Paul Robbins

The neoliberalization of nature: Governance, privatization, enclosure and valuation

These passages by Marx help to explain the inextricable logic and ongoing momentum behind global economic, political, cultural and environmental relations. As Marx suggests, there can be no human history without the environment, because human history has been made possible only through the metabolization of the environment through human action. Today, neoliberal capitalism drives the politics, economics and culture of the world system, providing the context and direction for how humans affect and interact with non-human nature and with one another.

The rotten institution: corruption in natural resource management

Abstract Despite widespread evidence of bribery and illegal exchange in natural resource management, corruption is largely unexplored and unincorporated in theorizations and descriptions of the political economy of environment/society interactions. This paper offers the outlines of a theory of natural resource corruption, defining it as a special case of extra-legal resource management institutions, exploring the challenge corruption poses for sustainable use of natural systems, and providing an example of corruption in the case of forest management in India. I argue here that corruption is an institutionalized system of nature/society interaction forged from state authority and molded around local social power through systems of social capital formation. I further suggest that corruption though unsustainable, is not environmentally destructive in a general sense, but that it instead puts selective pressure on some elements of a natural system while bypassing others. The argument addresses not only the character of corruption but also the role of institutions in mediating the relationships between the state and civil society, more generally.

Turfgrass revolution: measuring the expansion of the American lawn

Abstract This paper investigates one of the most understudied components of urban sprawl, the expansion of lawn monocultures and their concomitant high-input chemical management regimes. Introducing a method for estimating lawn coverage and growth, the paper models and explains the expansion of lawns using the case of Franklin County, OH. The results suggest that lawns occupy a significant proportion of total land cover (∼23%) and that lawns continue to grow as a relative proportion of lot size. The implications of this coverage are discussed in terms of both net changes in toxic chemical inputs and the policy implications of suburban ecology.

Lawns and Toxins: An Ecology of the City

Abstract This paper surveys the problems of contemporary urban ecology through the lens of lawn chemical usage, exploring the difficulty of explaining and managing urban ecological dilemmas that, though built from the disaggregated choices of individuals, aggregate into large and serious issues. Introductory discussion surveys the seriousness of lawn chemicals as urban non-point pollution sources and suggests why the issue, and problems like it, it understudied. Analysis proceeds with a case study from the United States city of Columbus, Ohio, utilizing formal survey techniques and aanlysis of county assessors data. The results suggest lawns and lawn care chemicals are expanding with urban sprewl and that users of high-input lawn chemical systems are more likely to be wealthy, well-educated, and knowledgeable about the negative environmental impacts of the actions than non-users. Further investigation demonstrates the instrumental logics of homeowners in pursuit of property values but also points to the moral and community-oriented institutions that enforce and propel high chemical use. The conclusions point to policy options for dealing with the lawn chemical dilemma but suggest the difficulties of circumventing the deeply structured roots of the problem.

Beyond Bias? The Promise and Limits of Q Method in Human Geography

Q method is a quantitative technique for eliciting, evaluating, and comparing human subjectivity. We introduce the method here and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, especially with regards to its incorporation into human geographic research. We conclude that Q method is particularly appropriate for human geographies informed by anti-essentialist notions of the subject and constructivist accounts of social and natural reality. Claims by the founders of Q method that hold that the procedure distances and removes the bias of the researcher are shown to be unfounded and epistemologically naïve. Nevertheless, Q method is a rigorous, hermeneutic, and iterative technique that allows the researcher to surrender the monopoly of control in their relationship with the researched and so contribute to more democratic research design and implementation.

