Political Ecology

Political ecology (PE) deals with the interrelations among nature, culture, and power, and politics, broadly speaking. It emerged as a field of study in the 1970s out of the interweaving of several ecologically oriented frameworks and political economy. By bringing these frameworks together, PE aimed to work through their respective weaknesses, namely, human and cultural ecology’s lack of attention to power and political economy’s undeveloped conceptualization of nature. Too mired still in structural and dualist ways of thinking, this “first-generation political ecology” (Biersack 2006) gave way over the past two decades to what could be termed a “second-generation” political ecology, variously informed by those theoretical trends marked as “post-” (poststructuralism, post-Marxism, postcolonialism). This second-generation PE has been a vibrant space of inquiry drawing on many disciplines and bodies of theory. What distinguishes it from its predecessor is its engagement with the epistemological debates fostered by constructivism and anti-essentialism. Although very provisionally, given the newness of the trends in question, it could be said that a third-generation political ecology has been in ascension over the past five to ten years. With roots in the second generation, this emerging PE also draws from the most recent academic debates on postrepresentational epistemologies and flat and relational ontologies in geography, anthropology, cultural studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Outside the academy, this tendency is influenced by the increasing visibility acquired by “environmental conflicts” that cannot be easily accommodated in any realist account of struggles over “nature.” We believe that this outgrowth of PE2 marks a noticeable shift from political ecology toward what we tentatively call “political ontology.” In what follows we provide a (necessarily) partial overview of the trajectory that PE has followed as it grappled with the power-laden relation between culture and the environment; we stress the limits it has encountered and how political ontology may help to push PE’s intent further.