Short and sharp Political Ecology analysis

May 23, 2023

Making Relatives and the Journey for Life

By V'cenza Cirefice and Lynda Sullivan. Experiences of international solidarity between communities resisting extractivism throughout Ireland with Indigenous Land and water protectors from the Zapatista and Turtle Island territories, offer important reflections and learnings on how to build a better world, one where many worlds fit.
April 18, 2023

How Neoliberal Conservation Fails Forward

By Robert Fletcher. Market-based conservation instruments’ continual “failing forward” exposes the naked emperor of an unsustainable capitalism. Post-capitalist degrowth is our only salvation.
March 28, 2023

Wild mushrooms and the political ecology of commercial foraging in the American West. A review of the documentary film Up On The Mountain

By Claude Péloquin The documentary film Up on the Mountain is a social portrait of the commercial harvest of wild mushrooms in the forests of western North America. 
March 21, 2023

Under-ground ore: street intervention in the face of socio-environmental devastation in the Quintero-Puchuncaví sacrifice zone

By Teresa Sanz Through a poetic intervention, Teresa presents Under-ground Ore, a documentary of a collective street theatre piece by activists and artists resisting industrial pollution in Quintero-Puchuncaví, Chile.
March 7, 2023

South-South Circles of Poison? Malaysia’s role in (re)creating uneven geographies

By Caitlyn Sears. The circle of poison describes regulatory failures to reduce the human and environmental harms caused by the global agrochemical industry. Originally used to denote relations between global North (high-income) and global South (low- and middle-income) countries, there is growing evidence that suggests circles of poison are (re)created in South-South contexts.
January 10, 2023

Biodiversity breakthrough or time to stop global environmental meetings altogether?

By Bram Büscher and Rosaleen Duffy. The big biodiversity conference in Montreal from 7-19 December was described as the event that will decide on the ‘fate of the entire living world’. Its outcome to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 is regarded by some as ‘historic’, but in reality promotes more business-as-usual. Have global environmental meetings reached the end of their usefulness? Or is hanging on to them worth it in the face of worsening environmental crises?
December 13, 2022

Formulating poisons: racism, agrochemicals, and cotton

By Brian Williams and Jayson Maurice Porter. In the U.S. South, cotton plantations served as an early laboratory for the toxic development and mass application of agrochemicals. Anti-Blackness shaped the formulation of this harmful agrarian calculus, and cotton, white supremacy and other poisons served as an important antecedent to the subsequent development of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture.  
November 1, 2022

Ocean Mourning – R.I.P. Mar

By Dennis Schüpf. This photo-essay visibilizes the struggle of residents of Los Silos, Tenerife, against illegal sewage discharge which pollutes the sea and kills their fish. 
October 4, 2022

Connecting academic (air) mobility with carbon inequality: Perspectives from a Global South scholar

By Subina Shrestha. As citizens of the Global South, now immigrants in the Global North, which narrative of climate action should we uphold: the one that we know is unfair back home, or the one that puts the responsibility of action on us because of where we reside now? Are our Western contemporaries aware of these dilemmas that we face? A Nepali scholar now residing in Norway reflects on these questions.
September 29, 2022

Europe’s summer of reckoning with losses and damages

By Guy Jackson. Climate-exacerbated disasters in Europe can illuminate the increasing economic and non-economic losses being experienced globally. From solidarity in loss may come solidarity in action, to fight the systems of oppression that create unequal vulnerabilities and fuel climate change
September 22, 2022

Encountering the commons in The Pluriverse of Eco-social Justice: From Coimbra and beyond

By Anoushka Zoob Carter. Both the Livros Carteneros movement and the Baldios are examples of everyday commons-making beyond a neoliberal capitalist society. They offer alternatives to privatisation and neoliberal individualisation, and help us to imagine the pluriverse in practice.
September 20, 2022

Unsettling (water) scarcity one raindrop at the time: Learning from the Revitalised Rainfed Agriculture Network in India

By Arianna Tozzi. Rainfed areas of India, where agriculture is reliant on seasonal rainfall, are often associated with drought-prone territories characterised by endemic water scarcity to be fixed by expanding irrigation. Tracing the historical roots beneath these naturalised scarcity framings, Arianna Tozzi discusses how the work of a grassroot network provides a space to reimagine an alternative paradigm for rainfed regions that values their diversity and variability.