Political ecology is the study of the relationships between
political, economic and social factors with environmental issues
and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological
studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena.
The academic discipline offers wide-ranging studies integrating
ecological social sciences with political economy in topics such as
degradation and marginalization, environmental conflict,
conservation and control, and environmental identities and social
movements.
The multidisciplinary, multilevel scope of political ecology
has been used as a rubric to explain environmental degradation or
environmental change, and to understand their significance for
different groups within society.
Political ecology approach is an inquiry into the political
sources, conditions and ramification of environmental change while
embracing different social and ecological scales, and relates to
inter-related research areas.
Political ecology explores the complexities by taking into
account the contextual sources of environmental impacts of the
state and its policies, inter state relations and global
capitalism. The second approach investigates the local - specific
peasants and other socially disadvantaged groups in struggles to
protect the environmental foundations of their livelihood. It also
tries to understand both historical and contemporary dynamics of
struggle.
The third approach were political ramifications of
environment change has been guided by what extent are the costs of
environment change are borne by socially disadvantaged groups, and
how does this unequal distribution of costs mediate existing
socio-economic inequalities and does this modify political
process.
An extreme ecological stand was taken by the Limits to Growth
study produced by the Club of Rome. It predicted that unless
technology changed its current course, the world was in danger and
running out of its resources.
This was supported with Paul Ehrlich (1968) predicted that the
world faced imminent social and environmental catastrophe due to
high population growth presumes that resource scarcities and
consequent limits to growth and population pressure is the heart of
the environmental and ecological issue.
The widely held notion that the principle cause of
environmental destruction is the alarming growth of
population.
Political ecology turned to the "World System theory" of
Immanuel Wallerstein focused on the different stages or levels of
national development within . what appears to be a global political
economy.
The world-system theorists opposed the 'dualism' in development
studies on the basis that the countries could achieve modernization
of resources could be shifted from the traditional sector of their
economies into the modem sector and opposed the tactics of the
communist parties which favored alliances with the national
bourgeoisies of the developing countries against feudal land owners
and multinational corporations.
The World System theory points out that neither the socialist
countries nor those of third world constituted distinct by
noncapitalist economic relations. The states never exist in
isolation, like but rather participate in capitalist world system
forged by the expansion of commerce and maintained by an enforced
international division oflabour shaped economic structures and
directed change.
The first generation of political ecology wedded ecology to
system theory that envisioned the world as organized into a single
class system, first-world nations owning the means of production
and third world nations supplying the labour and producing the
surplus value tended to think in terms of structures, systems, and
interlocking variables and did not focus on the local-global
articulation, the emphasis of today.
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