The University of Arizona

Left Coast Political Ecology: a manifesto

Ashton Wesner, Sophie Sapp Moore, Jeff Vance Martin, Gabi Kirk, Laura Dev, Ingrid Behrsin

Abstract


Left Coast Political Ecology (LCPE) is a network of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty engaged in a collective practice of political ecology grounded in strong connection to the "Left Coast" of North America. In this manifesto, we build on successful 2015 and 2018 workshops on the practice and value of political ecology today to communicate our origins, efforts, and ideas towards building a community of praxis amid the urgencies and uncertainties of our time. We first articulate those organizing and theoretical lineages that influence and inform our work. We trace the evolution of LCPE through diverse genealogies and cross-pollinations – from the "Berkeley School" to Black, Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial studies, through political struggles within and beyond the academy. In grappling with the challenges of our institutional histories of settler-colonial, capitalist, and racist dispossession, we then propose a "coastal epistemology", one that troubles the notion of a settler-colonial or neoliberal "frontier" while finding value in encounter, conversation, and emergence. We seek to make transparent our positions of relative privilege as well as the precarious contexts in which we work and live, while mobilizing and embodying political ecology's long-standing normative and liberatory aims. Next we share some of the diverse methodological approaches employed by our members and collective, with the aim of providing inspiration and solidarity to others contending with similar challenges. Ultimately, we suggest a vision for what a political ecology adequate to our moment might look like and require: a necessarily collective and hopeful project, amid processes of colonial violence, capitalist inequity, and climate catastrophe. The Left Coast Political Ecology network invites you to dream and organize with us, to share resources, experiences, and community, and to help push our field and our institutions toward more socially just and ecologically sustainable futures.

Keywords: Coastal epistemology, Left Coast, network, radical geography, praxis, West Coast


Full Text:

PDF

References


Bauer, Jr., W.J. 2016. California through native eyes: reclaiming history. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Blaikie, P.M. 1985. The political economy of soil erosion in developing countries. London: Longman.

Blaikie, P.M. 2008. Epilogue: towards a future for political ecology that works. Geoforum 39(2): 765-772.

Blaikie, P.M. and H.C. Brookfield. 1987. Land degradation and society. London: Methuen.

Blue Cloud, P. 1972. Alcatraz is not an island. Berkeley: Wingbow Press.

Carroll, C. 2015. Roots of our renewal: ethnobotany and Cherokee environmental governance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Carter, P. 2013. Meeting place: the human encounter and the challenge of coexistence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Chen, M.Y. 2012. Animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham: Duke University Press.

Cronon, W. 1992. Nature's metropolis: Chicago and the great west. Chicago: WW Norton and Company.

Daniel, C. 1982. Bitter harvest: a history of California farmworkers, 1870-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davis, D.K. 2007. Resurrecting the granary of Rome: environmental history and French colonial expansion in north Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Davis, D.K. 2015. Historical approaches to political ecology. In Perrault, T., G. Bridge and J. McCarthy (eds.). The Routledge handbook of political ecology. London and New York: Routledge. Pp. 263-275.

Davis, M. 1998. Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster. New York: Metropolitan Books.

de la Cadena, M. and M. Blaser (eds.). 2018. A world of many worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Doshi, S. 2017. Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions. Area 49(1): 125-128.

Edmunds, D.S., R. Shelby, A. James, L. Steele, M. Baker, Y.V. Perez and K. TallBear. 2013. Tribal housing, codesign, and cultural sovereignty. Science Technology and Human Values 38(6): 801-828.

Escobar, A. 1998. Whose knowledge, whose nature? Biodiversity, conservation, and the political ecology of social movements. Journal of Political Ecology 5(1): 53-82.

Escobar, A. 1999. After nature: steps to an antiessentialist political ecology 1. Current Anthropology 40(1): 1-30.

Faria, C. and S. Mollett. 2016. Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the 'field'. Gender, Place and Culture 23(1): 79-93.

Finney, C. 2014. Black faces, white spaces: reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the great outdoors. Chapel Hill: UNC Press.

