Discovering Political Ecology

Until reading this chapter, I had not even stopped to consider the meaning of “political ecology” as the term was casually dropped in discussions in class, or elsewhere. I simply assumed that I would figure out what it meant. But it wasn’t until comparing it to apolitical ecology, that I really grasped the importance of this field.

In my intro to American Politics class, I remember defining “politics” as who gets what, when and how, or the debate on resources. To me it is essentially impossible to talk about the environment without talking about use of resources, and this means distribution of resources which must be political. So of COURSE there is a field called political ecology, dealing with resources, ecological systems and everything that that entails.

The breadth of this field is something that is a bit hard to imagine, but in later chapters, backbones of the field have been laid out, showing how different branches can easily be related through common histories. As demonstrated on page 6, there have been a wide variety of “definitions” of political ecology. The goals have evolved from documentation and description to finding explanation behind phenomena that occur between societies and nature.

I’m shocked at how much unknown this field was to me, and yet how deeply connected it is to things that I consider on a daily basis. People are a huge factor in the environment, and we have ways of governing ourselves and our uses of resources.