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Urban political ecology (UPE) has become an important and influential paradigm for the geographic analysis of socioecological transformation. Despite considerable progress in its empirical and theoretical sophistication, however, what it means to analyze the specifically political dimensions of change in UPE accounts remains largely unspecified and underdeveloped. One option receiving attention is to confine analysis of the “properly political” to the disruption of prevailing orders by egalitarian challenges. As an alternative, we propose and elaborate a pragmatist approach to political analysis that has emerged in science and technology studies. Through accounts of two efforts to imagine the socioecological future of an urban river, we aim to demonstrate the potential of such an approach. We argue that in addition to local variation and the deployment of knowledge, analyses of the political trajectories of issues should address historical variation and the mobilization of desire. We contend that such an approach provides a methodology for tracing connections between conventional political processes and extraordinary moments of disruption and that it is also compatible with multiple perspectives on the “political” within UPE. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many have observed the decline of scientific authority over the last three decades, for reasons ranging from the toxic legacies of Cold War science (Beck 1992), to the current commercialization and privatization of knowledge production (Mirowski 2011), to the success of social constructivist critique (Latour 2004). Whatever the cause(s), it seems clear that the relationship among academia, the military, and state and economic elites is shifting once again. A new regime of knowledge production is emerging (Pestre 2003) in which academia carries significantly less clout than it has over the previous half-century, and broadly legitimate knowledge claims are increasingly developed outside of the academy. These changes carry obvious implications for the future of academic legitimacy and institutions. The implications for environmental and social justice are less obvious, although perhaps even more important, as the ways in which knowledge is vetted and the questions investigated (or ignored) shift. In this article, I use exploration of the changing relationship between academic and extramural knowledge producers to lay out potential futures for the production of environmental knowledge. I argue that although academics have been notably unsuccessful in challenging private-sector, commercialized environmental knowledge claims, we are increasingly successful in leveraging our remaining authority to enable the democratization of knowledge production to intellectually and politically progressive ends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the onset of the global economic crisis, financiers and the institutions regulating their behavior have been subject to far-reaching criticism. At the same time, leading geo-scientists have been insisting that future environmental change might be far more profound than previously anticipated. Finance capital has long been a crucial mechanism for melting present solidities into air to create different futures. This article asks what the prospects are for the switching of credit money into green infrastructures—a switching increasingly recognized as necessary for climate change mitigation and (especially) adaptation. Most research into geographies of finance has ignored ecological questions and few contemporary society–nature researchers examine major fixed-capital investments. Unlike those geographers who criticize capitalism without offering feasible alternatives, we take a pragmatic view underpinned by democratic socioenvironmental values and attempt to identify leverage points for meaningful change. This programmatic article identifies reasons and examples to be cautiously hopeful that liquidity can be fixed in less ecologically harmful future infrastructures, thereby addressing crucial extraeconomic challenges for the century ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is about the logic and dynamics of environmental politics when the environment at stake is profoundly socioecological. We investigate the socioecological forests of the coalfields of Appalachian Ohio, where once decimated forests are again widespread. Conceptualizing forests as power-laden relationships among various people, trees, and other nonhumans, we identify multiple distinct forest types that currently exist as both material reality and future vision. Each forest is characterized by antagonistic ideas about ideal species composition, structure, and function and about specific actions and actors deemed necessary and threatening for the forest's persistence. Each forest represents a very different vision for how socioecological relationships should be fostered. We argue, first, that broad acceptance that the environment is fundamentally socioecological does not mark the end of environmentalism. Rather, urges to environmentalism proliferate as people aim to foster the social natures they envision—and do so through interventions that are internal to what the forest is and does. Second, the proliferation of environmentalisms generates new forms of environmental conflict, which manifests over what sorts of social natures can and should exist (i.e., what they should do and for whom) and which interventions are beneficial or harmful to the survival and proliferation of the forest in the future. Ultimately, we demonstrate that socioecological futures are being shaped today through political struggle not over naturalness but over what should be done, by whom, to bring about which social natures, and to the benefit of whom (human and nonhuman). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the translation of key terms about climate change from English into Inuktitut, considering not only their literal translation but also the broader context within which words make sense. We argue that notions of resilience, adaptation, and climate change itself mean something fundamentally different in Inuktitut than English and that this has implications for climate policy and politics. To the extent that climate change is translated into Inuktitut as a wholly environmental phenomenon over which humans have no control, both adaptation and resilience come to be seen as appropriate and distinctly Inuit modes of relating to shifting climatic conditions, calling on practices of patience, observation, creativity, forbearance, and discretion. If translated as a matter of unethical harm of sila, however, Inuit frameworks of justice, relationality, and healing would be activated. In the context of a broader global shift away from mitigation and toward enhancing the adaptive capacities and resilience of particular populations, current modes of translating climate change, we argue, are deeply political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the need for meaningful political responses to socionatural change, in this article we develop an interim politics of resourcefulness as a strategy for addressing the limitations of postpolitical environmental governance. Drawing on political and epistemological insights of third-world feminism as well as an ongoing collaborative with environmental justice organizations in West Atlanta, we argue that visions for just socionatural futures must necessarily be generated in conversation with historically marginalized communities. We offer an interim politics of resourcefulness as one way of forging those kinds of engagements between academic researchers and communities, and describe the forms that such engagements have taken in our own research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Anthropocene—the geological epoch in which human activities are signaled in Earth's geological records—often appears as an age to be met with grim resignation. Anxiety-driven narratives about this era can translate into very material landscapes of surveillance, tightened borders, farmland acquisitions, and so on, landscapes where speculation shapes lived realities. This article proposes that instead of joining the chorus of dark predictions, or rejecting the flawed concept altogether, geographers are well positioned to experiment with articulating a different Anthropocene. Fragments of a beautiful Anthropocene are already under design: agroecology, green roofs and buildings, distributed renewable energy systems. Yet to weave together a vision compelling enough to provoke cultural and political change, other elements are necessary: a reawakened sense of wonder, an ethic of care, and aesthetic and cultural production around these. This article proposes enchantment as a concept to evoke these elements and discusses the merits and dangers of imagining an enchanted Anthropocene. It looks at emergent alternative framings for thinking about a human-shaped earth and examples of related practices—rewilding, biophilic cities, planetary gardening, smart landscapes—which could make for a more habitable and welcoming epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cap and trade systems have been pursued as a primary strategy for addressing climate change but have received surprisingly little analysis from a justice perspective. Using a multivalent justice framework that includes the dimensions of distribution, recognition, and representation, this article examines the development of the Western Climate Initiative (WCI), the largest multijurisdictional North American attempt to create a greenhouse gas (GHG) cap and trade system. Decisions involving five components of creating the system are interrogated: participation metrics, stakeholder consultations, methods of policy analysis, market boundaries, and policy guidelines. This analysis yields two sets of observations. First, the article documents how market-oriented regulation contracted understandings of climate change policy. Decisions taken to facilitate the commodification and marketization of GHGs narrowed the understanding of justice with the WCI to the concept of “fair play” among market participants. Second, the article argues that using a multivalent approach to justice facilitates the observation of how a relatively shallow understanding of justice was shaped in this particular context. It also concludes, however, by considering the limitations of this approach to justice, in particular the dimension of representation, when faced with multiscalar and ambiguous policy contexts such as those inherent to climate policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The changing notion of state territoriality highlights overlapping power structures at international, national, and local scales and reveals how states can be “differently” powerful. This article analyzes how the interplay of these power structures shapes the dynamics of natural resource management in one of the world's fastest changing transboundary basins, the Mekong. Taking the Lao People's Democratic Republic as a case study, we highlight the existing inconsistency and institutional discrepancies in land, water, and environmental policy related to hydropower and illustrate how they are manifested in multiple decision-making frameworks and overlapping legal orders. The resulting legal plurality reveals the inherently contested terrain of hydropower but, more important, it illustrates how the central state has been able to use contradictory mandates and interests to further its goals. The specific Mekong hydropower case demonstrates that an understanding of power geometries and scale dynamics is crucial to meaningful application of social and environmental safeguards for sustainable dam development. More broadly, the case sheds light on the important role of states’ various agents and their multiple connections, partially explaining how the achievement of the central state's goals can be derived from legal plurality rather than hindered by it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Analyzing everyday environmental imaginaries from contemporary Turkey through the lenses of postcolonial, emotional-affective, and nature–society geographies, this article offers insights into shifting nature–society relations and possibilities. Based on a series of interviews and focus groups conducted in four sites (Istanbul, Ankara, Diyarbakır, and Şanlıurfa), the concept of imaginative geographies of green is offered to highlight social