Flamming, D. 2005. Bound for freedom: black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Flores, L.A. 2016. Grounds for dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, and the making of the California farmworker movement. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Gilmore, R.W. 2007. Golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goldstein, A. (ed.). 2014. Formations of United States colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Goldstein, J.E., K. Paprocki and T. Osborne. 2019. A manifesto for a progressive land-grant mission in an authoritarian populist era. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(2): 673-684.

Gupta, C. and A.B. Kelly. 2014. The social relations of fieldwork: giving back in a research setting. Journal of Research Practice 10(2): 1-11.

Haraway, D. 2015. Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities 6: 159-165.

Hays, S.P. 1999 [1959]. Conservation and the gospel of efficiency: the progressive conservation movement, 1890-1920. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Hernández, R.D. 2015. 1968: on social, epistemic, and historiographic(?) revolutions. Kalfou 2(1): 135-46.

Heynen, N. 2018. Toward an abolition ecology. Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics 1: 240-247.

Johnson, T. 1996. The occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian self-determination and the rise of Indian activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kahrl, W.L. 1983. Water and power: the conflict over Los Angeles water supply in the Owens Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kim, S., G.U. Ojo, R.Z. Zaidi and R.L. Bryant. 2012. Bringing the other into political ecology: reflecting on preoccupations in a research field. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 33(1): 34-48.

Kosek, J. 2006. Understories: the political life of forests in northern New Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press.

Krohn, J. 2019. Geographer. Humanitarian. Felon? Huffington Post 30 May. [accessed August 5 2019]. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scott-warren-arizona-undocumented-migrants_n_5ceee754e4b00cfa19658ebd.

Larsen, S.C. 2016. Regions of care: a political ecology of reciprocal materialities. Journal of Political Ecology 23: 159-166.

Loftus, A. 2012. Everyday environmentalism: creating an urban political ecology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Louis, R.P. 2007. Can you hear us now? Voices from the margin: using Indigenous methodologies in geographic research. Geographical Research 45(2): 130-139.

Martin, J.V., K. Epstein, N. Bergmann, A.C. Kroepsch, H. Gosnell and P. Robbins. 2019 in press. Revisiting and revitalizing political ecology in the American West. Geoforum https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.05.006.

McCarthy, J. 2002. First world political ecology: lessons from the wise use movement. Environment and Planning A 34(7): 1281-1302.

McKittrick, K., and C.A. Woods (eds.). 2007. Black geographies and the politics of place. Brooklyn: South End Press.

Meinig, D.W. 1972. American Wests: preface to a geographical interpretation. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62(2): 159-184.

Merchant, C. 2005. Radical ecology: the search for a livable world. London: Routledge.

Middleton, E. 2010. A political ecology of healing. Journal of Political Ecology 17(1): 1-28.

Middleton, B.R. 2015. Jahát Jatítotòdom: toward an Indigenous political ecology. In R.L. Bryant (ed.). The international handbook of political ecology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pp. 561-576.

Middleton Manning, B.R. 2018. Upstream: trust lands and power on the Feather River. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Mollett, S. and C. Faria. 2013. Messing with gender in feminist political ecology. Geoforum 45: 116-125.

Moore, D.S., J. Kosek and A. Pandian (eds.). 2003. Race, nature, and the politics of difference. Durham: Duke University Press.

Moore, S.A. and P. Robbins. 2015. Nature's diverse economies: reading political ecology for economic difference. In Roelvink G., K. St. Martin and J.K. Gibson-Graham (eds.). Making other worlds possible: performing diverse economies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 153-172.

Moore, S.S., M. Allewaert, P. Gòmez and G. Mitman. 2019. Plantation legacies. Edge Effects, 22 January.

Murphy, M. 2017. Alterlife and decolonial chemical relations. Cultural Anthropology 32(4): 494-503.

O'Connor, J. 1988. Capitalism, nature, socialism: a theoretical introduction. Capitalism Nature Socialism 1(1): 11-38.

Osborne, T. 2017. Public political ecology: a community of praxis for earth stewardship. Journal of Political Ecology 24(1): 843-860.

Peck, J. and T.J. Barnes. 2019. Berkeley in-between: radicalizing economic geography. In Barnes T.J. and E. Sheppard (eds.). Spatial histories of radical geography. Chichester: Wiley. Pp 211-246.

Peet, R. and M.J. Watts (eds.). 2004. Liberation ecologies: environment, development and social movements. London: Routledge.

