Political and event ecology: critiques and opportunities for collaboration

Penna-Firme, Rodrigo

doi:10.2458/v20i1.21764

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Vayda and Walters (1999) criticize political ecology for assuming that political factors always explain environmental change and, hence, for being blind to how other (non-political) factors affect environments. Political ecologists, on the other hand, argue that progressive contextualization is inclined to result in 'apolitical' explanations that do not deal adequately with power and politics (Robbins, 2004;Penna-Firme, 2013).…”

Section: Research Approach and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Elephants over the Cliff: Explaining Wildlife Killings in Tanzania

2015

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a b s t r a c tMany incidents of elephant killings have recently taken place in Tanzania as well as in other African countries. Such events are usually presented as results of the rising global demand for ivory. As we show in this case study, however, not all violence against elephants is driven by the ivory trade. This article presents an event that occurred in West Kilimanjaro in 2009 when numerous villagers chased a herd of elephants over a cliff, killing six of them. Using a 'web of relations' approach, we seek to uncover the underlying as well as the immediate factors that led to this incident. A severe drought sparked off the event as elephants increasingly raided crops and destroyed water pipes. There are growing elephant and human populations in the area, which must be understood in the context of land use changes. Large areas have in various ways been turned into different types of protected areas during the last few decades as results of efforts by conservation NGOs and governmental agencies. In between these areas, people try to sustain a living on the remaining land, while encountering increased problems with wildlife. Conservation in the study area takes place without local communities having any real influence on decision-making. This leads to a feeling of being marginalized and disempowered, which again causes resistance to conservation, as in this case.

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Section: Research Approach and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Elephants over the Cliff: Explaining Wildlife Killings in Tanzania

2015

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“…Our approach described above is in many ways similar to Penna‐Firme's () discussion on event ecology and its articulation with political ecology. In sum, he suggests a collaborative perspective that draws on the empirical nature of event ecology and the critical narratives of power inherent in political ecology.…”

Section: Event Action and Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

4 Political Ecology and the Event: Calusa Social Action in Early Colonial Entanglements

Thompson

Worth

2018

Archaeological Papers of the American

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There are many examples of colonial entanglements resulting in shifts in religions, practices, subsistence, and political structures, largely linked to inequalities between the colonized and the colonizers. However, there are also examples in which practices, particularly among Native American societies, persisted in the context of social situations that intertwined peoples with diverse histories. At the time of Spanish arrival, the Calusa of southwestern Florida were a large‐scale, hierarchical society with supra‐community integration and were able to maintain high degrees of autonomy. Our focus here is to explicate the early colonial world of the Calusa. Specifically, we want to understand why early European interactions take such a dramatically different course in southwestern Florida than in other areas of Spanish colonization. To do so we use political ecology and recent scholarship on eventful archaeology to consider Calusa and Spanish social and political action. Our work focuses on interactions between the Spanish and the Calusa during the early and mid‐sixteenth century (ca. 1513 to 1569 CE). We argue that because the Calusa were fisher‐gatherer‐hunters, lacked maize agriculture, and had their capital on the defensible island of Mound Key, Spanish‐Calusa interactions and events transpired in a fundamentally different context compared to other Spanish outposts and colonies. With this example, we show how various events, knowledge, and traditions of the Calusa of southern Florida all worked to create a vastly different colonial entanglement that resulted in the Spanish abandonment of the area for some time.

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“…This predicament derives from Brazil’s adoption of the North American “fortress approach” to conservation in the 1930s, where human occupation and resource extraction were deemed incompatible in protected areas 3 (Diegues 1998 ; Penna-Firme 2013 ). PETAR was the first protected area to be established in the State of São Paulo in 1958 and was based on a notion of “wilderness” without human interference.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social-Ecological Changes in a Quilombola Community in the Atlantic Forest of Southeastern Brazil

Thorkildsen

2014

Hum Ecol

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Through a combined adaptive cycle and political ecology approach, this article explores how the Afro-Brazilian Quilombolas of Bombas, living inside the protected area of PETAR, respond to and shape social-ecological changes in the Atlantic Forest. Field data reveal that both environmental restrictions and social policies of state transfer payments and food packages have contributed to decreased engagement in agricultural practices, loss of traditional knowledge, and reduced agro-biodiversity. The claim to land rights based on a Quilombola identity and recent negotiations with forest authorities insinuate a shift of this trend. Contrary to dominant conservation narratives, the findings indicate that small-scale shifting cultivation practices by the Quilombolas have the potential to increase structural ecological complexity of the Atlantic Forest. The article therefore argues that legalization of settlement and subsistence activities is important not only for livelihood security and social cohesion of Bombas inhabitants, but also possibly for biodiversity conservation.

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Political and event ecology: critiques and opportunities for collaboration

Cited by 8 publications

References 39 publications

Elephants over the Cliff: Explaining Wildlife Killings in Tanzania

Elephants over the Cliff: Explaining Wildlife Killings in Tanzania

4 Political Ecology and the Event: Calusa Social Action in Early Colonial Entanglements

Social-Ecological Changes in a Quilombola Community in the Atlantic Forest of Southeastern Brazil

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