Grassroots

Statements -Just and Plural Political Ecologies: Traditions and Futures

Statements -Just and Plural Political Ecologies: Traditions and Futures

There are 14 short 1000-word statements published on the webpage of the Grassroots section of the Journal of Political Ecology. These statements are provocations to think about traditions and futures of just and plural political ecologies. The Journal of Political Ecology joined two other journals in soliciting these statements– Ecología Política (Barcelona) and the Journal of the Geographical Association of Tanzania. This is an initial step of an effort to publish a collection of reflections on the wide and plural field of political ecology as it takes shape in and around the 2024 POLLEN meetings.

The statements are self-selected, and do not reflect by any means the full range of ideas in political ecology. Most of the authors are located in Europe and North America, but half of the articles are written or co-written by scholars from the "global south".

All the statements present an idea of political ecology as a progressive, critical tradition of thought, but one that nevertheless has shortcomings. Alex Dunlap finds the Liberal University where much academic political ecology is produced to be an institution that propagates violence and terror. Why don't we political ecologists transform the institutions to conform with our goals, reducing carbon footprints, producing food sustainably, etc.? Simon Batterbury and Diego Silva point out that scholars in wealthy countries and institutions publish in corporate for-profit journals whose massive profits make the articles inaccessible to the global majority. Why don't these scholars publish their work in scholar-led open access journals?; why don't they change the review and promotion protocols at their institutions so that scholars are not forced to publish in journals that create huge profits for 5 big publishing houses? Batterbury and Silva present the Journal of Political Ecology as an example of a convivial, non-capitalist form of publishing.

Many of the statements present conceptual geneaologies and propose engagements with specific approaches. Antonacci, for example, makes the argument that "an ethic of synthesis is needed” for political ecology to embrace "World Ecology" approaches and vice-versa. Jean-Phillipe Venot calls for a renewed engagement of political ecology with participatory research, which despite complicity with structures of power, has the same public-facing goals of engagement and social change that are held by scholars working with social movements. A plural political ecology should be wide open; a just political ecology more discerning.

Most of the statements frame intellectual plurality in terms of philosophical tendencies and schools of thought rooted in cultural worldviews. Multiplicity, heterogeneity and plurality are qualities of postcolonial, decolonial, and ontological approaches that destabilize the universalizing claims of modern, western, scientific thought, and make room for alternate world-making. Contributors working in this vein include Sophie Haines and Sara de Wit, Carlos Tornel, Rosabel Sotolongo and Jose Sanchez.

With their eyes set on the current climate crisis, Haines and de Wit ask how scientific ideas, and mainstream narratives of climate change emerge, circulate, and interact with other worldviews and knowledges? They question the current emphasis on biophysical understandings of climate knowledge arguing that the abstractions that they produce yield to complexity, hybridity and translation when addressed by close and sustained field research. In the same vein, Pretell argues that claims about a coherent Latin American political ecology must be tempered by indigenous and feminist voices that disrupt that unity. Zanotti and Naveen offer a sophisticated review of tendencies within feminist political ecologies, agreeing with Pretell that indigenous and local knowledge must be foregrounded, as well as decolonizing approaches and methods rooted in care and hope.

After pointing to various debates in the field, Carmen Sera-Penker asks "How much more time can we spend on deciding which is the most relevant or most supported concept which should be applied to act against the ecological crisis?" Today the production of knowledge in the context of social movements and struggles is a key distinguishing feature of what authors variously call political ecologies of the South, or Latin American Political Ecologies. Denisse Rodriguez argues that the plural and just political ecologies emerge from the "dialogue of knowledges" – dialogo de saberes – that is carefully cultivated by social movements and communities in resistance. This radical pedagogy, most obviously present in Latin America, should be used by more privileged actors and institutions in the global north.

Beyond the envisioning of just and plural futures, Bluwstein and de Rosa argue for the need to analyze bio- and necropolitical ecological futures already in the making today. According to them, a political ecology of the future could help us unearth present foundations, structures, discourses, processes and social formations that shape specific future trajectories, likely to become entrenched in the absence of successful contestation and reversal.

Together these statements remind us that political ecologies are generated through productive social relations arranged in fields of power, knowledge, temporality and inequality. We must consider these fields as we forge collaborations with people, formulate projects that are important to them, generate data, publish our results, and deploy that knowledge to confront political, economic and environmental challenges.