>>Hello and thanks for tuning in for the first unit
of Culture, Power and Global Environment.
If you haven't already watched the videos
welcoming you to the class,
and explaining the academic integrity policy,
I encourage you to press pause now
and go back to those videos before proceeding.
With that said, I'm excited to officially
begin our exploration of how social, cultural
and political differences
shape environmental problems around the world.
Our first step in this journey
is to develop a solid understanding of political ecology.
Political ecology is a transdisciplinary field
that includes scholars from across
the humanities and social sciences,
but particularly from the disciplines
of geography, anthropology and history.
Though the term has a longer history,
the field we now know as political ecology
first emerged in the 1970's and 80's
as part of an effort by anthropologists
and geographers to incorporate political
economic forces into their studies
of environmental change and vice versa.
This was, in part, a response to the neglect
of the environment among political economists
and in part a response to the neglect
of political economy among human ecologists.
Despite criticism from those who see it as unscientific,
political ecology has grown steadily since the 1970's
and is today widely accepted as a worthwhile contributor
to our understanding of human environment interactions.
The data sources and methods used by political ecologists
vary widely, from the sort of ethnographic research
that I conduct, to archival research common
among historians to spatial analysis
used in satellite images.
Likewise, the theoretical orientations
of political ecologists range from those who work
within Marxist historical materialism
to those who mainly employ post-structuralist
discourse analysis to those who, like me,
take a more eclectic approach.
In this course, we won't dwell on the disciplinary,
methodological or theoretical distinctions
among political ecologist,
though these matters are certainly open to discussion,
should they interest you.
Rather, we're interested in what
political ecologists have in common.
So, what are the characteristics that
unite political ecologists?
The first, obviously, in an interest in the environment
and more specifically, in how politics
shape environmental problems.
What this means in practice varies tremendously.
Political ecologists study, for example,
how shifts in global commodity markets
affect the livelihoods of farmers,
how biologists relate to the animals they study,
and how certain voices take precedence over others
in determining whether a given
environmental problem even exists.
Amid all this topical variety,
a few principles stand out.
One is that political ecologists
look to human cultural behaviors
as adaptations to the environment.
This means that human societies,
even and perhaps especially those
often disregarded as primitive,
often have highly sophisticated
ways of interacting with and managing their environments.
As we know however,
human adaptations are not always in sync
with the environment can sustain
and so another principle of political ecology
is that degradation of local environments
is often driven by forces that transcend the local level.
Against the tendency to blame local peoples for
environmental degradation, political ecologists
draw attention to how local land and resource
use decisions are shaped by political economic forces
that operate at the regional, national and global scales.
Clearly then, another common concern
among political ecologists is power
and how differences in power shape
all aspects of people's relations with the environment.
In part, this is about how the costs and benefits
of environmental relations are distributed.
We study who has control over particular
landscapes and resources,
and who suffers the negative consequences
of particular activities,
but it's also about who has the power
to institutionalize their vision of the environment
and of the human role therein.
Many studies by political ecologists
show how dispossession of resources
by powerful actors goes hand in hand
with imposition of those actor's assumptions
about what the environment is
and how human's should relate to it.
Finally, political ecologist's are very often heard
arguing that the participants in human affairs
are not, in fact, exclusively human.
Whether it's mosquitoes and the diseases they carry
or trees and the fires they create.
Humans must always contend with the organisms
and biophysical processes' that surround them.
In this sense, studying politics means
more than understanding how humans
struggle with one another for resources
or cultural hegemony, it also means
understanding how a wide variety of different
organisms interact to shape the world in particular ways.
Finally, although there is no common political ideology
among political ecologists,
there is a definite tendency to seek
greater social equity and to see social equity
as an important factor in environmental sustainability.
As we move through the course,
you can decide for yourself whether you agree
with the types of social changes
that political ecologists often call
for implicitly or explicitly.
Now, when you read the chapters from Paul Robbins'
introduction to political ecology,
pay attention to the distinction he draws
between political ecology and apolitical ecology,
how, according to Robbins, does a political ecology
approach differ from one that is apolitical
or that attempts to focus only on technical
or biophysical aspects of the environment.
(uplifting sound)