Michael H. Finewood

Feeling the squeeze: a political ecology of race and amenity-based development in coastal Bluffton, South Carolina.

This paper develops theoretical insight from the rapid development of the coastal town of Bluffton, South Carolina. Bluffton has experienced rapid growth and development over the past 15 years, associated with the amenity-based migration of tourists, second homeowners, and retirees. The local management strategies that dominate regional development often project visions of coastal growth around the possibility of healthy environments and strong economies. The debates around these strategies have centred on the sustainability of development and environmental change, and have contributed to the production of amenity-based landscapes. However, I argue that these debates enforce normative ideals for “good” and “bad” development, which materially and discursively reinforce forms of inequality on the landscape. In particular, this paper will show how contrasts between new development projects and existing communities normalise certain city-building strategies that obscure, or even legitimise, race and class inequalities. Consideration of development/environment debates and the landscapes they help to produce provide an opportunity to envision an alternative future that emphasises social and ecological justice.

Theorizing an Alternative Understanding of 'Disconnects' between Science and Management

In some management discourses, challenges to using environmental health science in land use decision-making and policy formulation result from ‘disconnects’ between the tools and findings of environmental health science and the needs of land use managers. These disconnects are often posited as resulting from the incommensurable epistemologies of scientists and managers, leading to an inevitable lack of resolution between groups who are often characterized as unable to get along. This paper takes an alternative view of disconnects. We argue that disconnects between science and management stem from the often contradictory, double movement of environmental resources and economic development pressures within postindustrial capitalist societies. Utilizing a political ecological framework to analyze conflict in environmental management, this paper suggests disconnects can be linked to the broader problem of the commoditization of nature, rather than the relationship between scientists and managers. Theorizing disconnects in this way opens up new opportunities to think about the science/policy divide.

Making critical connections through interdisciplinary analysis: exploring the impacts of Marcellus shale development

The term “fracking” simultaneously conjures up images of extractive technologies, community tensions, and stories of overnight wealth and environmental nightmares. The introduction and rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing technology to develop oil and gas resources in shale plays across the USA has created complex and interrelated socio-economic, biophysical, and geopolitical challenges. In the Marcellus shale region, distinct but interrelated issues of water security, health, energy, and community overlap in the broader socio-ecological system and further illuminate the daunting character of drilling for natural gas and other hydrocarbons. This special issue of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences intentionally focuses on hydrocarbon development in the Marcellus shale, but situates this dialogue in the context of a broader, transdisciplinary approach to realizing a sustainable energy system. The interdisciplinary research published here examines the far-reaching complexities and consequences of the impacts of rapid, intensive natural resource development, including the role that access to information and inclusion in decision making have in connecting the global to the local facilitating critical evaluation of the long-term sustainability of development decisions at multiple scales.

The Hybrid AMPE Approach: Towards More Effective Environmental Management

In the Global North, attempts to manage environmental resources have resulted in uneven results for diverse ecosystems. Weak levels of participation are characteristic of these attempts, as well as a lack of accounting for the stochasticity of both human and environmental systems. To address this lacuna, adaptive management has integrated the concept of environmental stochasticity into the management of complex environmental systems. However, we contend that adaptive management does not ask critical questions that seek to ensure social and environmental equitability, calling into question the effectiveness of the approach in the long term. This article provides an alternative vision of adaptive management that incorporates theoretical approaches from political ecology. Adaptive management provides an applicable framework to sustain the critical questions that political ecology asks. Thus, this marriage of application and theory can result in a framework that recognizes system stochasticity and develops pathways to the equitable management of environmental resources.

