Terrestrial Transformations
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Terrestrial Transformations A Political Ecology Approach to Society and Nature Edited by Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Contents Introduction 1 Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg 1 The Anthropocene and Other Noxious Concepts 15 Thomas K. Park and James B. Greenberg 2 The Political Ecology of Climate Change 33 James B. Greenberg and Thomas K. Park 3 Digital Sensing and Human-Environment Relationships in the Face of Climate Variability in Senegal and Mauritania 51 Thomas K. Park, Aminata Niang, and Mamadou Baro 4 The Political Ecology of Languagelessness of the Southwest North American Region: Case Studies in the Linguistic Commoditization of Mexican Origin People 65 Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez 5 Political Ecology of Guitars and Their Tonewoods 95 James B. Greenberg 6 Indigenous Responses to Colonialism in an Island State: A Geopolitical Ecology of Kanaky–New Caledonia 111 Simon Batterbury, Séverine Bouard, and Matthias Kowasch 7 An Everyday Politics of Access: The Political Ecology of Infrastructure in Cape Town’s Informal Settlements 121 Angela Storey 8 Land Tenure Issues and Socio-Political Challenges in Mauritania 133 Mamadou Baro v vi Contents 9 Complicity and Resistance in the Indigenous Amazon: Economia Indigena under Siege 149 Alaka Wali 10 Dolphin Hunters or Dolphin Saviors: Cultural Identity Choices under Intensifying Sea-Level Rise, Cash Dependence, and a New Eco-Christian Conservation 161 Sarah Keen Meltzoff 11 When Pachamama Is Left Hungry: Healing and Misfortune in the Atacama Desert 179 Anita Carrasco 12 Place Matters: Tracking Coastal Restoration after the Deepwater Horizon 193 Diane Austin and Victoria Phaneuf 13 Practicing Political Ecology in the New Restoration Economy 211 Ravic P. Nijbroek 14 Nature Conservation and the Ambiguous Human-Nature Relationship 223 Ylva Uggla 15 Hope and Possibility for Transformation in Ordinary Acts of Well-Being on a Bicycle-Pedestrian Trail 235 Lisa L. Gezon Conclusions 251 James B. Greenberg, Thomas K. Park, Simon Batterbury, Casey Walsh, and Edward Liebow Acknowledgments We would like to thank all those who have contributed to the field of political ecology both those who have published in JPE and those choosing to publish elsewhere. We would like as well to thank all the staff and graduate students who have contributed time to make the Journal of Political Ecology a suc- cess. Most importantly the editors of this book would like to thank Simon Batterbury for his exemplary work as editor in making the journal a major force in the social sciences. vii Conclusions James B. Greenberg, Thomas K. Park, Simon Batterbury, Casey Walsh, and Edward Liebow INTRODUCTION: RISK, MODERNITY, AND INEQUALITY Ulrich Beck has suggested that modernity created “manufactured risks,” like toxic pollutants and higher levels of crime, and this has led to modern society being transformed by its obsessive assessments of risk (Beck, 2009). We would not disagree, but do argue that Beck touched only on traditional calcu-lable risks and this does not do justice to the full spectrum of risks and vulnerabilities resulting from modern society, social and environmental in-equalities, and the governance systems that permit them. Further, Beck de-scribes a modern way of calculating risk that is, like all forms of inquiry, necessarily partial and incomplete. Political ecology is a critical approach to understanding human- nature relations that pushes the epistemological and ontological boundaries of this knowledge of risk, incorporating new objects of study and refining techniques of observation and measurement. This con-clusion summarizes some of the key contributions of political ecology to understanding such risks, showing how this book places them in a political economy of the environment, across space and over time. A few examples may clarify our perspective. When a carcinogen is deter- mined, it typically is given a statistical determination such that a particular level of exposure is thought to raise the likely occurrence of cancers in the exposed population by a specific amount. Similarly, a bank’s investment portfolio can be assessed in terms of risk so that appropriate levels of insu-rance can be acquired. Traditionally, rainfall and flood likelihoods were in comparable ways assessed so society could talk of a 100-year flood or a 1,000-year flood. Unfortunately, modern understandings of risk have been 251 252 Conclusions disrupted by chaos theory, applicable in climate science and other areas, which problematizes such assessments. Scientists now claim that future cli- matic change will be a chaotic phenomenon, made so by differential and unpredictable melting of ice sheets and other phenomena resulting from ris-ing global temperatures (Kingslake 2015). For chaotic phenomena, no esti-mators derived from past distributions meet the criteria for unbiased and optimal estimators. Hence the actual likelihood of reaching a 1,000-year flood today may have little relation to their average frequency in the past. This