Environment General Courses (ENVIRON)

graduate level, taught in Beaufort

350S. Political Ecology. This graduate level seminar will examine the concept of political ecology, as a means of conceptualizing conservation and development conflicts and solutions. Blaikie suggests that political ecology explores "the interaction between changing environments and the socio-economy, in which landscapes and the physiographic processes acting upon them, are seen to have dialectical, historically derived and iterative relations with resource use and the socio-economic and political sets of relations that shape them", and that, political ecology examines "different states of nature, their change through time, and their contested representations under conditions of unequal power; this usually involves the production and/or critique of scientific interpretations as well as others such as by the mass media, policy makers, formal and informal institutions, and various other actors in civil society" (Blaikie 1999, A Review of Political Ecology: Issues, Epistemology, and Analytical Narratives. (Zeitschrift für irtschaftsgeographie 43 (3-4): 131-147).  These two conceptualizations of political ecology are the starting point for our discussions. Instructor: Campbell. 3 units.