Lec 9 - political ecology

Sunday, July 17, 2022 5:19 PM

Ecological degradation
Urbanization - slums
"3rd world, developing world" - desertification, famine
Beginning to fragment and fail
• Watts (nigeria), stonich (honduras)
○ Stonich
 Neo malthusian
 Ecological change, pop growth
 Worlds fastest rate of pop and deforestation
 Displacement - of farmers by corporate bodies to cities or mountains
□ Try to create another subsistence environment which leads to deforestation,
increasingly poor, more pop
 What brought large scale agriculture
 Honduran govt encouraged it for money
□ In debt, from loans to develop economy
□ Ecology starts to critique globalization

○ Watts
 Hausa
 Should be adapted to arid, dry climate w common droughts
 Drought hits while he is there, not severe, but people are dying
 Had been part of global marketplace
□ Not growing for themselves but for market
□ Nigerian govt encouraging this
□ No food security
 Critical social theory to social ecology

 Need to look at how global effects local

 Cultural ecologists have g=had on blinders, focusing too much on local, not seeing ho
global affects it
 Subsistence, risk averse changed to capital only society
□ ignore the language about Structural Adjustment. We did not have time to go
into it. Know only that the latter half of the twentieth century was a period of
rapid ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (aka THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT) in the
once-colonial (post-colonial) world -- Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc. It is in the
name of ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT that nations like Honduras and Nigeria
 (among others) are becoming integrated into the larger global economy.

 Subsistence and capitalism are modes of production

□ Capitalism - environment is resources, wealth
□ Chains - why is the farmer cutting down the farmer, scale micro farmer, macro
globalism
○ Poli ecology - how it’s all connected
 Cultural ecology
 Political economy