"Chicken wars", water fights, and other contested ecologies along the rural-urban interface in California's Sierra Nevada foothills

Abstract

The regional political ecology approach entails attention to chains of explanation both up and down scale while acknowledging both the similarities and distinctiveness between and among local level patterns and processes. In this paper, I apply the regional political ecology approach to the study of the rural-urban interface. The rural-urban interface is the site of multi-dimensional (environmental, economic, sociocultural) change as shifts in landscapes and lifestyles iteratively influence land use/management and the cultural context of places in flux. In Calaveras County, California (USA), situated in the Sierra Nevada foothills, certain features of and activities on the landscape are being mobilized by a variety of actors, in different ways, and at cross-purposes. In two cases in particular, specific resources (water) and activities (backyard agriculture) became powerful symbolic figures in increasingly heated public policy debates revolving around the use and value of various landscapes in the area. Using mixed, though mainly ethnographic, methods, I examine these instances of environmental conflict, one revolving around a sheep ranch turned golf course and another focused on the proper place of chickens, along the rural-urban interface. After analyzing the processes of change driving these contested ecologies, I describe the challenges of negotiating what is "acceptable" in the context of place-based change and differently situated actors. I conclude by offering some comments on the difficulties of managing competing expectations of use and function in rural places and arguing the significance of pursuing a particularly regional political ecology.Keywords: rural-urban interface; (regional) political ecology; land and environmental management; contested ecologies; environmental conflict.

How regions do work, and the work we do: a constructive critique of regions in political ecology

“…Walker (2003), for example, notes the benefits of regional analysis as a coherent geographic framing and scalar mooring for political ecologists given the field's shift in analysis from third to first world settings. Indeed, the authors of this Section seem to agree that regions figure centrally into the work of political ecology in the context of understanding and responding to the complexity of modern agrarian capitalism (Galt 2016) or connecting divergent perspectives on the implications of local land use activities to broader economic, environmental and cultural structures of influence (Hiner 2016). Similarly, regions are posited as a useful scalar frame to examine key (yet spatially differentiated) conditions undergirding and influencing the tone and substance of resource extraction debates in different parts the US West (Jenkins 2016).…”

“…Rather, underlying geographical imaginaries actively structure discursive representations of regions that have, in certain historical moments, shaped policies that reinforce geographical stereotypes such as core-periphery, modern-backward, reliableundependable and contributor-dependent (Brenner 1998; Gregory 1998). Geographical imaginaries, and the discursive regional constructions they give rise to, inform real policies with material implications for large populations and individual livelihoods (Hiner 2016, Larsen 2016. Political ecologists should leverage post-structural critique to unearth the social origins of regions and demonstrate the ongoing and potentially harmful (and beneficial) work they do.…”

Sustainability Science in the Light of Urban Planning

“…What they say is: I can see black dust on my car, in my lawn or in my house, which degrade my quality of life whether the PM2.5 thresholds are exceeded or not, and this dust comes from the coal plant. This case shows that divergences, in the perception of a resource or a nuisance by different stakeholders, can result in the emergence of a wicked environmental problem as mentioned by Colleen Hiner in the case of rural-urban water fights in California [49].…”

Does the region still have relevance? (Re)considering "regional" political ecology

“…In this introduction, we discuss the strengths and the weaknesses of using the region as a heuristic within political ecology (Hiner 2016;Jenkins 2016). Like Simon (2016) our focus is on what analytical work this concept can do, addressing the question: how and why how are regions useful within political ecology?…”

“…Hiner's vignettes, working comparatively within a region framed at a much more local scale in the Sierra Foothills of California, highlights interactions between local land use disputes and regional forces of change. Through attention to hyper-local community negotiations, Hiner (2016) exposes the ways the differing perceptions of place emerge in these conflicts. In these cases, Hiner shows how differences in ideology produce contested ecologies that defy simple dichotomous framings of rural versus urban or local versus newcomer.…”