Intersectional feminism for the environmental studies and sciences: looking inward and outward

Although hardly new, our current political climate has brought the specter of American injustice more explicitly into the public eye. The Black Lives Matter Movement, the Flint water crisis, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the various marches on Washington, among others, demonstrate the clear links between humans, nonhuman nature, and justice/equality. Now, then, is a critical moment for the field of environmental studies and sciences to evaluate how we “look outward” at the topics we study and “look inward” at how we conduct our ourselves and our work. Environmental studies and sciences (ESS) purportedly brings a transdisciplinary/multidisciplinary approach to research by linking the arts, humanities, social, and physical sciences in pursuit of more just socioecological outcomes. However, a cursory reflection on the field suggests continued disciplinary divisions that sort the nonhuman and human world into more-or-less distinct and sometimes problematically immutable categories. Further, manuscript discussion sections typically mix in issues of justice and equality ad hoc, rather than explicitly building them into research design and practice. In this article, we argue that feminist theory, and in particular theories of intersectionality, can critique and strengthen the ESS agenda by reforming current practice. Specifically, we draw on intersectionality to reframe how we organize the work we do (looking inward) and how we ask research questions (looking outward). We then use this theoretical framework to suggest how intersectional diversity can inform our future research programs, making the field more poised to meet the complex challenges of global environmental change.

“If That Would Have Happened”: The Moral Imperative of Environmental History

In 1969, South Carolina state officials announced plans to develop a BASF petrochemical factory near Hilton Head Island. However, local residents—both white and African American—mobilized a national campaign against the factory, eventually resulting in the withdrawal of the plans. Over time, the narrative of “BASF’s defeat” has become an important part of the region’s historiography, often presented as both a symbolic victory of stakeholders defeating special interests, as well as the unique and strong character of local environmental concerns. Importantly, too, the factory’s defeat shifted the regional political economy away from heavy industry toward the kind of exurban development that began on Hilton Head in the 1960s and continues today. In this chapter, we discuss this event and the place in which it occurred—Southern Beaufort County—to consider the role of historiography and narrative in exurban politics. Specifically, we explore discourses that have emerged from the defeat of the BASF factory to understand the way past events shape today’s landscape and normalize the vision and materialization of amenity-based development. Thus, we argue that the often taken-for-granted BASF moral narrative is mobilized as part of a broader discourse that legitimates a pattern of unequal geography on the development landscape of Southern Beaufort County, South Carolina.

A Review of “Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City”

a central feature of capitalist economies and discuss several theories that attempt to account for the disparities, including Rostow’s growth stage theory, the dependency theory, and the world systems theory. Chapter 7 turns to local and regional dimensions of economic change, particularly the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism and the issues related to industrial clusters. The final part of the book is titled “Geographies of Networks, Places and Flows,” which appears a bit misleading. The first chapter here examines how economic geographers have conceptualized nature and culture, how nature figures in economic geography, and how culture relates to the economy. The authors claim that these developments show that economic geography is increasingly “unbounded.” The second chapter, also the conclusion of the book, is very brief. It discusses the implications of the recent global economic recession for the geographies of economic life and for economic geography as a field of study. Overall, the book provides a succinct, refreshing, and up-to-date review of both the geographies of economic activity and the various approaches economic geographers use to study them. Especially noteworthy is the authors’ effort to bridge the traditional and NEG and to demonstrate the plurality and diversity that characterizes the subdiscipline today and creates the need for an eclectic sensibility in studying the geographies of economic life. They make it clear that their emphasis is on the social and relational (thus inherently political) nature of contemporary economic matters and economic life, but they also show the values of other approaches. As a textbook for an undergraduate course, it includes some nice pedagogical features. Boxed examples interspersed in most chapters provide more detailed information about specific issues or cases mentioned in the body of the text. Each chapter except for the introductory and concluding chapters ends with one or two exercise questions and separate lists of annotated references and Web sites for further reading and exploration. Most of the exercise questions are straightforward, but a few might be a bit overwhelming to a typical undergraduate student. Exercise 8.1 (p. 157), for example, includes a dozen different questions. Instructors will, however, welcome the authors’ emphasis on developing students’ hands-on and independent thinking skills, as college education in the United States increasingly focuses on these skills. The brevity of the book means that instructors might need to supplement additional material when covering some of the theories and perspectives discussed in the book, but this is not really an issue because instructors usually customize their courses with any textbook they use.