11 Facts About Political ecology

Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes.

Scholars in political ecology are drawn from a variety of academic disciplines, including geography, anthropology, development studies, political science, economics, sociology, forestry, and environmental history.

Conversely, Julian Steward and Roy Rappaport's theories of cultural Political ecology are sometimes credited with shifting the functionalist-oriented anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s and incorporating Political ecology and environment into ethnographic study.

Political ecology's approach tends to see environmental harm as both a cause and an effect of “social marginalization”.

Ultimately, applying political ecology to policy decisions – especially in the US and Western Europe – will remain problematic as long as there is a resistance to Marxist and neo-Marxist theory.

Related searches

Vayda and Walter's response to overly political approaches in political ecology is to encourage what they call “event ecology”, focusing on human responses to environmental events without presupposing the impact of political processes on environmental events.

Political ecology in the view Greenberg and Park is a way of creating a synergy between a political economy that aligns power distribution with ecological analysis and economic activities in a wider version of bio-environmental relations.

Political ecology explained by Bryant is the dynamic in politics that is associated with "discursive struggle" and material in the environment of less developed nations, showing how unequal relation in power makes up a political environment.

However, when environmental interventions result in environmental degradations, scholars of political ecology throw their support to actors who resist such exercise of environmental interventions.

Amongst the foundations of political ecology is the political economy thought of Marxist which centered on the inequalities that emerged from global capitalism.

Political ecology emphasized that understanding how power works in environmental governance follows Foucault's notion of “governmentality”.