POLITICAL ECOLOGY: THE POLITICAL CONSTRUCTION OF

NATURE1
Gerardo Castillo Guzmn
This literature review highlights the main issues stressed by the political ecology
approach. It states that the central concern of political ecology is the understanding
of social and environmental change. Drawing on insights from different disciplines,
its goal is to develop modes of analysis that encompass and relate social and
ecological variables. However, at difference of cultural ecology which conceived
small societies in relative isolated and unchanged terms-- political ecology has
argued that, to more or less extended, any society has been connected with other
groups in broader economic and political systems of trade, cooperation or conflict.
Esta revisin bibliogrfica destaca los principales tpicos enfatizados por el enfoque
de la ecologa poltica. Ella sostiene que la preocupacin principal de la ecologa
poltica es el entendimiento los cambios sociales y ambientales. Tomando prestado de
diferentes disciplinas, su meta es desarrollar modos de anlisis que acomoden y
relacionen variables ecolgicas y sociales. Sin embargo, a diferencia de la ecologa
cultural --la cual concibi pequeas sociedades en aislamiento relativo y bajo
condiciones de inalteradasla ecologa poltica argumento que, en mayor o menor
medida, toda sociedad est conectada con otros grupos en un sistema econmico y
poltico mayor de comercio, cooperacin y conflicto.
Key words: political ecology, cultural ecology, nature, market integration, historical
perspective, gender relations, discourse analysis.

The return of the thick space in society-nature relationship

Space, and its inseparable sibling of landscape, is not only a central concept in the
geographical account but it is also regarded as its distinctive landmark and has shaped
the history of the discipline 2. In his essay on the concept of cultural landscape, Lester
Rowntree (1996) proposes a very interesting phenomenon: the return to a thickness
conceptualization of space.
1

Edited version of the paper presented at the Contemporary Geographical Thought Seminar.
Department of Geography, The University of Oklahoma, Norman. December 2001.
2
Michael Curry (1996) has argued that four main paradigms have characterized the conceptions of
space in the Western tradition: the Aristotelian, the Newtonian, the Leibnizian, and the Kantian. These
paradigms, in turn, have shaped the work of geographers although, in more or less extension, these
conceptions of space have become internalized and could co-exist even within the same research frame.

The historical account of Rowntree argues that in ancient and medieval times notions
of space and landscape where inextricably charged with moral values about authority
and social order. It was the Aristotelian but also Christian notion of the correct
place in the world. Through a long process of rationalization and secularization the
thinkers of the Enlightenment conceived space as a highly abstract reality where any
object could be situated and its movements measured through the use of mathematics
and objective mechanisms. Space became a fixed, timeless, and infinite container
where actions happen and elements are located. Similarly, landscape was defined in
two senses: as the superficial land cover captured by our view and; the geographical
features associated with specific cultural areas and the people that inhabited it (i.e. the
notion of traditional English landscape).

In any case, the emphasis lays in a treatment of space as a physical an immobile

reality that serves of support for natural and human events. In Taaffes (1997: 146)
terms, there is a geographers long-standing concern with the relation between
society and the physical environment and with the distributions of phenomena within
an area.

Since 1980s, however, a turn in social theory has dramatically influenced geography
and its conceptualization of space. Space became regarded as the result of the social
activity rather than the granted place where events happen. To state that space is
socially constructed (Lefebvre: 1991) implies that it is embedded in economic,
political, cultural relations that organizes social life as well that it is perceived and
interpreted (Relph: 1997) accordingly to individual experiences, which remit to social
classifications of gender, class, age, or ethnicity, for instance.

Therefore, the works of Richard Peet (1996), Denis Cosgrove (1985), or James
Duncan (1990), showed how space is an ideologically disputed construction and that
landscape is shaped by the industrialization process in American cities and reflects
these class struggles over production. In this line, Doreen Masey (1984) explains that,

beginning with the economy and social structures of production, she attempts to
develop a wider notion of spatiality as the product of intersecting social relations.

Many of these studies were interested in exploring the enormous capacity of capital in
the reshaping of space, fundamentally urban space (Gottdiener: 1994). David Harvey,
for instance, has stated that capitalism is not only a historical process but also a
geographical project (Harvey: 1990) where urbanization is the result of the necessity
of capital to find a fix place through which to organize production (Harvey: 1985).

