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The seven years between the first edition and this one have made the relevance and urgency
of political ecology a difficult thing to determine. On the one hand, the field has grown so
dramatically, and in so many directions, that it is even easier to say of this contested enterprise that it has become too diffuse to matter. References to “political ecology” in the Web
of Science database have more than doubled in the intervening years but now reflect a huge
range of approaches. One might think that political ecology has finally “jumped the shark,”
a phrase from the television industry suggesting the creative end of a franchise. I am sympathetic with those who may hurriedly wish to get on with the “next thing” as well as those
who are still not sure what political ecology is, let alone whether it has a purchase on a
special kind of explanation.
And yet if political ecology is no longer relevant, no one bothered to tell the world. The
horrifying 2004 tsunami revealed structures of vulnerability that demand structural analysis. The summer monsoon of 2010 swept away hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan,
in a floodplain perfectly engineered to reduce the year-to-year hazard of flooding in defense
of cash crop production, while increasing the decade-to-decade probability of human
tragedy on an unimaginable scale. Areas gazetted for conservation mushroomed in recent
years without consensus on how to deal with the displacement of people and loss of productive resources this entails. Mining concessions have ballooned on indigenous land. The
world got warmer.