and spatial differences as central to the articulation of green visions and movements. The research foregrounds several social and spatial gradients specific to the Turkish context, including east–west divides both within and beyond Turkey (i.e., Kurdish–Turkish and eastern–western Turkey, as well as notions of Turkishness and Europeanness). The work also suggests that environmental imaginaries have deeply emotional, ambivalent, and power-laden associations. Apart from the implications of the work for enriched understandings of emergent environmental possibilities in this context, the conclusion touches on ramifications for European Union accession debates as well as new directions for work on environmental citizenship and movements in the global south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studying rivers, physical and social science researchers tend to analyze water resource regulation at a national scale, treating “the state” as a monolithic entity mechanistically executing its regulatory code. Yet variation abounds in the interpretation and application of any national environmental policy. This study examines the complex geography of a small but crucial component of the U.S. Clean Water Act—compensatory stream mitigation—and how particular states and federal agency districts, and the individuals occupying key roles in those units of government, have interpreted the same national law in quite different social and environmental settings. The appearance of monotonic regulatory outcomes at a relatively coarse scale obscures a high degree of fine-scale heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent decades, the creation of conservation areas has been a significant and contested trend in resource peripheries around the globe, embracing the “remapping” of resource extents, tenures, and values and thereby land use patterns and regional development trajectories. Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have emerged as key actors in the conflicts underlying this remapping, as advocates of environmental values and opponents of vested economic and political interests engaged in large-scale resource commodification. Remapping is contentious because it is inescapably normative, rendering moral judgments and alterations of property rights and the meaning of sustainable development. The outcomes of remapping are highly contingent, driven by environmental bargaining processes that describe the formal and informal interactions among ENGOs, industrial interests, different levels of government, and other actors with conflicting interests, strategies, and alliances. This article explores how conflicts were resolved in the creation of the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia's central coast. Conceptually, the stakeholder model approach to resource conflict is elaborated by emphasizing the roles of ENGOs as advocates and representatives of environmental values within scientific boundary organizations created specifically to be key facilitators in the bargaining process. The study draws on forest policy documents, records of negotiation, surveys of the region's ecological and socioeconomic structures, and field visits. The analysis reveals the Coast Information Team as the multirepresentative scientific boundary organization that developed a shared, accepted multilayered geographic information system of the region. This map provided a “shared currency” and the basis for agreement regarding (1) land use zoning at multiple scales, (2) ecosystem-based management, and (3) conservation mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the late 1990s there have been many calls to bring critical geography into conversation with science and technology studies (STS). Although the strongest cross-fertilization to date has been ontological, political economy is another productive area for conversation between the two fields. More specifically, I argue that fully understanding the role that environmental science plays in expropriation requires expanding our focus of analysis to include not just the application of science but also its production and circulation. Through a field analysis of the Rosgen Wars, a fight that has convulsed the American stream restoration field since the mid-1990s, I demonstrate how Bourdieu's analytical framework can bridge political ecology and STS, revealing the political economic relations central to the development of scientific knowledge claims, education, authority, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study uses an intellectual history approach to construct a retrospective on Annals nature-society geography during the past century (1911-2010). It begins by identifying six areas of topics and approaches that have emerged as primary clusters in the 1990s and 2000s: (1) environmental governance and political ecology; (2) environmental hazards, risk, and vulnerability science; (3) land use and cover change science; (4) human-environment interactions; (5) environmental landscape history and ideas; and (6) scientific concepts and environmental management. A combination of continuity and change involving the core areas of human-environmental scholarship is found to distinguish Annals publications during recent decades (1990-2010) vis-a-vis preceding periods (1911-1969, 1970-1989). The current plurality and partial intersection of core topics and approaches is mostly a contrast to previous predominance and distinctness of the Sauerian Berkeley School and the Chicago School of hazards research. Reflection on this intellectual history sheds light on issues of the timely role of nature-society within the geographic discipline and in relation to environmental interdisciplinarity and policy. Using the concept of translating across knowledge domains, Annals writings demonstrate the expanded, multistranded intellectual spaces of nature-society geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hundreds of local governments in the United States have adopted greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals during the past several years, requiring critical examinations of the role of the state in climate governance and the effects of these programs on urban citizenship. Using a study of Seattle, Washington, a city at the forefront