Bradley B. Walters

Against Political Ecology 1

Starting with a priori judgments, theories, or biase s about the importance or even primacy of certain kinds of political factors in the explanation of environmental change s, self-styled political ecologists have focused the ir research on environmental or natural resource politics and have missed or scanted the complex and contingent interactions of factors whereby actual environmental change s often are produced. As an alte rnative to the present ple thora of programmatic statements on behalf of political ecology, a proposal is presented here for what may be called evenemental or event ecology. Our own experience in applying an evenemental approach to research on mangrove forests of the Philippine s will be drawn on for the purpose of illustration.

Local Management of Mangrove Forests in the Philippines: Successful Conservation or Efficient Resource Exploitation?

Recent environmental “narratives” suggest that local people are effective stewards of forest resources. Local restoration and management of mangrove forests, in particular, are now widely advocated as a solution to achieve both economic and environmental conservation goals. This paper presents findings from a study of 2 coastal sites in the Philippines that are renowned and often showcased as success stories in community-based, mangrove reforestation and management. These cases are especially intriguing because local tree planting and management emerged in both areas long before governments and nongovernment organizations began to promote such activities. These management systems are a successful economic innovation in that planted mangroves protect homes and fish pond dykes from wave and wind damage, and the production of high-value construction wood is dramatically enhanced through intensive plantation management. Mangrove plantations are an efficient alternative to harvesting from unplanted, natural mangroves and their spread may reduce harvesting pressures on existing forests. However, mangrove plantations are structurally and compositionaly very different from unplanted forests, a finding of particular concern given that such plantations are increasingly encroaching into and replacing natural forests. Furthermore, planted forests are not typically viewed by planters in terms of their environmental conservation values and are frequently cut and cleared to make space for alternative uses, especially fish farming and residential settlement. The suggestion that these local mangrove management systems are successful for conservation thus needs to be qualified.

People and mangroves in the Philippines: fifty years of coastal environmental change

Historical research has enhanced understanding of past human influences on forests and provides insights that can improve current conservation efforts. This paper presents one of the first detailed studies of mangrove forest history. Historical changes in mangroves and their use were examined in Bais Bay and Banacon Island, Philippines. Cutting to make space for fish ponds and residential settlement has dramatically reduced the distribution of mangroves in Bais, although forest has expanded rapidly near the mouth of the largest river where soils from nearby deforested hillsides have been deposited as sediments along the coast. Heavy cutting of mangroves for commercial sale of firewood occurred under minor forest product concessions in Bais and Banacon between the late 1930s and 1979. Cutting for domestic consumption of fuel and construction wood by local people has been widespread in both areas, although rates of cutting have varied in space and over time as a result of changing demographic pressures and in response to cutting restrictions imposed by firewood concessionaires, fish pond owners and government officials. People in both Bais and Banacon have responded to declining local forest availability by planting mangroves. Early motivations to plant reflected the desire to have a ready supply of posts for construction of fish weirs. Many have also planted to protect fishpond dykes and homes from storm damage, and increasing numbers now plant as a means to establish tenure claims over mangrove areas. However, planted stands have tended to be species monocultures and to bear only limited resemblance to natural mangrove forests. In contrast to many upland forests, opportunities for protection and restoration of mangroves are limited by virtue of a highly restricted natural distribution and by competing land uses that are likely to intensify in the future. Understanding historical patterns of change can be instructive to conservationists, but the future remains laden with uncertainties.

Event Ecology, Causal Historical Analysis, and Human-Environment Research

Research on human–environment interactions is especially challenging given its interdisciplinary character and its need to address complexly interacting causes in time and space. Event ecology has been suggested and illustrated as an approach that can effectively address these challenges. Yet, previous writings on event ecology offer only a limited rationale for the approach. This article attempts to address this shortcoming through a more explicit examination of the underlying logic and practice of event ecology. Event ecology is based on a pragmatic view of research methods and explanation, articulated by such scholars as Peirce, Lewis, and Chamberlin, that has recently resurfaced in scholarly debates. This view places at the center of research inquiry the answering of “why” questions about specific environmental changes of interest, instead of evaluating causal theories, models, or factors that are thought in advance to influence such changes. Explaining environmental change this way involves constructing causal histories of interrelated social and biophysical events through a process of eliminative inference and reasoning from effects to causes, called abduction. Precise questions, concrete event descriptions, and counterfactual analysis are central to this. In practical terms, researchers should strive to be skeptical about what constitutes evidence, yet open-minded and adaptable to unexpected findings, and be willing to employ whatever sound methods and theoretical ideas are best suited to answer the question at hand. Examples from field research experience on people–forest interactions in the Philippines and Saint Lucia are included to illustrate these features of the event ecology approach.

Patterns of Local Wood use and Cutting of Philippine Mangrove Forests

Small-scale wood harvesting from mangrove forests is a commonplace yet barely studied phenomenon. This paper integrates bio-ecological and ethnographic methods to examine local wood use and cutting of mangrove forests in two areas of the Philippines. Findings reveal considerable site variation in cutting intensity, with heavier cutting typically closer to settlements and in forest stands that are not effectively regulated by government or private interests. Overall, cutting is responsible for almost 90% of stem mortality in both natural and plantation forests. Field measurements confirm ethnographic evidence indicating that harvesting for construction wood, but not fuelwood, is both species- and size-selective. Mangrove management and conservation efforts can be made more effective by better understanding how local people are harvesting wood resources from these forests.