The decade of the 1990s was witness of two relates trends. On the one hand, the
postmodern critique to the validity of totalizing narratives (Dear: 2000; 1994; Harvey:
1990; Soja: 1996). On the other, the emergence of a globalization discourse (Castells:
1996; Scott: 1997; Sklair: 1999). In a convergent line, both approaches tend to present
a panorama of fragmented and interchangeable sites and simultaneously connected
through global flows. With a technological and informational revolution that has
eliminated distance, the spatial embeddedness of power and economic relations would
become irrelevant.

The previous works, although exceptionally worthy, deal almost exclusively with the
economic and political conditions of capitalist societies and later capitalism.
Moreover, because their concerns are related with some specific ways to organize
production (i.e. the Fordist line-assemble production) the relationship with nature has
almost become invisible. In addition, privileging long-term and structural factors as
the expansion of the capital, these works have tended to overlook local negotiations
and interpretations.

Through this literature review I will show how a political ecology approach has
helped to a better understanding of the nature-society interaction among societies with
diverse modes of production. In addition, political ecologists have constructed a
bridge between society-nature relationships and broader political and economic
constrains without loosing the particular interpretations and conditions of each case.
In the next sections, I will summarize some important works in political ecology in

order to trace key thematic trends and to identify the main characteristics of their
methods.

From Cultural Ecology to Political Ecology

Political ecology is a historical and multidisciplinary outgrowth of the central
questions asked by the social sciences about the relationship between human society -- viewed in its biological, cultural, and political complexityand a significantly
humanized nature (Greenberg and Park: 1994). Indeed, much of the Political Ecology
agenda, interests, and methods, came from a critical examination of early Cultural
Ecology approach. In one his pioneer works, Julian Steward (1968) defines cultural
ecology as ... the study of the process by which society adapts to its environment.
And declares, moreover, that its ... method requires examination of the interaction of
societies and social institutions with one another and with the natural environment.
At the base of this definition rest a biological metaphor: as any living organism,
human society must adjust its different components to the characteristics of the
environment in order to survive and, then, growth. How much harmoniously the
society is connected with the environment how much better adapted. However, since
the environment itself changes with the human action in the adaptation process, this
process is never ending. There is a continuous process of successive adjustments
conducting to a hypothetical equilibrium (homeostasis).

One of most representative and extreme examples of the cultural ecology approach is
the research of Roy Rappaport (1968) among the Tsembaga in Papua New Guinea. He
states that religious ritual could fulfill not only social and psychological functions of
cohesion and relief but it also organizes and regulates interaction with non-human
species in the direct environment and with other human groups in the less direct
environment. Ritual organizes people over the land, maintains natural resources,
mobilizes social groups, keeps political order, and distributes essential food surpluses.
The simplified model is as follows. Pigs are almost never eaten except under ritual
premises as gifts to the ancestors. In small quantities, pigs are easy of care and highly
beneficial for the land but when the number growths, they demand more work, more
4

food, and cause social stress invading the crops of neighbors. When the stress
increases, illness and fights increase and it finally derives into a war state with other
groups. During wartime social relationships are activated calling for allies through a
complex system of reciprocity. The end of the war is signed with the occupation of
new lands and with the ritual distribution of enormous quantities of pigs. Thus, the
origin of the disorder the crescent growth of pigsis auto regulated by the same
mechanism it causes the war. This could seem irrational, but doing this the ritual
regulates the access and use of resources and activates social relationships in a society
lacked of political institutions.

Findings in political ecology have frontally argued against four assumptions of the
previous cultural ecology approach. First, the conceptualization of nature in terms of
a separated and autonomous entity. Second, the spatial definition of culture as the set
of values and cognitive tools shared by a specific and clearly defined group. Third, the
notion of adaptation as a more or less conscious process that shapes the whole
features of the group, including values and norms (culture) as well as institutions
(social organization) in, fourth, a harmonic and equalitarian society. Political ecology
rejects the treatment of indigenous societies as close and clearly defined groups, with
a shared and homogenous culture, which are direct consequence of the interplay with
its local environment. As it is showed below, political ecology has introduced local
history and regional comparison, has re-examined the relatively independence
between cultural and ecological spheres, and had paid special attention to social
differences, trying to avoid environmental determinism.

