized pesticide politics – a mosaic of factors that have worked together to produce a regulatory structure that has always been better at registering pesticides than at reducing pollution. I show that pesticide drift activists’ reliance on confrontational practice, collective action, and strategic alliances have been crucial to the movement’s success with bringing visibility to this issue and with gaining traction in the political arena. Thus, at the same time that neoliberalization can exacerbate physical spaces of sacrifice, this case study illustrates that it can also, unexpectedly perhaps, generate new, non-neoliberal political spaces for social change.  相似文献   

16.
Alistair Fraser  Nancy Ettlinger   《Geoforum》2008,39(5):1647-1656
This paper discusses the dynamic cultural economy of British drum and bass (D&B) music, which emerged out of Britain’s rave culture in the early 1990s. We suggest that D&B offers insight into more general issues regarding the relation between alternative cultural economies and capitalism. We examine relations between D&B and the mainstream capitalist economy and argue that D&B calls attention to the possibility for alternatives to conventional capitalist relations to survive and possibly thrive without pursuing separation from capitalism. We also theorize D&B as a vehicle towards empowerment regarding the industry segment vis-à-vis the mainstream music industry and also regarding D&B’s practitioners, many of whom can be understood as marginalized discursively and/or materially. However, D&B empowerment is fragile, due in part to technological changes that threaten practices that have helped cultivate innovativeness as well as communal relations. The empowerment of alternative practices is fragile not only for D&B as an industry segment, but also from the vantage point of internal power relations – notably with respect to differences along axes of gender and generation/age. Our conclusions indicate the broader significance of the paper for critical social theory and propose how new research might build on our dynamic view of D&B’s cultural economy.  相似文献   

17.
The author outlines the relationships between geography and the study of environmental problems. After WW II when these problems were growing in number and complexity, many geographers turned to the quantitative study of spatial relations and processes, neglecting the ecological aspects of human life on earth. However, recently human and physical geography are turning again to an ecological point of view. In the study of environmental problems, a synthesis of the spatial and the ecological traditions in geography is possible. The spatial aspects of environmental problems and environmental management in a systems-theory framework are the central points in the contribution of geography to an interdisciplinary environmental science.  相似文献   

18.
This paper engages with emergent conceptualizations of political–industrial ecology to understand the politics surrounding how the volume, composition, and material throughput of stormwater in Los Angeles is calculated and applied by experts. The intent is to examine the unfolding relationship between the volume and material flow of stormwater, and the social, political, and technical practices involved in identifying stormwater as a new and underutilized water resource. Specifically, it seeks to understand how the active processes of calculating the metabolic inflows and outflows of stormwater in Los Angeles serve as a way for the city to render value and meaning to the flows of stormwater. I suggest that the ways urban metabolisms are calculated reflect a volumetric approach to environmental governance that serves to achieve certain political goals. I refer to this type of governance as volume control—a way of organizing technopolitical interventions around overcoming problems related to the volume of resources flowing and circulating into, through, and out of cities and industrial systems. I argue that understanding this form of governance relies on taking a political–industrial ecology approach that accounts for both the social and material dimensions of resource flows. While the categories and motivations of stormwater governance remain contested over time and space, it is shown that stormwater in Los Angeles needs to be understood in relation to the ecological systems and scientific, political, and cultural practices designed to make it into a resource and align with existing patterns of growth and development.  相似文献   

19.
In Egypt, major sustainability variables could be identified as scarce of soil and water resources, environmental degradation, rapid population growth, institutional arrangement that includes land tenure and farm fragmentation, agricultural administration, lack of infrastructure, and credit utilization. The main objective of the current work is to evaluate the sustainable land use management (SLM) model through biophysics and socioeconomic elements for the purpose of combating sustainability constraints that preclude the agricultural development geospatially. In this research, from the geomorphologic point of view, the obtained results showed three main landscapes. They were identified in the study area as: fluviolacustrine plain, Aeolian deposits, and flood plain. The study area was dominated by some physical and chemical degradation processes with different scales breaking down the equilibrium of soil stability. The SLM model was implemented and assessed from multivariate perspective points of productivity, security, protection, economic viability, and social acceptability. Four SLM classes were outlined as follows: class I, land management practices that did meet sustainability requirements with a score ≥0.65, which represented 31.0 % of the considered agricultural study area; class II, land management practices that were marginally above the sustainability threshold and represented 12.6 %; class III, land management practices that were slightly below the threshold of sustainability and represented 8.60 %; class IV, land management practices that did not meet sustainability requirements with index values >0.1 that represented 47.86 %. As a general conclusion, it is found that land management practices tend to be unsustainable in the area under investigation for certain constraints that play motivated roles in lowering the targeted land sustainability.  相似文献   

20.
Pacific Islands are considered among the most vulnerable geographies and societies to the effects of climate change and variability (CCV). This study addresses the mismatch between global climate change narratives and local perceptions of environmental change in Moorea, French Polynesia. This study builds on CCV risk perception and adaptation research by analyzing how temporal and historical socio-economic, cultural, political, and ecological contexts shape local perceptions of environmental change among a sample of environmental stakeholders in Moorea. The data were collected prior to the widespread global narrative and social amplification of climate change risk and its particular impact on islands. As such, they offer an important portrait of environmental perceptions in French Polynesia prior to the influence of a circumscribed climate change narrative, which has since come to shape government and NGO responses to environmental change in the Pacific Island Countries and Territories. The data presented in this paper illustrate that perceptions of drivers and effects of environmental change and risk in Moorea are embedded in larger social processes of political economy and ecology, particularly related to contemporary environmental politics, contextualized within the histories of colonialism and tourism-led economic development. Integrating the complexity of local environmental risk perceptions into CCV policy will help to avoid maladaptation, social movements against CCV planning, and may help maximize government and donor investments.  相似文献   

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