Political Ecology by Paul Robbins

Author:Paul Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Challenges in Explanation

Meetings in the Forest

The Challenge of Land Change Science

The Challenge of Causal Explanation

Towards a Dialogue in Co-Production

Meetings in the Forest

So far in our visit to Schorfheide Forest we have been forced to consider what a degraded or transformed state of nature is and how we might measure or define it. We have also considered the degree to which the forest is as much a conceptual object as a material one; a forest as a construction of human ingenuity and categorical imagination and not simply a material fact of trees.

But political ecologists are by no means alone in such a forest. The world of policy, science, development, and conservation is filled with other perspectives and voices, all with different claims on the “truth” of the forest, its degradation, and on explaining either or both. What satisfies an observer as a satisfactory, relevant, or important explanation will vary enormously as a result. Indeed, this forest might be filled with competing accounts, which may share a number of things with political ecological narratives, but differ in important ways. Of many perspectives, two are of special interest here: land change science and causal (or event-centered) explanation. These two perspectives are by no means exclusive from political ecology, or one another, but each holds lessons that political ecology might heed, even while their differences suggest limits that political ecology precisely seeks to transcend. A friendly review of the challenges these approaches pose helps us to understand when and why political ecology is powerful (or not), but also how it might be considerably more effective.

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