Political ecology lecture

• How we define the problem of the environment
• geographers, anthropologists and economists
• redefine fundamental problems and causes of them, and design appropriate answers
• institutions are the rules - sociological
• problems are outcome of these interactions
• more data, more information. Ignoring fundamental political questions.
• Geographers Sauer
• Blake and Brookfield - soil degradation in Africa; work in 1980s. Soil erosion and political issues. Read Leff’s book, Political Ecology
• 3 main phases
  1. 1980s Blakey & Brookfield, soil erosion in Africa, neo-Marxist, with anarchist contributions. political economy. Focussed on trade, property rights. Related ecological problems with field international development
  2. 1990s post-structuralist ideas, rather than Marxist. Foucalt. Localised, inter-personal.
  3. 2000s diverse, reflecting 2 phases
• Systemic has it’s manifestation in the local
• Political Ecology coming from China.
• Michael Watts - criticising POlitical Ecology for becoming too pluralistic and diluted.
• Forsyth_chapter_MattTurnerPolEc Interesting article on what political ecologists could learn from sociology and philosophy - Jack
• Decolonise - Susannah Hatch, incredible (find reference)

Fighting inequality and mass deforestation in Brazil

• Dept Internat Dev Oxford Uni - invited to talk about deforestation
• Self-described Political Ecologist
• Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system Flores et al 2024 Nature
• Collapse - could become savannah in next few decades
• Already 15% of biome has been lost, at least 38% degraded by droughts and land use
• 40m in Amazon, 28m in Brazil. 2.2m indigenous peoples.
• Direct connection between poverty, inequality and deforestation
• Has to be connected with questions of developments and global market trends, systematic exclusion of majority of regional population, non-white
• “The totality of relations is the category of our analysis”
• Drug trafficking main economic activity in Brazil, as important as agribusiness. Mexicanisation of the Amazon. Corruption in police, judiciary.
• “Spatial claims over lives, ecosystems and relations that were (and still are) poorly understood”
• The fate of the Amazon “development” in Brazil
• Since 1990s, normalising agribusiness
• The Global Power of Brazilian Agribusiness - Economist Unit
• “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the th” get quote
• Subtractive Geographies - Ioris
• Environment and development book Ioris