Joel Wainwright

The geographies of political ecology: after Edward Said

This paper offers theoretical reflections on a series of questions raised by the shift in political ecology from the Third World to the First: what precisely constitutes a context for political ecology? How does something come to be a space or region that calls for political ecology? To respond to these questions, I argue for a turn to the thought of Edward Said, who articulates a Gramscian approach to geography that calls into question the constitution of the world.

Climate Change, Capitalism, and the Challenge of Transdisciplinarity

A new sense of urgency has grown among many scientists for policies to address climate change, resulting in unprecedented investments by scientists in public education and, in some cases, political activism. As climate scientists have investigated future climate scenarios—and potential social responses to environmental changes—they have become, ipso facto, social scientists. This article examines these changes to reflect on how they could reshape geography, a discipline that appears well positioned to advance transdisciplinary research. In light of the intellectual and political urgency of transdisciplinary climate research, why have we seen so little substantive collaboration across the science/social science divide? The answer, I argue, stems from differences between research in natural science, on one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other. These problems need not cause paralysis, but to address them they must be understood. The article attends to this challenge by reflecting on Albert Einsteins arguments concerning science and capitalism.

The Value of Nature to the State

In recent years geographers have produced a considerable literature on the creation of markets in environmental goods and services. This literature reveals numerous complications with such market-based conservation strategies, yet it has failed to address the conception of value that underlies capitalism and drives the capitalist state. To address this gap, we offer an analysis of how the concept of the value of nature has been taken up in U.S. environmental regulatory debates over the creation of markets for wetland services, where state actors creating new regulations must attempt to specify the value of nature. In 2008 the U.S. government adopted a rule governing the creation and sale of wetland credits. This rule initially attempted to define value as a way of both grounding the credit commodity in underlying phenomena and defining the object that state intervention was designed to protect. But in final negotiations and drafting the term became so controversial that its definition was deleted and its use radically restricted. To draw meaning from this situation, we draw on nineteenth-century debates over value in political economy. Our central finding is a cyclical tendency for conflicts to arise over whether to define value as something either inherent (e.g., to a physical process) or essentially relative. Agents of the state involved in creating environmental policy today are caught in the same dilemma as were value theorists of the mid-1800s: They recognize that they must specify the value of nature in justifying state environmental strategy and the expansion of capital into ecosystem services but struggle with the limits of doing so by extracting elements of nature and placing them in capitalist value form. Political ecologists and others will similarly struggle to understand the basis on which capitalist states confront nature—even as the consequences of this encounter are increasingly well documented—without a return to value theory.

Nature, Economy, and the Space — Place Distinction

This paper reconsiders the distinction between the concepts of space and place. We argue that, rather than favoring one side of the place – space division, or dissolving the partition between them, the distinction needs to be maintained because it is a key site of Western metaphysics. Specifically, the distinction between space and place cannot be abandoned or easily altered because it remains inextricably entangled with other key concepts. Drawing upon Derridas notion of différance, we illustrate two such entanglements, the relation of space – place with nature and with economy. We argue that space – place helps to constitute, but in turn is constituted by, nature and economy. The larger point is that none of these metaphysical concepts are separate and independent, but are entwined in complex and changing forms, producing effects that demand critical scrutiny.

The battles in Miami: the fall of the FTAA/ALCA and the promise of transnational movements

In November 2003 thousands of demonstrators staged protests in the streets of Miami while trade ministers from across the hemisphere met for the Eighth Ministerial of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Accounts of these events tend to rehearse a common narrative about mass urban protests that frame such demonstrations as a conflict between proglobalization governments and antiglobalization activists. This narrative focuses on the physicality of the protests without considering their performative qualities, assumes that state practices and dissent are distinct, mutually exclusive realms of action, and takes ‘globalization’ to be a scale-fixed process. We call this narrative into question by pursuing two lines of inquiry. First, we analyze the spatial and discursive practices of three different groups of protesters so as to identify crucial affinities and distinctions in their positions and strategies. Second, we challenge the view that capitalist states are simply ‘proglobalization’ by considering resistance to the US delegation by South American delegations within the FTAA ministerial. From our reading of these events we draw lessons regarding the political and strategic effects of mass urban demonstrations.

