Ecologies of Hope: environment, technology and habitation - case studies from the intervenient middle

Abstract

This paper is an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Political Ecology on "Ecologies of Hope." The authors argue that discrete, specific, and often, local actions can create spaces that are bettering human lives and livelihoods. The five papers identify actions and movements that are situated in the "middle" between the individual and larger social and economic formations, and inbetween social and economic status- quo and revolution. They are everyday initiatives that do not make revolutionary claims, but which in small but significant ways, help transform the lives of people and communities. These "ecologies of hope" resonate with the work of Karl Polanyi, and his identification of the modern disembedding of the economy and the environment from its societal and cultural context. Polanyi argued that processes that result in a loss of cultural "habitation" engender movements by societies to protect their social solidarity, and distortions of their relationship with the natural environment. Creating and carving out "ecologies of hope" may not mitigate catastrophic global change or miraculously transform the unjust into the just, but does make life and livelihoods a bit more habitable. For people whose lives are affected, this matters. Political ecology should recognize the importance of creating spaces for "habitation" that are not necessarily structural and scalable.Key words: Karl Polanyi, ecologies of hope, habitation, self-organized communities.

The Intersection of Planning, Urban Agriculture, and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

“…Food in these neighborhoods, referred to by many scholars as food deserts, is typically more expensive (Raja & Yadav, 2008 ), whereas fast food outlets and others sources of unhealthy food proliferate (Ver Ploeg, 2010 ). Scholars link the combination of economic barriers, the lack of healthy food choices, and the abundance of unhealthy food choices to a number of negative health-related outcomes for both children and adults, including higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease among adults (Lowery et al, 2016 ;Morland & Evenson, 2009 ;Raja & Yadav, 2008 ). Food justice demands that people living in food deserts and food swamps have access to good food.…”

“…Food justice advocates engage in a wide range of local, specifi c, place-based projects, like cooperatively owned grocery stores and urban agriculture, that aim to expand peoples' geographic access to good food in the short term (Rajan & Duncan, 2013 ). Food justice scholars acknowledge that place-based projects are important because they offer people localized opportunities to develop alternatives to the industrial, corporate food system and to fl ex muscles in food democracy (Hassanein, 2003 ).…”

Quality revolutions, solidarity networks, and sustainability innovations: following Fair Trade coffee from Nicaragua to California

“…I have explored the possibility that more direct producer-cooperative-roaster relations could be a starting point for a series of sustainability innovations and a renewed partnership with increased accountability and better results for Southern communities and landscapes (Rajan and Duncan 2013). I did this without forgetting the critical wing of political ecology which reminds us that a deeper agricultural and food-based imperialism is clearly the dominant trend in this recent post 1989 phase of liberalization and globalization and a recognition that Southern states will need to play a stronger role in efforts to negotiate a fairer deal for their citizens (Clapp and Fuchs 2009).…”

Sowing seeds of hope in California's fields of resistance to Pharm rice and Frankenfish

“…At the same time, the actors in these cases are using habitation, their connection to a place, to change how they interact in national and international contexts as well. The actors' understanding of their role, their place, the cultural, economic, and social contexts in which they are operating, is part of why these two cases are examples of ecologies of hope (Rajan and Duncan 2013). They are experiments in democratic action and decision making, with solutions reached by coalitions of activists who worked within institutions to give form to their resistance to genetically engineered organisms that they saw as inimical to their cultural and economic past and future.…”