Chapter 5: Challenges in Ecology
The two processes that political ecological questions and answers have depended on measuring or revealing
What are Destruction and Construction (of environmental systems or landscapes)?
It holds that social context alone determines what we accept as true, leaving little room for nonhuman material processes like soil or climate to shape outcomes independently
What is Hard/Radical constructivism?
A multidisciplinary research technique that involves:
1. monitoring land change
2. thinking about these changes as a “coupled system,” combining human and environment subsystems
3. constructing spatially explicit models (i.e., in a GIS environment)
4. evaluating outcomes of changes for people and the environment more generally.
What is Land Change Science?
loss of natural productivity;
loss of biodiversity;
loss of usefulness;
creating or shifting risk ecology
What are the approaches of defining and measuring degradation?
This philosopher argued that objects of experience are shaped by our ideas rather than the other way around in his work The Critique of Pure Reason
Who is Immanuel Kant?
Asking and answering “why” questions through:
1. empirical observation
2. the development of conjectures leading to further investigation
3. sorting through available evidence and competing hypotheses by practical means to eliminate some explanations and retain others
What is Causal Explanation?
One of the tools that political ecologists have to cope with ecological complexity, this tool “describes and anticipates significant transitions in landscape form and composition”
What is State and Transition Model (STM)?
What key example does Robbins use to illustrate the need to move beyond social construction toward “co-production”?
What is Amazonian Dark Earth?
1. A model for reaching and integrating with global audiences
2. A creative adoption of technology
3. Evaluation of non-human influences and co-evolved systems using environmental science methods
What can Political Ecology learn from Land Change Science?
Can be used to describe a condition in which a system irreversibly changed, after some biotic or abiotic influence, even in some cases it might still be possible to restore some of the historic structure and functions of the ecosystem
What is Ecological Novelty?
This term describes the stance holding that categories like “race” or “desertification” are false social overlays on top of an objective and empirical reality independent of our categorization
What is “social object” constructivism, or a form of soft constructivism?
1. Applying methodologies beyond interpretation and theorization to justify explanations
2. A critical analysis of pre-determined categories and assumptions
3. Consideration of alternative explanations
What can Political Ecology learn from Causal Explanation?
1. establish the overall type, rate, and direction of, possibly multiple, environmental changes
2. identify the drivers of that change, human and non-human
3. determine the environmental context in which such changes occur, including preexisting variability and dynamics
4. explore the specific impacts of various practices in terms of their intended and unintended effects
5. examine the capacity, rate, and direction of routes of ecological recovery following changes or cessation of impacts.
What does Robbins present as the "methodological imperatives in political analysis of environmental destruction"?
Politically explicit form of “geomatics”, used to defend customary land claims against states and settlers, described by Peluso as an effort to “appropriate the state’s techniques and manner of representation” to bolster local legitimacy
What is Counter-Mapping?
The tendency to collect data that supports one's own perspective
What is confirmation bias?