‘Critique is impossible without moves’: An interview of Kojin Karatani by Joel Wainwright

In this dialogue, geographer Joel Wainwright interviews the celebrated Marxist philosopher, Kojin Karatani. Their wide-ranging discussion examines key concepts by a series of philosophers – especially Kant, Marx, Hegel and Derrida – through an analysis of several core geographical concerns: the spatial organization of global capitalism, the formation of empires and territorial nation states, the current economic crisis, and more. The interview concludes with a discussion of the conditions of possibility of transcending the dominant social formation (i.e. capital-nation-state).

Three recent works by Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour is widely known for his contributions to science studies, debates about postmodernism, and, through the spread of his “actor-network theory,” methods in the social sciences. While one can draw connections between these works, it is hard to pigeonhole Latour. His originality, style of argumentation, and aversion to being defined vis-à-vis other thinkers make Latour enigmatic. More recently, Latour has called into question elements of his earlier project, arguing in his 2002 treatise, War of the Worlds: What About Peace?, that critique has “overshot its target” 4 and asking “why has critique run out of steam?” in a 2004 essay of the same name. That puts Latour, who urged us to follow scientists to understand social life, under the microscope himself.

Climate Change and the Adaptation of the Political

In the face of climate change, along what path might we attempt transformation that could create a just and livable planet? Recently we proposed a framework for anticipating the possible political–economic forms that might emerge as the worlds climate changes. Our framework outlines four possible paths; two of those paths are defined by what is called “Leviathan,” the emergence of a form of planetary sovereignty. In this article we elaborate by examining the adaptive character of emergent planetary sovereignty. To grasp this, we need a theory that can see through our ostensibly “postpolitical” moment to grasp not the disintegration but the adaptation of the political. What does it mean to say the political adapts? Reduced to its essence, it is to say that if the character of political life prevents a radical response to crisis, then it is the political that must change. A materialist attempt to elaborate on this question must begin by reflecting on the manifest inequalities of power in the current mode of global political-economic regulation. After doing so, we conclude by arguing for a return to the concept of natural history.

The U.S. Military and Human Geography: Reflections on Our Conjuncture

In recent years, the U.S. military-intelligence community has shown a growing interest in human geography. This article examines the available literature to consider this trend. I contend that the growing military-intelligence use of human geography, both as a concept and as a practice, deserves critical scrutiny. Although military involvement in geographical research is a long-standing and well-recognized fact, the growing emphasis on human geography per se marks a notable shift: not only a change in terminology—from anthropology of human terrain to human geography and geospatial intelligence—but also a shift in underlying military strategy and concepts. Because this shift has potentially profound implications for the discipline, substantive debate over the militarys employment of human geography is urgently needed.

The political ecology of a highway through Belize's forested borderlands

This paper examines how a new highway in Belize will change a tropical forest landscape. Since the end of British colonialism (1981), the Maya communities in Belizes Toledo District have struggled with the state for control of the lands they have customarily used to produce a livelihood. We were approached by some Maya leaders, who recognize that the paving of a new highway through their villages could transform Maya agricultural practices and thus land use and cover change (LUCC), and asked to produce an analysis that could assist them in managing their lands. We braid together historical, social, political, economic, and satellite data to answer two questions: (1) How has land cover changed since 1975 in areas with Maya customary versus noncustomary land-use practices? (2) What will be the consequences of paving the new highway through this region for the landscape and the Maya communities? Using a multifaceted LUCC/political ecology analysis we found that forest clearing is greatest where noncustomary farming practices are employed. Noncustomary practices are spatially concentrated along the Belize-Guatemala border; the shift to noncustomary practices resulted from inmigration by war refugees who maintained close ties to Guatemalan markets. The paving of the highway promises to reduce the functional distance to Guatemalas markets, which could change land use in other villages to the detriment of the forests because of the likely diffusion of noncustomary farm practices. Forest change will be shaped by the regions complex political geography.