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Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in management and distribution of natural resources in the developing world, came “home” to the American West in the 1990s and 2000s. This groundswell of research did much to problematize socio-environmental conflicts in the region, long typified by tensions over land and resources, identity and belonging, autonomy and authority. Since first touching down in the West, however, the “big tent” of political ecology has only grown bigger, incorporating new perspectives, epistemologies, and ontologies. At the same time, the nexus of environment and society is perhaps even more salient today, amid a regional conjuncture of populist revolt, climate change, and rapid political economic transformation. Here we reflect on three longstanding regional concerns – energy development, wolf reintroduction, and participatory governance – leveraging the pluralism of contemporary political ecology to better understand their contemporary incarnations. In so doing, we highlight the need to bring together insights from both “traditional” approaches and newer directions to better understand and engage contemporary challenges, with their heightened stakes and complexity. Such an approach demonstrates what we might learn about global processes in this place, as well as what insights regional praxis (often woefully provincial) might gain from elsewhere – new ways of seeing and doing political ecology. Our goal is to generate discussion among and between political ecologists and regional critical scholars, initiating new collaborative engagements that might serve the next wave of political ecology in the 21st century American West.

Communities reliant on subsistence and small-scale production are typically more vulnerable than others to disasters such as earthquakes. We study the earthquakes that struck Nepal in the spring of 2015 to investigate their impacts on smallholder communities and the diverse trajectories of recovery at the household and community levels. We focus on the first year following the earthquakes because this is when households were still devastated, yet beginning to recover and adapt. Through survey questionnaires, focus group discussions, open-ended interviews, and observations at public meetings we analyze physical impacts to farming systems and cropping cycles. We investigate respondent reports of loss and recovery through a new social-ecological recovery assessment instrument and find that diversification of livelihoods and access to common resources, alongside robust community institutions, were critical components of coping and recovery. There was widespread damage to subsistence farming infrastructure, which potentially accelerated ongoing transitions to cash crop adoption. We also find that perceptions of recovery varied widely among and within the typical predictors of recovery, such as caste and farm size, in sometimes unexpected ways. Although postdisaster recovery has material and psychosocial dimensions, our work shows that these may not change in the same direction.

Environmental disasters, such as hurricanes, landslides, and earthquakes, are pervasive and disproportionately affect rural and poor populations. The concept of resilience is typically used in disaster scenarios to describe how a community or person is able to “bounce back” from a disaster event. At the same time, resilience theory also contends that disasters, or environmental shocks, can produce or initiate profound changes in social and ecological systems. This case uses a post-disaster resilience assessment to examine how the series of earthquakes that hit central Nepal in 2015 impacted farming communities. Mid-montane smallholder farming communities near the epicenters of the earthquakes were the most affected and the associated damages impeded traditional and subsistence agricultural practices. Our results show how some aspects of the Nepali farming social-ecological system (SES) bounced back more quickly than others and how farmers used various types of coping strategies, including the adoption of labor-saving cash crops as part of their post-disaster recovery. The increased interest in cash crops after the earthquake accelerates an ongoing transition toward more market activities in subsistence communities and illustrates the potential of environmental shocks to transform and change SESs.

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Despite the increasing concentration of wealth among high net worth (HNW) individuals and their rising influence as proprietors of natural resources worldwide, the discipline of geography has only recently begun to consider the interactions between the contemporary global super-rich and systems of environmental management. This article addresses a gap in the literature related to the social and ecological implications of ranches owned by the very wealthy. Drawing from a life course perspective, we complicate static representations of landowners and examine HNW ranchland ownership dynamics in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, an iconic conservation area in the U.S. West. Four stories about HNW ranches, compiled through a composite narrative approach, describe how ranch management practices and strategies play out over time and space. The result is a set of management trajectories linked to broader geographies of the super-rich where social–ecological outcomes related to an ability to ranch with, as opposed to for, money reinforces the connections between systems of wealth, elite interests, and land control. Our findings underscore a need for future scholarly efforts attuned to HNW ranch management trajectories as consequential drivers of change in rural areas and critical conservation areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urgency and deliberateness are often at odds when executing conservation projects, especially as the scale and complexity of objectives increases. The pace of environmental degradation supports immediate and measurable action. However, best practices for adaptive governance and building resilient social-ecological systems call for more deliberate efforts and participatory processes, which can be slow. We explore conflicts between urgency and deliberateness and the potential for their reconciliation through a case study of the challenges of conserving native rangelands in North America's Northern Great Plains, an ecoregion targeted for global conservation initiatives. This region is undergoing a significant social-ecological transition, which underscores a need to rethink conservation strategies in light of the social-ecological system dynamics and potential future trajectories. Based on a structured narrative literature review process and iterative engagement with key regional stakeholders, we identify three interrelated factors critical to the system's future outcomes that illustrate system complexity as well as trade-offs between urgent and deliberate action and unilateral and multilateral approaches to conservation: (1) influences of land management on biodiversity, (2) economic restructuring and shifting land use priorities, and (3) changing climate and disturbance regimes. We identify key gaps in the literature for each factor and across the factors--an effort that informs our call for research and practice agendas that address uncertainty and complexity at regional scales through more inclusive and future-oriented approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]