Peluso, N.L. 1992. The political ecology of extraction and extractive reserves in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Development and Change 23(4): 49-74.

Peluso, N.L and M.J. Watts (eds.) 2001. Violent environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Pulido, L. 2002. Reflections on a white discipline. The Professional Geographer 54(1): 37-41.

Pulido, L. and J. De Lara. 2018. Reimagining 'justice' in environmental justice: radical ecologies, decolonial thought, and the Black radical tradition. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(1-2): 76-98.

Restrepo, E. and A. Escobar. 2005. 'Other anthropologies and anthropology otherwise': steps to a world anthropologies framework. Critique of Anthropology 24(2): 99-129.

Ribot, J.C. and N.L. Peluso. 2003. A theory of access. Rural Sociology 68(2): 153-181.

Robbins, P. 2002. Obstacles to a First World political ecology? Looking near without looking up. Environment and Planning A 34(8): 1509-1513.

Robbins, P. 2012. Political ecology: a critical introduction. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Robinson, C.J. 1983. Black Marxism: the making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Rocheleau, D.E. 2008. Political ecology in the key of policy: from chains of explanation to webs of relation. Geoforum 39(2): 716-727.

Rocheleau, D.E. and D. Edmunds. 1997. Women, men and trees: gender, power and property in forest and agrarian landscapes. World Development 25(8): 1351-1371.

Safina, C. 2012. The view from Lazy Point: a natural year in an unnatural world. New York: Picador.

Santos, B. de S. 2014. Epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide. London: Routledge.

Sasser, J. 2018. On infertile ground: population control and women's rights in the era of climate change. New York: NYU Press.

Sauer, C.O. 1963. The morphology of landscape. In J. Leighly (ed.). Land and life: a selection from the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 315-350.

Sayre, N.F. 2002. Ranching, endangered species, and urbanization in the Southwest: species of capital. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Sayre, N.F. 2017. The politics of scale: a history of rangeland science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schroeder, R.A., K. St. Martin and K.E. Albert. 2006. Political ecology in North America: discovering the Third World within? Geoforum 37(2): 163-168.

Schulz, K.A. 2017. Decolonizing political ecology: ontology, technology and 'critical' enchantment. Journal of Political Ecology 24 (1): 125-143.

Sharp, J. 2005. Geography and gender: feminist methodologies in collaboration and in the field. Progress in Human Geography 3: 304-309.

Simon, G.L. 2016. Flame and fortune in the American West: urban development, environmental change, and the great Oakland Hills fire. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Simpson, A. 2014. Mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. Durham: Duke University Press.

Smith, L.T. 2012. Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.

Steward, J. 1972. The concept and method of cultural ecology. In Theory of cultural change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Pp. 30-42.

Stryker, S. 2008. Transgender history. Berkeley: Seal Press.

Sundberg, J. 2007. Reconfiguring North-South solidarity: critical reflections on experiences of transnational resistance. Antipode 39(1): 144-166.

Sundberg, J. 2014. Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies 21(1): 33-47.

Tallbear, K. 2014. Standing with and speaking as faith: a feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. Journal of Research Practice 10(2): Article–N17.

Vowel, C. (Âpihtawikosisân). 2016. Beyond territorial acknowledgements. Âpihtawikosisân: Law. Language. Culture.

Walker, P.A. 2007. Political ecology: where is the politics? Progress in Human Geography 31(3): 363-69.

Walker, R.A, 2004. The conquest of bread: 150 years of agribusiness in California. New York: New Press.

Watts, M.J. 1983. Silent violence: food, famine and peasantry in northern Nigeria. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wilkinson, C.F. 1992. Crossing the next meridian: land, water, and the future of the west. Washington, DC: Island Press.

Wynter, S. 1971. Novel and history, plot and plantation. Savacou 5: 95-102.

Wynter, S. 2003. Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257-337.

Ybarra, M. 2017. Green wars: conservation and decolonization in the Maya forest. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zimmerer, K.S. 1995. Ecology as cornerstone and chimera in human geography. In Earle, C., K. Mathewson and M.S. Kenzer (eds.). Concepts in human geography. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Pp. 161-187.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.2458/v26i1.23539