Mangrove forests and human security 1

This paper reviews concepts and theories of ‘environment and security’ and examines their relevance in understanding human–mangrove interactions. Scientists and decision-makers are increasingly interested in the relationship between environmental change and human security. Research on human–mangrove interactions suggests that mangrove forests illustrate this relationship well, at least in terms of the general framing of these issues. Mangroves and the diverse resources and services they provide (wood, food and fuel) are critical to the livelihood security of highly vulnerable coastal populations throughout the tropics. At the same time, their restricted coastal distribution, which is often proximate to population concentrations, makes them the frequent loci of conflict between competing human interests. Studies of mangrove planting and human settlement along the coast demonstrate the value of mangroves for protecting property and livelihood from storm impacts. Observations of the Asian tsunami of 2004 further highlight this protective role and provide a stark reminder that environmental sustainability and human security are often inseparable. Yet, broadly framed discussions of environment and security offer little concrete guidance to researchers and policy-makers tasked with understanding and better managing the relationships between people and mangrove forests in particular contexts.

An event-based methodology for climate change and human-environment research

Abductive causal eventism (ACE) is an analytical methodology based on a pragmatic view of research methods and explanation that places at the center of research inquiry the answering of ‘why’ questions about events, including human actions or environmental changes of interest. When used in human–environment research, the methodology entails constructing causal histories of interrelated social and/or biophysical events backward in time through a process of eliminative inference and reasoning from effects to causes, called abduction. ACE encourages an eclectic use of methods, models, and theoretical ideas. It fosters integrative, interdisciplinary analysis without being committed either to systems as ontological entities or to holistic analytical frameworks. By not privileging particular theories or explanatory factors in advance, ACE enables researchers to interrogate the plausibility of different causal influences, including local environmental changes that may be related to much wider changes in climate. Likewise, behaviors or practices that may be of value in light of anticipated environmental changes can be studied without their presuming to be caused by these changes or by changes in climate per se. Research on coastal mangrove planting for storm protection in the Philippines and upland tree planting in St. Lucia are used to illustrate these arguments.

Farmed landscapes, trees and forest conservation in Saint Lucia (West Indies)

BRADLEY B . WALTERS 1 ∗ AND LISA H ANS E N 2 1Department of Geography and Environment, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB E4L 1A7 Canada, and 2Sustainable Forest Management Research Group, Department of Forest Resources Management, University of British Columbia, 2045–2424 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada Date submitted: 10 July 2012; Date accepted: 25 November 2012; First published online: 21 December 2012

Theory and methodology in causal research: a commentary

Theory in the social sciences can have diverse meanings (Abend, 2008). In a recent paper, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has suggested that theories, similarly to the empirical matter they are conceived to theorize about, can be seen as things in the world. Helmreich suggests that this approach operates ‘“athwart theory”: that is, as tacking back and forth between seeing theories as explanatory tools and taking them as phenomena to be examined’ (Helmreich, 2011, p. 138). In other words, theories make worlds appear in particular ways as much as vice versa, and as such both data and theory can be seen as intimately located in empirical matters. Both explain and need to be explained, and in consequence, a very clear distinction between data and theory seems hard to sustain, as both domains are, in fact, a product of analysis (Hastrup, 2011). One domain can become a context for the other, and importantly, they can switch places. This idea echoes some of the issues raised in the papers in this volume that examine theoretical perspectives on causal research of climate–society relations. One of the key findings to take away from the papers seems to be just this: an admonition against invoking any one theory as an overarching explanatory frame that ends (or begins) the discussion and is somehow a step removed from its object. Instead, researchers might let the analysis unfold in an iterative manner that simultaneously encompasses empirical puzzles, methodological choices and possibilities and theoretical insights; an amalgam of these may then give rise to new empirical questions to be pursued further by way of and occasioning new insights. There is, then, a sense in which all of these aspects or steps of the analysis occur simultaneously and organically, a fact that may complicate the establishment of clear-cut unidirectional causal relations with regard to not only, say, impacts of climate change from observed transformation to adaptive response but also the very crafting of our analyses. Theory, in other words, need not be seen as an abstracted a priori point of departure, of which the given empirical findings are but an illustration or confirmation (or a negation, as the case may be), nor is it an equally abstracted domain that can be pointed to as the final result of prior processing of empirical data. A more pragmatic and flexible – and indeed contemporary – notion of theory (and by the same token, of data) seems far better suited to account for the many and sometimes paradoxical ways in which environmental change surfaces in local worlds. The promise of this approach is to allow for unexpected relations between causes and effects to enter the picture. As Reenberg et al. (2012) clearly show the people or places that we study often simply do not act as we might expect on the basis of a singular and preconceived theoretical framework. Similarly, abductive causal eventism, as advocated by Walters (2012), takes its point of departure in the explanation of human actions and other events of interest – the ‘effects’ – and from there moves backwards in time to an analysis of alternative possible causes of those events, thereby not privileging in advance any particular explanatory theory or factor. What is at issue here is the need to be able to combine different perspectives, while recognizing that theory, understood as just a perspective, implies partiality in two senses: ‘bias’ and ‘incompleteness’. In this light, identifying causal relations is in itself a theoretical inference on the basis of empirical puzzles that gives way to both new empirical questions and new theoretical suggestions.