Nature as a constructed concept

Marxist approaches (Moore: 1996) have had decisive influence in the understanding
of society-nature relationships. They state that nature is conceptually and materially
constructed. Nature, as a physical reality is produced and mediated by the social
conditions of production and reproduction. In this sense, there are historical social
arrangements embedded in power relationships about what natural resources are
extracted, by which groups, in which way are they used, and for benefit of whom.
5

Considerations of age, class, ethnic adscription or gender are part of the complex
social arrangements that produce the physical environment. On the other hand, nature
is culturally constructed as a concept. Through the language, human groups create,
classify, organize, understand and internalize a physical reality.

The recognition that nature is a cultural constructed concept has enormous

implications closely interwoven. First, if nature is culturally constructed, then, its
meanings are not the same for everybody. In a participatory mapping work, for
example, Rochelau, Thomas-Slayter and Edmunds (1995) show how the landscape is
created and appropriated accordingly to, but not exclusively, gender differences.
Thus, nature is not a general concept but specific environments defined and used by
specific groups under specific situations.

Second, there is the issue of authority, power and knowledge. To define nature
implies to mark its boundaries (i.e. non-human or pristine space), to classify it
(scenic gardens, grassed pastures, tropical forests, or eroded terraces, for instance), or
what is still more importantto rationalize its use. This rationalization is embedded
in moral values. For instance, Nancy Peluso (1992) has noted in her Javas study that
the modern Western state perspective has emphasized a utilitarian view of natural
resources as government revenue. At the same time, this claim is justified by the
maxim that natural resources should be managed to provide the greatest good for the
greatest number of people for the longest time. Moreover, these attempts have been
rooted and consecrated by scientific discourse (i.e. forestry management programs).
Unfortunately, in the most cases --as Ferguson (1990) argues for a development
project in Lesotho-- local people benefit very little from the state centralization of the
resource management.

The political implications of environmental management

Very related to the last point, the claim for rational resource management is not a freevalue and objective outcome of scientific research. Many of the environmental
discourses and plans have been constructed and have benefited intentionally or
6

norfrom and for the dominant perspective. In a study on Cte dIvoire, Basset and
Bi Zuli (2000) applied a discourse analysis to the 1994 National Environmental
Action Plan (NEAP) in order to enquire how environmental problems are constructed.
They found that the environmental discourse in NEAP report is wrong-headed, not
merely erroneous and ill informed but damaging to correcting environmental
problems. Not surprisingly, NEAP discourses follow closely the style and objectives
of colonial discourses that sought to rationalize environmental use through an
authoritative definition of the problem.

Focusing on the colonial order, the historical study of Raymond Bryant (1994) in
Burma illustrates how the British administration facing the forest collapse resulting
from mercantile teak extractioncategorized the shifting cultivation of peasants as
irrational and detrimental practices for its conservationist purposes. Thus, generally
colonial discourses on soil erosion or deforestation failed to recognize politicaleconomic constrains that encouraged erosion on peasant farms (Grossman: 1997);
because of political-economic influences were ignored, solutions were framed in
purely technical terms.

In a similar way, the research of Lucy Jarosz (1996) in Madagascar finds close
similarities between the French colonial regime and the current state policies. Despite
of its contribution to forest clearance, coffee cash-production was not declared an
irrational land-use by the state. Instead of that, rice shifting-cultivation was banned
not only for supposed ecological considerations but because self-subsistence is
contrary to wage work, state revenues and food surplus for a market economy.
Therefore, the resulting Malagasy resistance was not limited to environmental
practices. Indeed, illegal burning of forests and prairies became a symbol against
authority and slaving conditions in wage works. Rice-shifting cultivation was erected,
thus, as a symbol of traditional community values endangered by colonial and state
expansions.

Understanding market integration

Since the very beginning, political ecologists have been aware of the enormous
implications of market integration over subsistence societies. In an early essay, Larry
Grossman (1981) critiques the conventional wisdom in economic development, which
assumes that the introduction of market-oriented activities in rural villages will not be
detrimental to the subsistence system if a surplus of land and labor exist to be
dedicated to the new activities. Grossman states that the social complex,
environmental linkages, productive structure, and cultural responses to commercial
activities are equally important for the understanding of the potential integration of
subsistence and cash-earning systems.