situation is not so different for banking risk as the 2008 financial crisis, rife with “black swan events” (events with impossibly small estimated chances that nevertheless happened) shows us. Similarly for cancer risk. Human metabolisms function as chemical facto-ries in which molecular inputs are transformed through a sequence of mole-cules until the desired output is reached. Intermediate chemicals, such as those produced in the processing of alcohol can, if left untransformed, cause major health issues. At a national level in the United States, we input annual-ly into our environment thousands of different industrial chemicals, which are subsequently processed in the internal chemical factories of every living organism. In addition, many relatively simple and unregulated materials are now produced at nanometric scales and have an array of properties the ef-fects of which on organisms is unknown. Many materials are also trans-formed in the atmosphere; as those who study urban smog formation on hot summer days with a temperature inversion have long noticed, and these are dumped into rivers, lakes, and water bodies as well as inhaled into our lungs. They are also transformed through physical processes in the earth. The com-binatorial possibilities of so many untraditional molecules and materials in so many biological and physical processes are incalculable and certainly cannot begin to be analyzed in our very finite number of laboratories or by our small number of scientific staff capable of such analyses. That such tasks are be-yond our current and future capacities may be only one problem. The other is that there is no reason to assume none of these interactions participate in nonlinear or chaotic processes. Small incidents of new molecules, as well as those directly flowing from industrial processes, are already having major transformative impacts on the planet’s biota and physical processes. This is a prime case for more science to refine and support environmental justice campaigns about toxic exposures, begun in the United States but currently represented in the Environmental Justice Atlas, which reports on countless sites of injustice worldwide (Temper et al., 2015). The precautionary principle, discussed in our the chapter on climate change (chapter 2, above), is thus likely to have quite broad applicability. It is even likely that future generations, should humanity not die out, will look back on the modern society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as disastrously naive and misguided. Political ecology draws attention to levels Conclusions 253 of causality that we may presume are more fundamental even than the chemi-cal processes precipitated by emissions from factories and industrial process-es. Countless examples could be adduced but perhaps one will suffice. Soci-etal demand for saturated colors (e.g. deep red or black), motivated by adver-tisers’ awareness that sex can sell almost anything to a properly inoculated population, motivates the textile industry to use major carcinogens in textile production, and these not only impact wearers of textiles but also spread through the biosphere as they enter it through industrial waste water (Chung 2016). Elsewhere, the Kanak of New Caledonia, discussed by Batterbury et al., (chapter 6, above), are motivated by a desire for a decent standard of living but have found their main chance through the mining of nickel, a quite toxic metal used widely in industry, and its presence in their natural environment has been magnified by 140 years of mining. Similarly, the Atacameño stud-ied by Carrasco (chapter 11, above) find their main chances for a decent incomes primarily through employment tied to the mining corporation which, through its draw down of the water table, has destroyed their tradi-tional livelihoods. The scales of mineral extraction and the global consump-tion of minerals are incommensurate, with health and livelihood risks con-centrated among these local populations. Uggla’s discussion of the common insistence on a distinction between humans and nature emphasizes the dra-matic character of this misunderstanding of the fundamental reality that we are part of nature and whatever happens to nature thereby happens in some form to us. But this is not a process that is equally distributed by location, gender, race, or ethnicity. THE JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECOLOGY The Journal of Political Ecology (JPE) and the Political Ecology Society (PESO) were founded in 1994 to help stimulate research and publications in the emerging field of political ecology. Both vehicles have been highly suc-cessful. PESO was eventually joined by the POLLEN political ecology net-work with a pan-European base and a large bi-annual conference, and the DOPE political ecology conference held yearly at the University of Ken-tucky. Other events are held in Chile, Mexico, and across Scandinavia, to name only three. The journal has succeeded in publishing over 400 articles on a variety of themes with a global scope, diversifying away from its roots in the Americas, in anthropology, and the work of Eric Wolf.