Tag: nature

CfP POLLEN20 – Land, environment and nature: politics of resources*

Amber Huff

Third Biennial Conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN20)
Brighton, United Kingdom
24-26 June 2020

*This session is part of ‘Conversations between political ecology and critical agrarian studies’, a series of six linked sessions that will explore complementarities and tensions between political ecology and critical agrarian studies in relation to land, energy, environment and nature, degrowth, green economies and agrarian struggles and agrarian and environmental movements. 

Session organizer

Charles-Alexis Couvreur (University of Oxford). Please send abstracts of 250 words of less to chalexiscouvreur@gmail.com no later than November22nd.

Session description

Critical agrarian studies has focused on land as the central resource for agrarian production, driving the dynamics of accumulation. However, as with much scholarship originating in Marxist thought, it has been widely critiqued for its failure to engage with environmental questions more broadly. As the ‘environment’ is itself a contested and multi-layered notion, we are interested in further fleshing out how non-human ‘natures’ interact with processes of agrarian change and, more broadly, capital accumulation in rural settings with the following questions:

  • How can the role of nature(s) be incorporated into a re-theorisation of agrarian/rural economy dynamics?
  • Can diverse knowledge systems recast conventional understandings of the relationships between people, production and nature?
  • What are the political and ontological implications of ‘greening’ conventional understandings of agrarian/rural capitalistic transformations?

Contributions from wider rural settings (e.g. fisheries) and disciplinary realms (e.g. geography, anthropology) are particularly encouraged too, for the complementary light they shed on the importance of nature(s) in the multiple processes of capital accumulation that still need to be further unpacked.

News: updates from Political Ecology Research Centre, Massey University, NZ

katharinehowell

POLLEN initiators Bram Buscher and Rob Fletcher (Wageningen University, The Netherlands) will be traveling to New Zealand in early February 2018 with colleagues from Sociology of Development and Change Group (SADE).  They will visit Massey University’s PERC (Political Ecology Research Centre) members and researchers from the School of People Environment and Planning (SPEP).  A workshop will be held at New Zealand’s National Park and the group will also visit Massey University’s Auckland and Palmerston North campuses.  The visit is intended to stimulate existing collaborations between PERC, SPEP and SADE and to bring these to the next level.  

PERC is also pleased to announce an open access book publishing contract with Athabasca University Press for Plastic Legacies: Persistence, Pollution, and Politics.  This collection edited by Trisia Farrelly, Sy Taffel, and Ian Shaw, developed out of PERC’s online conference held last year: The Lives and Afterlives of Plastic. The unifying theme of the edited collection is the material politics of plastic. Plastic Legacies considers how an interdisciplinary approach drawing upon the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural, and life sciences can illustrate the problems and offer potential solutions to the global plastics crisis. 

PERC will soon be announcing their next annual online conference, Feral:
In the twenty-first century, globalisation has become a truism, rather than a challenge or opportunity. People, money, resources, culture and power all flow around the world in ever increasingly complex systems and assemblages. Yet even as apparently almost all aspects of life become subject to global circulation, our ways of thinking about natural or non-human worlds remain stubbornly resistant to concepts of hybridity and exchange. Nature is so often imagined to have a proper place, arrangement or constitution: certain species are desirable and must be saved, whereas the flourishing of others (from algae to jellyfish to rats) can be taken as a sign of imbalance or degradation. In order to re-examine how we conceive and value different forms of nature or the non-human, this event calls on participants to take up the feral as a way to explore the possibilities and problems of the human relation to the non-human world.  The idea of the feral gestures towards forms of non-human life that have spurned human control or expectations: ‘bad’ forms of wilderness that are out of place and upset conventional thinking about the desirable or proper arrangement of nature. From biosecurity to so-called invasive species, ‘dead zones’ to re-wilding, urban pests to the idea of the feral calls on us to interrogate our assumptions about how, what, where and why nature ought to be, how we draw those lines and distinctions and how they speak to wider structures of power and privilege.

The Feral conference will be online late in the year.   Please see our website for updates: http://perc.ac.nz/wordpress/.

Tourism, labour and the rhino poaching crisis in South Africa

Stasja Koot

By Stasja Koot, 12 December 2017

In the Kruger to Canyon (K2C) region, South Africa, there are two big phenomena of which the interactions have so far hardly been researched: tourism and the rhino poaching crisis. Based on four field trips to South Africa in 2016/17, totalling about 3 months, I have investigated these links, and here I wish to present some first ideas. In particular, I wish to explain one important tension that I observed; the role of labour in tourism and how this is related to the rhino poaching crisis. Read more →

Nature is priceless, which is why turning it into ‘natural capital’ is wrong

Stasja Koot

image-20160920-11117-10p4n3d

By and

For: The Conversation

An increasingly popular line of argument is that, by turning nature into capital, it is possible to reconcile a capitalist growth economy with conservation. In this way, proponents assert, conservation can be expressed in a language that economists, policy-makers and CEOs understand.

But this strategy is not just self-defeating. It is a dangerous illusion that masks the way capitalist growth undermines conservation itself.

Read more →