His findings show that despite of the land and labor availability in a Papua New
Guinean village, the introduction of cattle-raising and coffee production had
catastrophic consequences for the subsistence system. The immediate result was an
over burning female work; less time and care for garden cultivation and pig feeding
and, in consequence, less food available and starved pigs damaging and overgrazing
gardens. With less staples produced, the village families were pushed into a vicious
circle procuring more cash to buy products. The panorama was completed by a
cultural behavior that values the making of bisnis and the expending of cash-incomes
into drinking and gambling sessions.
In brief, the Barabunas people became very dependant of market prices and were
exposed to cyclical crisis. For the author this loss of autonomy has maladaptive
consequences. First, once tied to commercial activities, the community is at mercy of
fluctuating market prices. Second, the terms of trend work against rural products.
Third, returns to both labor and land in cash crop production often are lower than in
subsistence production, and thus more land and labor are needed to support a
population. Fourth, traditional subsistence systems are well adapted to local
environment and are better able to cope with unfavorable environmental conditions.
Fifth, market-oriented activities intensify pressure over determined species and
resources. Sixth, commercial activities in rural areas lead to the breakdown of
communal land tenure systems and increase the likelihood of landless families.
8

From a very similar position Nietschmann (1979) describes the deep changes operated
in the Miskito social, ecological and economic complex because of the strengthening
of commercial activities. He acknowledges that Miskito groups have been exposed to
external commercial relationships for centuries in economic cycles of prosperity and
depression (pirates, British trade agents, lodging companies, American fruit processor
plants). However, Nietschmann regards that the nature of the green turtle and animal
skin industry has been so disruptive for the ecological and social system that the
Miskito, in order to adapt to the new circumstances and keep alive their culture, must
to migrate.
As in Barabunas case, the Miskito became trapped in a vicious circle. First,
companies extend credit and supplies to the Miskito, which could then catch turtles all
over the year instead of the traditional seasonal system. Second, they have to catch
turtles in order to repay the credit. Third, income has to be secured to buy food
because subsistence activities could not be maintained with the labor engaged in cash
earning activities. Fourth, as the turtle population declines greater efforts has to be
made to maintain constant the cash flow. Fifth, with so many turtles being sold less
meat is available to reciprocal distribution, resulting in social friction. Once the
subsistence sector becomes monetized, societies lose that stabilizing buffer that
permits self-sufficiency and autonomy during downswings in external markets. As the
Barabuna, the Miskito response is not return to subsistence regulations but further
market intensification.

These works show that the transition to a capitalist mode creates: 1) ecological
pressure over local natural resources; 2) economy dependency over cash-income
activities; 3) dislocation of social order based on reciprocity and; 4) lost of resilience
of subsistence systems leading to cyclical food-shortages.

More recent literature has emphasized the active response of existing social networks
to market pressures (Lewis: 1989, for a relatively success integration in Philippines)
in a dynamic interplay between local conditions and macro economic reforms

(Hershkovits: 1993, examines the effects of market-oriented reforms in Chinese

farms). While early papers argued that traditional societies were in a transitional
stage, and they would eventually become fully integrated to the capitalist system,
nowadays these groups are regarded part of the market system, connected through
international trade chains (Dodds: 1998, for a lobster trade case in Nicaragua) and, in
some cases, under sub-contracting systems (Grossman: 1998, for banana plantations
in the Caribbean), although this integration is often culturally contested (Watts:
1992b).

