The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 140

We need to resist a similar “anti-politics” that blinds us to the asymmetrical eco-
nomic and ecological relations of the post-industrial world. Doing so will help us
understand the unevenness of the “anthropogenic.” As Nathan Sayre ( 2012 , p. 59)
asks, “who caused which changes, and what impacts on whom?” The “uneven
anthropogenic” is visible at multiple scales: from cross-national analyses of the
relationship between environmental degradation and economic development, to
more nuanced examinations of the dynamics and drivers of local socio-ecological
changes.

10.3 The Uneven Anthropogenic

The anthropologist Eric Wolf ( 1982 ) was particularly interested in understanding
the ways in which industrialization gave rise to a global economic system that relied
on cheap labor and raw materials from the Global South. As Wolf and others have
demonstrated (see Smith 2008 ), the reach of industrial capitalism transformed the
livelihood strategies of peasants, horticulturalists, and pastoralists throughout the
world, and in many cases, promoted the overuse of resources. 2 Political ecologists
have sought to understand the role of the modern economic system in creating “eco-
logical distribution confl icts,” such as confl icts over access and control of land and
resources (Escobar 2008 ; May Jr 2015 in this volume [Chap. 27 ]). Political ecology,
including the infl uential work of Wolf and others, was shaped by systems approaches,
such as World Systems Theory (Wallerstein 1974 ), that conceptualized the connec-
tions between the Global South and North as historically constituted by uneven
political economic relations.
Recently, Steffen and colleagues analyzed broad patterns of global change
associated with transformations in the global economy since the Industrial
Revolution ( 2011 ). In particular, numerous social and economic indicators demon-
strate that rates of consumption, production, and population growth have acceler-
ated dramatically in the past 50 years (Steffen et al. 2011 , p. 742). The authors go
on to carefully demonstrate the correlations between these accelerated rates of
change and the continued degradation of the functioning and structure of the Earth's
systems. Importantly, the authors make the point that this “accelerated” rate of
global change was disproportionately driven by consumption patterns in the Global

2 For the most part, the “politics” of political ecology has concerned itself with the means by which
people exert control over other people, as well as the environmental transformations (deforestation,
desertifi cation, for example) spurred by these material processes (Blaikie 1985 ; Blaikie and
Brookfi eld 1987 ). Paige West has defi ned political ecology as “a sophisticated contemporary the-
ory of accumulation by dispossession and the vast effects of this ongoing process” ( 2012 , p. 30; see
also Biersack and Greenberg 2006 ; Neumann 2005 ; Paulson and Gezon 2005 ; Peet and Watts
2004 ). This scholarship has produced critical appraisals of the symbolic and material absorption of
other beings within capitalism and other arenas of socioeconomic power—including through dis-
cursive regimes, practices of governance, and contests over resources and the equitable distribution
of environmental risk.