critical tools

Not entirely sure how to respond to this chapter. It’s more informational, laying the groundwork for the field of political ecology. It includes peasant studies, feminist studies, and other areas of inquiry that you wouldn’t necessarily think to associate with ecology, but which really, in that way underlines the basic purpose of political ecology: to look at how people are behaving, and what they are reacting to which causes these behaviors when looking at interactions with the environment.

Chapter 2 outlined the ways that our thought has developed from evaluating nature based on human needs to evaluating the needs of nature, in order to sustain human life. The back and forth/give and take between humanity and nature has been continually developing, but it is a fairly modern realization that sustainability is key, and that our historical/political actions have been shaping our interactions with the environment.

Although I don’t entirely understand it now, I can tell that the common property theory will be integral in understanding how we deal with resources in groups, whether it be a community, a state, a country or as a species.

That, in fact, seems to be a fairly huge factor in itself: how we are subdivided into various groups, and allegiances, and who in the end has the authority to conserve resources that, in some cases, provide the livelihood of a large country or region?