Historical perspective and colonial experience

A major distinctive characteristic of political ecology studies is its use of local socioenvironmental histories, often covering long-term periods (Blaikie and Brookfield:
1987). Contrary to previous works in cultural ecology and ecological anthropology
that embraced a functionalist and synchronic approach, political ecologist are aware
of the fact that societies are affected by their history and that current patterns must be
consider in perspective in order to grasp changes in ecological responses.
Karl Butzer (1990), for instance, in his studies of An a rural community of the
Southeastern Spain-- introduces a historical perspective in order to understand the
social responses to demographic growth. He points up the creative and conscious
process through which a community takes decisions over the environment (i.e.
construction of water channels and terraces, simultaneous use of grape vineyards and
grass, or almond production) accordingly a complex balance of cultural beliefs
(Catholic restrictions, for example), political frame (i.e. feudal landlords or civil war
instability), social identity (the attachment to the community), market opportunities
(i.e. the decline in vine French production) as well as ecological factors (water
scarcity, altitudinal differences or limited land, for instance).
Butzer, in consequence, considers that the Ans Mediterranean landscape of
vineyards and olive crops growing around the hill slopes, is the historical result of
land uses shaped by ecological, technological, demographic, economic, and political
10

conditions. A large process of land intensification and desintensification explains the

current Ans landscape. Since the second half of the XIX century, a broader process
of industrialization in Europe has dramatically affected the rural-urban composition of
the population. As one result, Ans land-use has shifted from intensive agriculture to
tourist activities.

Using archeological and historical evidence, Karl Zimmerer (1994) notes that greater
biodiversity is not a natural process but a human induced one through species
selection and fire regimes. Through his anthropogenic islands work in the Amazon
Basin, Zimmerer finds that ecosystems with traces of human presence are more
biodiverse than surroundings. Equally, the articles compiled by Patrick Kirch and
Terry Hunt (1997) examine the debate of natural versus anthropogenic change and
show a large variety of environmental responses, from fragility to resilience, of
Pacific Islands societies from prehistoric periods to colonial times. Actually, political
ecologists have been extremely conscious of the environmental impacts of the
political constrains imposed by the colonial dominance over indigenous populations.
Certainly, a crucial tenet of theory in political ecology is that power relationships
matter in human interactions with their environments (Greenberg and Park: 1994).

For instance, Anna Roosevelt (1998) uses a historical perspective in order to critique
the common idea of isolated and unchanged indigenous groups that could connect us
with the past of primitive societies. Her findings the Amazon basin of Colombia and
Peru suggest that within few thousand of years lowland cultures settled down in
fishing villages along the mainstream of the Amazon and became to make pottery. By
about 4,000 years ago people had begun to cultivate crops, which supported populous
agricultural chiefdoms. When chiefdoms were destroyed during European invasion
many people return returned to horticulture and foraging subsistence. Others were
forced into a more mobile settlement pattern by the various disruptions of conquest
and developed new forms of foraging on the abandoned crop fields of their neighbors
and the orchards and free-range cattle of the European settlers. Current hunter-gather
groups in the Amazon, in consequence, are not the repetition of precedent societies

11

but the result of the colonial impact over indigenous societies, the product of a
changing political landscape.

Michael Watts (1983), introducing a sophisticate theoretical framework, asserts that

natural hazards deal less with physical changes that with changes on the social
networks that support the modes of production and reproduction of a group. In fact,
Watts describes how a traditional mode of production in Muslin northern Nigeria was
totally disrupted by colonial and capitalist forces. XIX century Hausa society was
engaged in a use-value economy organized trough a horizontal (kinship) and vertical
(political hierarchy) network that provided security against food-shortages in case of
droughts. Nevertheless, the introduction of the colonial order --and its imperatives for
cash-production because of tax exigencies broke down the traditional cycle of
reproduction based in poly cultivation (risk aversion), mutual support (reciprocity)
and an expectation of minimum state support (moral economy).
Studying the Zimbabwes Campfire program, Alexander and McGregor (2000) find
that in Gwampa Valley, peoples economic aspirations about modernity, by a desire to
leave behind a life of suffering in the bush with animals. People associate game with
the primitive and backward, with neglect and hardship. In addition, attitudes to land
were powerfully shaped by colonial evictions, and the sense that the nationalist
struggle and guerrilla war were fought to correct these past wrongs. The notion that
land had been stolen from its rightful owners was much more strongly development
that any comparable notion of lost ownership of game. The authors point to the
complexity of forced movements of black farmers from one ecological area to
another. Not only were animals regarded as antimodern but so too people living there
by the new settlers. In this struggle, some residents are against their own elected
District Council, Forestry Commission, a Canadian development NGO, and the
Campfire Association. In contrast to condemning the massive game killing project of
the colonial state, the legacy of the past leads valley residents to oppose the return of
wild animals, no matter for whose benefit. In this complex of memory, violence and
resource use, colonial history is reframed in nationalist movements and international
donors.

