Political Ecology

Political ecology is an academic field that seeks to understand human societies and their relationship to nature. Political ecology posits that environmental problems are intrinsically political and need to be understood in a broader framework that takes local as well as global actors into consideration. An important overarching goal of political ecology is to understand and participate in the forces linking social change, environment, and development. Academic studies using political ecology perspectives of analysis are appearing with greater frequency in contemporary environmental scholarship. While geographers and ecological economists have taken the lead in this endeavor, other fields, such as anthropology, history, and sociology, are joining in this collective effort. However, different shades of political ecology draw from a number of academic subdisciplines including: cultural and ecological anthropology, development theory, environmental economics, environmental studies, gender studies, environmental history, human geography, rural sociology, and postcolonial studies. The origin of political ecology was influenced by political economy, which has roots in Marxism, and has drawn on post-structuralism.

Given that an increasing number of academic disciplines are engaging in political ecology frameworks of analysis, explanations of society-nature relations have likewise become increasingly fragmented along disciplinary lines. These explanations are characterized by dualistic thinking that all too often analytically isolates physical and social phenomena. Political ecology is an interdisciplinary, nondualistic strategy that remains under development, and perhaps deliberately so, seeking to describe the dynamic ways in which, on the one hand, political and economic power can shape ecological futures and, on the other, how ecologies can shape political and economic possibilities.

Often identified with political economy, political ecology frequently takes political economy's interest in the expression and influence of state and corporate power on environmental politics and combines this with insights derived from understanding and analyzing environmental influences on social activity. In this manner, political ecology extends theoretical inquiry beyond the insights of the conventional social and natural sciences. Political ecology's ability to engage the philosophy and values of ecological justice has made it attractive to many who expect analysis to facilitate social change.

Political ecology is a fast-growing multidisciplinary field of research. It focuses on human to nature relationships and has a particular interest in connections between politics and environmental change. Human beings have evolved out of and as a part of nature, but with the increasing determinacy of human culture on landscapes, highly visible since the Neolithic period, it is hardly possible to speak of virgin natures. Even the Arctic Archipelago, far from human settlements, is exposed to radiation from the gap in the ozone layer caused by human livelihoods in other parts of the globe. The uneven vulnerability of humanity to environmental crises is increasingly being recognized, as global capitalism affects place-based peoples and transnational, mobile elites in extremely different ways.