Green Theory

Question 1

What is Green Theory?

Answer 1

“A new ecologically-inspired political tradition of inquiry that challenged the instrumental posture towards the environment shared by liberalism, socialism and the new expressions of conservatism”

Question 2

Major Tenets pt. 1

Answer 2

Political ecology, “seeks to understand the complex relations between nature and society through a careful analysis of what one might call the forms of access and control over resources and their implications for environmental health and sustainable livelihoods (Watts, 2000).

Question 3

Major Tenents pt. 2

Answer 3

“Political ecology’s originality and ambition lay in its efforts to integrate human and physical approaches to land degradation, through an explicitly theoretical approach to the ecological crisis capable of addressing diverse circumstances… and capable of accommodating both detailed local studies and general principles… Less a problem of poor management, inappropriate technology, or overpopulation, environmental problems were social in origin and definition” (Watts, 2000, p. 259).

Question 4

Major Tenets pt. 3

Answer 4

“From its very inception, political ecology never represented a coherent theoretical position for the very good reason that the meanings of ecology and political economy, and indeed politics, were often in question” (Watts, 2000, p. 261).

Question 5

There are three essential assumptions of political ecology:

Answer 5

• The first is interactive, contradictory and dialectical: society and land-based resources are mutually causal in such a way that poverty can induce, via poor management, environmental degradation which itself deepens poverty.
• Second, it focuses on “chains of explanation” (p. 46), linking local decisionmakers to spatial variations in environmental structure (stability and resilience as traits of particular ecosystems in particular). Locality studies are, thus, subsumed within multi-layered analyses pitched at a variety of regional scales.
• Third, land management is framed by ‘external structures’ which in the lexicon of PE means the role of the state (p. 17), the core-periphery model (p. 18) and ‘almost every element in the world economy’ (p. 68)” (Watts, 2000, p. 262).

Question 6

Finding the Ecology in Political Ecology:

Answer 6

“In the 1990s, however, political ecology branched out in new directions in which the place of biophysical ecology became less central. Some scholars complained that the structuralist’ political ecology of the 1980s, with its focus on the role of political economy in shaping the environmental decision-making of the ‘land manager’, was overly deterministic and provided remarkably little attention to politics. There was, in the memorable words of Michael Watts (1990), little attention given to ‘the rough and tumble’ of environmental politics (p. 129) - the actual day-to-day struggles over control of resources.” (Walker, 2005, p. 75).

Question 7

Finding the Politics in Political Ecology

Answer 7

• Two years later, Walker (2007) noted that “so central has politics become in the field that serious critiques have been made that political ecology has become ‘politics without ecology’ (Vayda and Walters, 1999). Yet, it is possible to question whether, by its own definitions of the word ‘politics’, political ecology fully lives up to its promise to take politics seriously” (Walker, 2007, p. 363).
• But how much practical difference does political ecology actually make? What might be the obstacles to a more constructively engaged political ecology – to a more fully political Eco scarcity ecology” (Walker, 2007, p. 364)
• Increasingly, considering the environmental problems we face, these questions are gaining in urgency.