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Resource use, gender and power

Feminist thought is strongly placed among political ecology studies as far as there are
gender differences in experiences of nature and responsibility for the environment that
derive not from biology but from social constructions of gender that varied with place,
class, age, or ethnicity (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari: 1996). To be sure,
feminist political ecology has moved from eco-feminism which stresses the women
natural and closer relation with environment because of their innate condition of
nurturers (Shiva: 1989)to the analysis of the gendered and politicized
environmental relations constructed through day-to-day activities (Leach: 1994).

Indeed, feminists have followed the political ecology tradition grounded in the
analysis of unequal control over resources but treated gender as a critical variable in
interaction with other social factors. For instance, in an article on authority forms and
environment in a modern Indian community, Paul Robbins (1998) differentiates for
types of environments defined for a set of property regimes: goshers (state pastures),
fallows (semi private/communal pastures), orans (communal forest) and enclosures
(state forest). He founds that land-cover changes (namely, degradation) are related
with the fulfillment of institutional norms about which, by whom and when specific
forestry practices are allow or forbidden. Therefore, landscape transformation
depends on the manner the authority is exercised (enforcement capacity) and on the
manner it is perceived (legitimacy).
However, who uses and affects these specific environments is not the Society or the
Community but specific individuals who have are who have beliefs, interests,
knowledge, and negotiation strategies embedded in social and cultural norms crossed
by gender, race or class distinctions. Women in the village --with specific tasks (wood
fuel recollection and not goat herding, for example) and excluded of the communal
decision process-- have little interest in the conservation of the goshers but have
special concern in the maintenance of the paid jobs in the state enclosure.

13

Therefore, gender relationships affect specific uses of specific resources. For instance,
women and children could collect firewood while men are in charge of timber
extraction or forest clearance for agriculture. Thus, the perception of the causes and
the responsible of forest degradation could be different depending on gender and age
considerations. Moreover, the perception and understanding of specific environments
are shaped by gender practices. Diverse societies manage a gender division of plants
and products. Plants and trees are classified in a gender division and its particular
appropriation and use depends on gender considerations too (Rochelau, ThomasSlayter, and Edmunds: 1995). To fail in to incorporate women perception as an
ordering social categorygive us a partial understanding of the social reality. At the
same time, from a public policy perspective, the failure in the incorporation of women
interests seriously limits the changes of success of forest management programs.

These findings highlight some of the themes pursued by feminist political ecology:
gendered knowledge (i.e. gendered landscape mapping and appropriation; Rochelau,
Thomas-Slayter, and Edmunds: 1995); gendered environmental rights (including
property, resources, and space; Schroeder: 1993); and gendered environmental
politics, particularly womens involvement in collective struggles over natural
resources and environmental issues (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter, and Wangari: 1996).

The humanization of the landscape and struggles over resources

Researches in the political ecology tradition have pointed out a paradox in the
nature/society relationship. Nature is embedded in power and social relations, but this
resulting construction serves as a mirror in which society reads and reflexes itself.
Thus, for many groups there is a double process through which landscape is
humanized and read in terms of the organization of the society and at the same
timesocial organization (i.e. clan system) and social differences (i.e. gender) are
explained and naturalized through environmental metaphors, resulting in politicized
moral geographies (Bryant: 2000).

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For example, working among and Wetsuweten a group in British Columbia

Leslie Johnson Gottesfeld (1994) relates practices and beliefs with conservationist
observances. However, Gottesfelt explains that not every practice and belief could be
attached to a biological model of conservation. She observes, for instance, that the
Wetseweten as many other groups have taboos related with menstruation and
with the shift from childhood to adolescence in girls. The menstruation taboos
consider that women have strong powers that affect negatively men hunting abilities
and the reproduction of the game. Nevertheless, this beliefs and practices cannot be
connected at least directly with environmental regulations.