of implementing climate regulations through formal government institutions, this article examines how and why climate is incorporated into local environmental policy. By deliberately connecting the causes and consequences of global climate change to the local community, Seattle has been able to use climate as a conceptual resource for urban environmental policy via the climatization of the urban environment. Furthermore, a key mechanism for making climate governable in Seattle is the carbonization of urban governance, where a relationship between the production of GHG emissions and specific urban activities is established through the use of GHG inventories and emissions monitoring. These practices facilitate the act of territorialization, where material natures and state institutions are coconstituted through the production of carbon territories. A key effect of these practices is that Seattle has begun to enroll its residents as a new type of carbon-relevant citizen in the regulation of global climate, while also reaffirming its ability to regulate infrastructural design, commercial activities, and community development. These findings are discussed with respect to their implications for how we understand state practice in climate governance, as well as the relationship between “the state” and “nature” in environmental politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the integrity of the emerging emissions allowance markets for greenhouse gases (GHG) under the international emissions trading system created by the Kyoto Protocol and the parallel European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. In particular, we suggest that accepted definitions of emissions baselines, initial allocation of emission credits, verification of “additionality” for GHG reduction beyond what would have occurred without trading, assuring permanence for offset-generating projects, preventing leakage of emissions-generating activities from protected project areas, monitoring, and reporting requirements are problematic. As with previous reforms that also rely on market allocation and expansion of private property rights, GHG trading deflects change in the social relations of production required for more sustainable production while commodifying access to the atmosphere and nature's ability to recycle carbon. Alternatives to this modern-day GHG indulgence system are considered, especially an upstream carbon tax, designed to force change in energy procurement and use. Although we found that most of the conditions required for the efficient operation of the international GHG markets are not being met thus far, further changes in the trading systems are being made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how access regimes, defined by a set of interrelated institutions and organizations, facilitated the flow of production resources and benefits that resulted in patterns of land change in the Brazilian Cerrado. We analyzed remotely sensed data (Landsat MSS, TM, +ETM) for three time periods (1972/1973-1986, 1986-1992, 1992-2002) with qualitative and archival data for eastern Mato Grosso state. Overall we found that land privately colonized was cleared more rapidly and extensively than lands under no colonization scheme. We also identified significant spatial variability in Cerrado conversion within and outside colonization areas and variability of annual rates of Cerrado conversion during each period. We explain that farmers in the Cerrado engaged in land-leasing and production contracts and worked through cooperatives and firms to marshal resources, including credit, technology, and inputs, which, in turn, influenced land-use decisions and regional patterns of land-cover change. We conclude that a mesoscale analytical framework that examines how land managers access natural and productive resources provides useful insights to explain the processes that cause patterns of high-input agricultural expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for effective and efficient climate policy has led to a major expansion in the use of market-based instruments and voluntary agreements (New Environmental Policy Instruments [NEPIs]) at national and international levels. Yet, despite the prevalence of these instruments as an outcropping of the broader shift toward neoliberal approaches to environmental policies, tremendous diversity exists in the way signatories to the Kyoto Protocol have deployed NEPIs. Drawing on recent geographical and political science research on the neoliberalization of nature, this article reexamines reasons for geographical variations in market environmentalism and, in particular, the role of national policy styles in refracting neoliberal influence on environmental policy. In so doing, I argue that policy styles are too frequently conceptualized in terms of state processes, overlooking complex and territorialized social relations between regulators and regulated parties. To illustrate this claim, I compare the implementation of climate policy in the United Kingdom and Germany, exploring the effects of national policy styles on NEPI deployment, factors contributing to industry reactions to market-based and voluntary measures, and how national policy styles color these evaluations. This is used to argue that understanding geographical variations in market environmentalism requires greater appreciation of the role of industry groups in the creation, defense, and evolution of national policy styles. I conclude by reflecting on the study's implications for the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial information technologies, particularly as they relate to remote sensing and geographic information science (GIScience) are providing new perspectives for understanding rural systems. By utilizing geospatial technologies with more integrative research approaches, geographers can ask more socially relevant and innovative questions about the human–environmental system. Within remote sensing alone, there has been a significant leap forward in usable sensor systems for analyzing human dimensions of rural areas through high spatial and spectral resolution approaches. The impact of various forcing factors (e.g., water availability) in Kansas and Botswana, for example, within the