The Dictionary of Human Geography

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geography, rooted inecosystemsapproaches

to human behaviour; ecological anthropology,

grounded in cybernetics and the adaptive

qualities of living systems (see Rappaport,

1968); and the high tide of Marxist-inspired

political economy, andpeasantstudies in

particular, of the 1970s. A number of people

contributed to this intersection of ideas –

Richards’ (1985) work on peasant science,

Hecht’s (1985) analysis of eastern Amazonia,

Grossman (1984) on subsistence in Papua

New Guinea, and Watts (1983) on the simple

reproduction squeeze and drought in Nigeria –

but Blaikie pulled a number of disparate

themes and ideas together, drawing in large

measure on his own South Asian experiences.

In rejecting thecolonialmodel of soil erosion

that framed the problem around environmen-

tal constraints, mismanagement,overpopula-

tionandmarketfailure, Blaikie started from

the resource manager, and specifically house-

holds from whom surpluses are extracted,

‘who then in turn are forced to extract

‘‘surpluses’’ from the environment ... [lead-

ing] to degradation’ (1985, p. 124). The ana-

lytical scaffolding was provided by a number of

key middle-range concepts – marginalization,

proletarianization and incorporation – that

permitted geographers to see the failure of soil

conservation schemes inclassor social terms;

namely, thepowerof classes affected by soil

erosion in relation tostatepower, the class-

specific perception of soil problems and solu-

tions, and the class basis of soil erosion as a

political issue. Blaikie was able to drive home

the point thatpovertycould, in a dialectical

way, cause degradation – ‘peasants destroy

their own environment in attempts to delay

their own destruction’ (1985, p. 29) – and that

poverty had to be understood not as a thing or

a condition, but as the social relations of pro-

duction, which are realms of possibility and

constraint.

In this work, political ecology came to mean

a combination of ‘the concerns ofecology

and a broadly defined political economy’

(Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, p. 17), the lat-

ter understood as a concern with effects ‘on

people, as well as on their productive activ-

ities, of on-going changes within society at

local and global levels’ (1987, p. 21). This is

a broad definition – an approach rather than a

theory – which was adopted by the editors in

the inaugural issue of theJournal of Political

Ecologyin 1995. Political ecology has three

essential foci.

The first is interactive, contradictory and

dialectical:societyandland-basedresources

are mutually causal in such a way that poverty,

via poor management, can induce environmen-

tal degradation that itself deepens poverty. Less

a problem of poor management, inevitable nat-

ural decay or demographic growth (seede-

mography), land degradation is seen associal

in origin and definition. Analytically, the cen-

trepoint of any nature–society study must be

the ‘land manager’, whose relationship to

nature must be considered in a historical, pol-

itical and economic context.

Second, political ecology argues for regional

or spatial accounts of degradation that link,

through ‘chains of explanation’, local decision-

makers to spatial variations in environmental

structure (stability and resilience as traits of

particular ecosystems in particular).locality

studies are, thus, subsumed within multi-

layered analyses pitched at a variety of regional

scales.

Third, land management is framed by

‘external structures’, which for Blaikie meant

the role of the state and thecore__periphery

model.

If early political ecology was not exactly clear

what political economy implied, beyond a sort

of 1970sdependency theory, it did provide a

number of principles and mid-range concepts.

The first is a refined concept of marginality in

which its political, ecological and economic

aspects may be mutually reinforcing: land deg-

radation is both a result and a cause of social

marginalization. Second, pressure of produc-

tion on resources is transmitted through social

relations, which impose excessive demands on

theenvironment(i.e.surplus extraction). And

third, the inadequacy of environmental data of

historical depth linked to a chain ofexplan-

ation analysis compels a plural approach.

Rather than unicausal theories one must, in

short, accept ‘plural perceptions, plural defin-

itions ... and plural rationalities’ (Blaikie and

Brookfield, 1987, p. 16).

Political ecology had the advantage of see-

ing land management and environmental deg-

radation (orsustainability) in terms of how

political economy shapes the ability to manage

resources (through forms of access and con-

trol, of exploitation), and through the lens of

cognition (one person’s accumulation is

another person’s degradation). But in other

respects political ecology was demonstrably

weak: it often had an outdated notion ofecol-

ogyand ecological dynamics (including an

incomplete understanding of ecological

agency: Zimmerer, 1994b); it was often remark-

ably silent on the politics of political ecology; it

had a somewhat voluntarist notion of human

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POLITICAL ECOLOGY