This implies that, first, cultural beliefs and social institutions are not exclusively
neither totally shaped by a single factor: the environment. Secondly, the landscape
could be regarded as raw material with which people read, explain, and ideologically
validate social reality. Thus, the landscape could be used as metaphor that explains
gender or other differences in the social realm. Therefore, to acknowledge that
environments shape and reflect social institutions is not the same that to establish a
functional and one-to-one correspondence between ecological and social regulations
as in the determinist relationship of the Rappaports model.

However, for many peasant and indigenous societies, daily and seasonal resource use
does something more that animate features of the social landscape. Donald Moore
(1993) shows the political use by Kaerezi villagers in Zimbabwe of concepts about
the environment. They took these concepts from the cultural landscape which is
embedded in a moral universeand put them in the context of a discourse of conflict
over access and control of resources. In this sense, cultural landscapes act as
mnemonic devices. In remembering the past we are installed into the dynamics of the
present conflicts, and the environmental metaphors at used as tools in material and
ideological struggles within and between state agencies, NGOs, and rural peoples
movements (Rocheleau and Ross: 1995).

These struggles for the access and control of resources are located and affect specific
environments. As result, it is created cultural landscapes, ideational resources

15

(Offen: 2002) or symbols that shape and reflect local views of the land. At the same
time, and in a dialectic process, these symbolic means constitute discourses that guide
actions or behavior over these resources, modifying consequently the set of the
struggle. Thus, different conceptions about resources and its use led to specific
struggles over them.

Through the cultural politics they enact, social movements advance a unique approach
to biodiversity conservation and appropriation. This approach is couched in terms of
cultural difference, territorial defense, and some measure of political autonomy
(Escobar: 1998). In subscribing to a view of biodiversity as linked to cultural and
territorial defense, these social movements articulate an alternative political ecology
(Haynes: 1999).

Of course there is a great chance to idealize indigenous environmentalist practices and

movements (Apffel-Marglin: 1998). However, as Melissa Leach (1994) has argued
for the case of women, indigenous and peasant populations of the Third World are not
conservationists per se, nor are intrinsically closer to the nature. Offen (2001)
examining the Miskitu of Northeastern Nicaraguashows that the representation that
this indigenous group has about their future is linked to the exploitation of the natural
resources. There is, in consequence, a claim for the benefits rather than a shift in the
use of the natural resources. David Dodds (1998) explains how the growing
importance of lobster capture for international trade has led to a decreasing pressure
for forest resources but at the cost of depleting lobster populations in a Miskito
community of Honduras.

Poststructuralist influence and discourse analysis

Increasingly, political ecologists are moving from localized studies to a broad critique
to the capitalist society. However, they have not followed the traditional Marxist
critique that stresses the labor-capital contradiction or that one between environment
and capital (Bridge: 1998). Political ecology has moved closer to poststructuralist
postures that question the hegemonic Western project and the deployment of its
16

development discourse (Bryant: 1992; Escobar: 1995; Peet and Watts: 1996; Pred and
Watts: 1992).

However, different to postmodern geographies literature (Soja: 1989, 2000), current

works on political ecology do not simply draw the fragmented map of late capitalism.
Indeed, the exhilarating narrative of the epitome world-city of Los Angeles crosses
through shopping malls, freeways, and streets but not there is little about people.
Reframing anthropological traditions rooted in ethnographic and deep cultural
understandings, political ecology is attempting to connect these geographies to local
meanings and knowledge (Escobar: 2001, Watts: 1992a). This ethnographical
tradition has meant strong fieldwork and comprehensive descriptions, which have
provided with local interpretations about the complex relationships over resources in
particular societies. It offered to political ecologists valuable local explanations about
the use and classification of the environment. Gathering and analyzing local
interpretations and practices have resulted in a sympathetic approach to the native
values.

Moreover, some practitioners have stressed the nature of the relationship between
researcher and informants, and argue for a more equal relation that could benefit both:
more accurate information and a conscious debate over women rights, for instance
(Rocheleau, Slayter-Thomas, and Edmunds: 1995). In a similar path, Sundberg (1998)
prevents from the repetition of vertical patterns in environmental practices and claims
for more democratic practices among Maya populations in Guatemala. In general,
political ecologists have become more interested in social justice (Low and Gleeson:
1998) and linking research to action.

