Political Ecology
James Greenberg and I began work on the Journal of Political Ecology in 1992-93 and its first issue appeared in 1994. We have edited a book (Terrestrial Transformations, 2020) evaluating where the field has gone, and not gone, over the subsequent 25 years. A brief glimpse of our current thinking on current and future directions for political ecology as a field of research includes the following:
Political Ecology
We would argue that political ecology should assume fully dialectical relationships.
Hegel’s ideological argument: Thesis-Antithesis -> synthesis (change)
AND
Marx’s materialistic argument: dialectical relationship: Industry-Nature-Society
suggest we recognize continuing change in all three theses.
Our current position (post authoring two books on a multicultural history of western finance):
It may be helpful to imagine:
Three ideological and three material realms in dialectical relationships:
Finance&Advertizing-Biosphere&Research-Industry&Culture aka FABRIC
with continuous change in all six loci of influence.
Compare this dialectical position with the archaic and simplistic and putatively new concept of the Anthropocene which imagines humans simply dominating nature:
Anthropocene: the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
A further serious problem with the Anthropocene concept is that like the early Foucault, but not the late Foucault, it imagines a clear disjuncture in history, a before and after. This is like the claims of a qualitative break between the “modern” and the “postmodern.” In contrast we agree with Foucault’s final position that such a claim is unwarranted and the contrast is counterproductive (in Foucault’s 1983 words: noxious: among “les habitudes les plus nocives de la pensée contemporaine”
“it should be said perhaps the most noxious habit of contemporary thought…: the analysis of the present moment as being precisely in history that of a rupture, or that of the summit. or the fulfillment or that of the dawn which returns… I say it especially because I have happened to claim this; I say it especially because in the work of someone like Nietzsche, one finds it, endlessly, or at least in an insistent way… No it is a day like any other, or rather it is a day which is never quite like the others. ” Dits et Ecrits Il cf pages 195-211
The geology inspired search for a golden splike marking the beginning of the Anthropocene epitomizes this early Foucault search for an inferior “pre” and a more important “post” perspective. It has elicited a similar bandwagon effect by scholars eager to make their mark. This trajectory of ideas distracts from any number of more interesting perspectives. It also obscures the reality that most pollution is caused by a few hundred companies and the consumption patterns of the wealthy. Treating the effects of an out of control industrial economy adamant about not accepting blame for serious harms as if the harms are a mere human artifact for which humanity in general is responsible makes the case for more rational approaches such as the need for precautionary politics more difficult to argue.