Political Ecology

Abstract

When business is bad, as the Chinese proverb goes, paint the store.The social sciences unendingly seem to be repainting the store with new fads, yet business remains bad.Some would argue that it is time to tear down the store (I.Wallerstein 1991).Others see this as precisely the problem.We are forever slaying old paradigms.Instead of standing on the shoulders of our predecessors, we take an ax to their knees.As each new approach goes after its precursors with an ax, the social sciences have come to resemble, as Eric Wolf (1990:588) so poignantly phrased it, "a project in intellectual deforestation."The problem, of course, is that while knowledge is socially produced, to launch professional careers, it must be individually appropriated.This fuels the constant demand for the "new and improved," that either adds new bells and whistles to old products or smashes and reassembles them.As old paradigms are cast aside or recycled, so much "new knowledge" has been produced that universities have been forced to continually add new chairs, specialties, and departments.From their common heritage in nineteenth century political and economic philosophy, the social sciences have fragmented into many disciplines.Political ecology does not amount to a new program for intellectual deforestation, rather it is a historical outgrowth of the central questions asked by the social sciences about the relations between human society, viewed in its bio-cultural-political complexity, and a significantly humanized nature.It develops the common ground where various disciplines intersect.The Journal of Political Ecology welcomes case studies from specialists in agriculture, land tenure, health, development, international law, history, and both the physical and social sciences; major contributions to the study of political ecology have already come from each of these fields.Despite this broad interdisciplinary emphasis, it is possible to delineate two major theoretical thrusts that have most influenced the formation of political ecology.These are political economy, with its insistence on the need to link the distribution of power with productive activity and ecological analysis, with its broader vision of bio-environmental relationships.The origins of political economy may be found in the works of seventeenth to nineteenth century thinkers such as Hobbes, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx.Karl Marx, perhaps, came closest to defining the dialectic between individuals, their productive activity in human society, and nature (I.Mészáros 1970:104) that political ecology seeks to address by his insistence that one must begin not with abstract premises or dogmas (K.Marx and F.Engels 1970 [1846]:42), but with the productive activities of real individuals.This focuses attention on political economy as it transforms and is transformed by individuals and nature.Nature and society are both socially constructed to significant degrees, yet both are determined to some extent by what may be glossed as system-like constraints that are neither the deliberate nor inadvertent products of human purposive activity.Political economy as a field has tended to reduce everything to social constructions, blatantly disregarding all that is not human.This has led to a narrowing of the potential of Marx's more flexible dialectic, and to serious analytical deficiencies.Political ecology expands ecological concepts to respond to this inclusion of cultural and political activity within an analysis of ecosystems that are significantly but not always entirely socially constructed.In this brief introductory note to the Journal of Political Ecology we would like, by way of welcome to future readers and contributors, to briefly

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