Nevertheless, this concern for local knowledge and practices has also opened a
powerful entry to the understanding of conflicts and interest over the use and property
of resources. Moreover, inspired in Foucault works, political ecology regards
environmental discourses as a negotiated process in controlling resources. Therefore,
discourses are understood as frameworks that embrace particular combinations of
narratives, ideologies, concepts, and signifying practices, naturalizing and unseen

17

power that constitutes the limits within ideas and practices are considered natural
(Barnes and Duncan: 1992).

Example of these discursive analyses are the works on soil protection in Andean
communities of Peru and Bolivia (Zimmerer: 1996a; 1996b), land degradation
(Blaikie and Brookfiled: 1987), biodiversity in the Pacific coast of Colombia
(Escobar: 1999), forest conservation in colonial Burma (Bryant: 1996), or the
contested model of national park proposed by Anglo-American in Tanzania
(Neumann: 1998). The emphasis is on the social construction of environmental
knowledge and its uses rather than in material struggles. Biodiversity conservation is,
therefore, considered as part of broader reassessments of environmental problems in
late capitalist society (Bryant: 2000).

Conclusion
The central concern of political ecology is the understanding of social and
environmental change. Drawing on insights from different disciplines, its goal is to
develop modes of analysis that encompass and relate social and ecological variables.
However, at difference of cultural ecology which conceived small societies in
relative isolated and unchanged terms-- political ecology has argued that, to more or
less extended, any society has been connected with other groups in broader economic
and political systems of trade, cooperation or conflict. Moreover, a political ecology
approach remarks the European colonial expansion as a key element in order to
understand the configuration of current peasant and indigenous groups. This implies
that the environmental conditions of current groups is less the result of a timeless and
wise adaptation to nature that the consequence of historical influences and political
dominance over resources. Therefore, political ecology tends to emphasize historical
approaches rather than only synchronic and functional ones.

The outcomes of environmental change are often felt unevenly. Political ecology links
the generation of this unevenness to a political economy. In this way, conflict and
contestation over resources are central to most studies. Contestation involves

18

struggles at the ideological and discursive levels including definitions of science, local
knowledges, environment, biodiversity, sustainability, and so on.
Whereas cultural ecology once claimed that the inner workings of the culture were
unimportant and that only group behavior was interested, political ecology
deliberately scrutinizes the inner dynamics and differentiation within social groups,
and particularly asks how certain divisions of labor are maintained or modified over
the time, especially in the context of globalization. Groups are not homogenous and
internal variation provides an engine for cultural and ecological change. For political
ecologists culture is not directly nor uniquely shaped by ecological conditions but also
by political, economic, legal or institutional elements. Political ecology denies a
general cultural pattern harmoniously and homogenously shared by the whole
community and highlights the construction of a set of contested values by different
groups; which interact accordingly diverse interests crossed by gender, class, age or
ethnicity. This focus on a broader framework has led to a growing separation between
the study of ecological conditions, on the one hand, and political and discursive
devices, on the other.

As with the understanding of social groups, nature is not a general concept but
specific environments defined and used by specific groups under specific situations.
The political ecology literature states that nature is socially and culturally constructed
in a double process. On the one hand, as a physical reality it is produced and mediated
by the social conditions of production and reproduction. In this sense, there are
historical social arrangements embedded in power relationships about what natural
resources are extracted, by which groups, in which way are they used, and in benefit
of whom. Considerations of age, class, ethnic adscription or gender are part of the
complex social arrangements that produce the physical environment. On the other
hand, nature is culturally constructed as a concept. Through the language, human
groups create, classify, organize, understand and internalize a physical reality.

Indeed, ecosystems and social systems are regarded mutually constituted. Thus,
political ecology blurs distinctions between humans, society and nature. In contrast to

19

early cultural ecology approach which assumes that ecological systems tend towards
equilibrium, political ecology recognizes that resource use patterns may be
ecologically degrading while being socially profitable or functional, at least in the
short term and for some actors. In this sense, political ecology has expanded the
explicatory factors on the culture-nature relationship using a variety of levels and
scales, particularly the global and the local, with the explicit linkages between them. It
also adopts a particular concern about the State, its institutions, and conflict over
natural resources, their knowledge and their meanings.

20

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