Political Ecology. Paul Robbins

Thanks to Bob Toborg, Frank Forgione, and Dave Feroe for being the intended audience of the volume. The Department of Geography at the University of Denver and the Kulturstudier program in Ghana are wonderful institutions and were generous with collegiality and space. Thanks there to Andy Goetz, Matthew Taylor, Siri Fagerheim, and Liv Adams. Finally, and very likely against their wishes, Billie Lee Turner II and Andrew “Pete” Vayda remain inspirations for this work. China Mieville gave me a lesson on utopia and dystopia during our productive encounter in 2014 which I will never forget.

      Most importantly, throughout the whole process Sarah Moore continued to insist not only that another edition of the book would eventually get finished (despite my strong doubts) but that at least one person would eventually agree to read it; her comments on and support for my writing have saved a great many confusions and embarrassments over the years (the word “penultimate” means next to last, for example; who knew?). Her knowledge of the politics of waste and consumption was invaluable and her contributions are evident throughout this book.

      Having said this, the interpretations and perspectives contained within the text are my own, and I certainly can’t lay blame at anyone else’s feet for controversial, confusing, or bizarre claims. The reader will have to address any complaints to me.

      Paul Robbins, July 2019

Introduction

        The Goals of the Text

        The Rest of the Book

      When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in August of 2017, only 1 of an astonishing 17 named storms in North America that season, its winds ripped the top off the shining veneer that hides so many contradictions in the heart of the city of Houston. Waters rose throughout that city as the storm squatted overhead, raining between 30 and 60 inches (75 and 150 cm) down on the overdeveloped streets of metropolis. Four hundred square miles were underwater at the height of the flooding, which was nearly 10 feet (3 meters) deep in many locations. The storm spawned several tornadoes, which plowed through suburban neighborhoods. Power failed across the grid and several sites containing toxic hazards spilled their stored waste into the flooded streets where people waded, swam, and paddled their way to safety.

      The ecology of this storm is political in so many ways.

      First, the most likely chain of causation makes a tidy circle of political irony. Warm gulf waters fed the intensity of the storm and its seemingly endless supply of rain. These waters, in turn, have experienced elevated temperatures for some time – the average water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico during the period between August and October has risen between 1 and 2 °F (1.1 C) over the last 40 years. These waters have warmed in response to overall regional warming, especially throughout the summer, and the period leading into storm season. That warmth has in turn been driven by the increased loading of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which are predominantly released by the global petrochemical‐based economy. That economy built Houston, of course, which is home to more than 5,000 energy‐related firms. The disaster in Houston is a tragic loop.

This is made all the more complicated by the fact that many of the foremost community and political leaders in the region either deny trends in climate change, or accept them with the caveat that they are “natural.” The events of Hurricane Harvey are as much about the political impacts of storytelling – claims about nature – as they are the physical impacts of a storm.

      At a more local level, moreover, the storm's effects were exacerbated (or perhaps even caused) by the history of urban development. A vast carpet of impervious pavement covers the city, disallowing the torrential rainwater from seeping into the wetlands, grasslands, and streams that the city displaced over decades. That blanket of cement was encouraged to cover the land by a local political system that doggedly eschewed basic instruments of urban planning, including zoning codes that might keep flood‐resilient land covers on the ground. Deeply vested development interests keep these lax laws unchanged, since reforms might be costly or inconvenient. Harvey's flooding is by no means a natural disaster; it is precisely an unnatural one.

      There is a deeper and even more problematic politics to the ecology of the 2017 Hurricane season, however. The spectacular scenes of flooding in an American metropolis, however startling, represented a short, relatively minor event, relative to the impacts of that season on other parts of the region. Puerto Rico was ravaged under the heavy rains and high winds of Hurricane Maria in September, and the impacts of the storm were far more devastating for the people of that island than for those of Houston. The death toll remains unclear at the time of writing, but will likely eclipse that of Hurricane Katrina, once all the grim accounting is done. The electrical grid failed totally, as in Houston, but its restoration in Puerto Rico would take months. Hospital systems failed. Half the island was still without power by the turn of the New Year. Thousands were put out of their homes while aid to rebuild families and businesses languished in storage. More than 140,000 Puerto Ricans fled to the state of Florida alone. This has been a devastating spectacle of neglect, rooted in a colonial and racist history.

      The reasons for these incredibly divergent outcomes, after all, have nothing to do with geography and everything to do with political economy. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States and not a state, acquired in a lopsided military conflict more than a century ago. As such, its residents are US citizens but ones who have repeatedly been treated as less‐than‐equal by their mainland counterparts. The lack of attention to the suffering on Puerto Rico stands in marked contrast to the rapid response in Texas.

      This outcome was made all the worse by local political economic conditions, insofar as Puerto Rico entered the hurricane season reeling from a debt crisis that left the island's infrastructure frail and vulnerable. That debt crisis was itself a product of local mismanagement and a grossly disadvantaged position in the global economy. Like all other “natural” disasters, events on Puerto Rico show the terrible unevenness of human vulnerability.

The 2017 hurricane season tells us many things. It highlights that environmental hazards and transformations are unequally distributed, with winners as well as losers. It shows the dialectical relationships between people and things: investors, carbon, and rain; developers, blacktop and water. It reveals a system of relationships that begin and end in contradictions. It points to the way claims about nature matter to nature itself. It shows that nature is inextricably entwined with political economy.

      It also suggests the need for a wide‐ranging kind of research and theory to understand fully, from technical assessment of ocean–atmosphere relationships and the extensive study of oil markets, to intensive survey of urban development investment and state‐led institutions of redistribution. This single season might tell us many crucial stories.

      This book is an effort to survey these kinds of tales and to describe the hard work that underlies researching and telling them well. By introducing political ecology, a field that seeks to unravel the political forces at work in environmental access, management, and transformation, I hope to demonstrate the way that politics is inevitably ecological and that ecology is inherently political. But more than this, I intend to show that research in the field can shed light on environmental change and dynamism, thereby addressing not only the practical problems of equity and sustainability, but also basic questions in environmental science.

      The normative goal of the book is not over‐ambitious. By explaining and constructively exploring the body of research sometimes called political ecology, I intend only to clarify the most persuasive themes in a highly disparate body of writing and show the politics of nature to be both universal and immediate. This, I think, may make a small contribution to helping us all break from an image of a world where the human and the non‐human are disconnected, a fiction that remains so stubborn a part of our modern reasoning that it is as difficult to unimagine as it is to picture a world without patriarchy or class. I believe, however, that an alternative picture, where nature and society are undivided, is as