context of human–environmental interactions can be more fully understood using such geospatial technology approaches. At the same time, through new infospheres, cybergeography, and sensitivity to new attitudes in learning by millinneals, future geographies are created that demand more geographic management systems (GMSs). At the center of such evolving trends, geographers are poised to provide important leadership in more fully understanding the human–environmental system as we begin the Association of American Geographers' next century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An integrated analysis of landscape change in the alpine zone of Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Nepal, is presented based on the results from five separate research expeditions conducted between 1984 and 2004. Research results indicate that alpine ecosystems (4,000–5,200 m) within the Imja and Gokyo valleys have been significantly impacted during the past twenty to thirty years as a result of poorly controlled tourism. Impacts within the alpine zone include the overharvesting of fragile alpine shrubs and plants for expedition and tourist lodge fuel, overgrazing, accelerated erosion, and uncontrolled lodge building. Evidence suggests that similar scenarios of landscape change in the alpine zone are occurring elsewhere around the Everest massif as the result of adventure tourism. This article stresses that the alpine zone is a comparatively neglected landscape that is in need of greater protection, conservation, and restoration involving integrated, applied research to the clarification of problems, the design of remedial projects, and monitoring of their impacts.“Community-based Conservation and Restoration of the Everest Alpine Zone,” a Sherpa-led project established in May 2004, is provided as an example of how the paper's research results are currently being utilized by local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses two questions: (1) How do spatiotemporal changes in air pollution levels—specifically, total suspended particulates (TSP)—rise or fall with socioeconomic status? (2) A critical equity interpretation of environmental policy then motivates this question: does the pursuit of average regional reductions in pollution benefit those who need improvements least, benefit those who need improvements most, or maintain the status quo? TSP data are drawn from networks of monitoring stations operated in 1985, 1990, and 1995. The monitoring data are interpolated with a kriging algorithm to produce estimates of likely pollution distribution throughout Hamilton. Exposure is related to socioeconomic status (SES) variables at the census tract level for corresponding years—1986, 1991, and 1996—and associations are tested with ordinary least squares (OLS) and spatial regression models. The results show that whether TSP rises or falls, injustice persists but becomes less pronounced over time. Among all SES indicators, dwelling value consistently predicts TSP levels for all years, suggestive of a land-rent/spatial-externalities dynamic. As we move forward in time, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate air-pollution exposure among Hamilton neighborhoods, as industrial TSP sources become more dispersed in the region and transportation pollution becomes relatively more important. We conjecture that more equitable distributions of air pollution have resulted more from post-Fordist industrial and spatial restructuring than from environmental policy intervention. Injustice in Hamilton and its apparent relationship with changing industrial structure appear similar to results in the United States and speak to a continental, intraurban environmental-justice experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the development of international environmental policy from the 1972 United Nations Stockholm conference in Sweden to the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil. Assessment of geographic contributions and changing nature of geographic research over the period; Contemporary agenda of global-change research and policy.

Opinion. Examines the openings created by environmental policy reforms introduced along the Gambia River Basin focusing on the strategies rural Gambians have developed to manipulate these policies for personal gain. Demonstrations on how women market gardeners used usufruct rights to ease the economic impact of persistent drought conditions.

The National Environmental Policy Act and the pollution control powers of environmental protection agencies present a potentially significant new influence on the location of economic activity within the United States. This study examines whether traditional factors such as markets, labor, and materials remain predominant in manufacturing-location decision making, despite the recently added dimension of environmental regulations. Personal interviews and mailed questionnaires were used to identify the factors that were most important in the location of 162 new branch plants of large U.S. corporations. For most of the locational decisions investigated, environmental regulations did not rank among the most important factors considered" when such regulations were of some significance, uncertainties about when the necessary permits would be obtained were more important than spatial variations in direct costs. The results indicate that environmental regulations have had no consistent effect on the size of the search area, the number of sites considered, the sizes of facilities built, or the decision to expand existing plants versus building new plants. Environmental regulations will not lead to major shifts in the location of industry' within the U.S. for the traditional location factors remain predominant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply to researcher Madhusudana N. Rao for his comments on a article by the authors. According to them they are familiar with most of the citations mentioned by Rao. as they were commissioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop a complete bibliography on climate/health relationships as part of the effort to evaluate the impact of a predicted global warming on the environment. In addition to that, the article presents various other information.