The Intersections of Biological Diversity and Cultural Diversity: Towards Integration

There is an emerging recognition that the diversity of life comprises both biological and cultural diversity. In the past, however, it has been common to make divisions between nature and culture, arising partly out of a desire to control nature. The range of interconnections between biological and cultural diversity are reflected in the growing variety of environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged. In this article, we present ideas from a number of these sub-disciplines. We investigate four bridges linking both types of diversity (beliefs and worldviews, livelihoods and practices, knowledge bases and languages, and norms and institutions), seek to determine the common drivers of loss that exist, and suggest a novel and integrative path forwards. We recommend that future policy responses should target both biological and cultural diversity in a combined approach to conservation. The degree to which biological diversity is linked to cultural diversity is only beginning to be understood. But it is precisely as our knowledge is advancing that these complex systems are under threat. While conserving nature alongside human cultures presents unique challenges, we suggest that any hope for saving biological diversity is predicated on a concomitant effort to appreciate and protect cultural diversity.

The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political Economy*

Abstract Study of local environmental knowledge has led to a general critique of state epistemology, positing a controlling, official knowledge that crushes competing accounts of nature. Skeptical of that claim, in this paper I assess the differences between state and local knowledge empirically, using a case study of the Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary in Rajasthan, India, to explore the way knowledge varies across class, caste, gender, and affiliation within the state forest bureaucracy. The results show that state versus local knowing is not the most meaningful division in epistemology, and that it is the daily struggle over resources in local political economy that gives rise to contending accounts of nature and environmental change. The conclusions further point to knowledge alliances between state and local actors that render certain claims powerful and so determine natural resource management policy and direct landscape change.

Tracking Invasive Land Covers in India, or Why Our Landscapes Have Never Been Modern

The effects of rationalization and bureaucratization on the landscape are myriad and contradictory. The unforeseen environmental consequences resulting from modern planning create new geographies far beyond those of the planner’s design. This article explores the land-cover effects of state-sponsored modernization efforts in the semiarid Godwar region of Rajasthan, India. Using satellite imagery, historical data, household production information, and the discourse of state planners, the research described here explores the land covers that result from agricultural intensification, biodiversity preservation, and resource conservation in postindependence development. The study demonstrates that through these efforts, state planners have attempted to physically partition those land uses seen as “social” from those seen as “natural” and thereby enforce a modernist purification of land covers. Despite these efforts—indeed, because of them—hybrid and “impure” land covers, which mix social and natural characteristics and combine exogenous and indigenous species, have proliferated across the landscape. Moreover, these quasiforests have proven impossible to control or quarantine. The results of analysis, therefore, suggest that these sorts of unexpected land-cover changes necessarily grow out of the very attempts to halt them through modernization, and that, despite our best efforts, following Bruno Latour, our landscapes have never been modern.

Beyond Ground Truth: GIS and the Environmental Knowledge of Herders, Professional Foresters, and Other Traditional Communities

As a result of increasingly apparent and problematic effects of global information system and remote sensing technologies, there has been increased emphasis on demonstrating and incorporating indigenous environmental knowledges in land use and cover analysis. Such approaches, though ethnographically revealing and politically efficacious, tend to reproduce a model of difference between local and scientific knowledges that is epistemologically untenable. This paper demonstrates an alternative use of geographic information system and remotely sensed imagery to both demonstrate the partiality of mapping technology and show possibilities for critical usage of the tool. Using a case from India, the research shows a method to elicit and explore competing environmental knowledges, including and especially those of “scientific” experts. The analysis concludes that, for both local producers and expert managers, the cultural meaning of landscapes is dependent on their roles in regional production and resource politics.

Authority and Environment: Institutional Landscapes in Rajasthan, India

To date, there have been few systematic assessments of the role of social institutions—rules, norms, and systems of authority and power—in creating and reconfiguring natural environments. In the desert grass and shrub lands of Rajasthan, India, where multiple, contending institutions govern village resources in a state of legal pluralism, the need for such research is pressing. Here, state political interventions vie against traditional common and semiprivate rule arrangements for control of valuable pasture and forest resources. This paper introduces an authority-centered theoretical vocabulary for such an analysis and reviews research conducted during 1993–1994 comparing four institutional forms to assess the role of institutions in configuring resource extraction decisions made by producers and in creating distinct and distinguishable biotic conditions. The study results demonstrate that responses to authority differ along axes of gender, caste, and class and so lead to varied decisions by produc...