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drawn (Ellen, 1982; Latour, 1993; Castree 2005). Environmental determinism,
historical possibilism; cultural ecology, human systems ecology, political economy
of natural resources, environmental history, resource economics, environmental
security, and various versions of political ecology all draw boundaries between
human society and everything else in different ways with signifi cant implications
for what researchers see. Mediating concepts, currencies, or mechanisms such as
Julian Steward's cultural core; energy and nutrient fl ows in human systems ecology;
evolutionary concepts of 'adaptation' in cultural ecology; and notions like capital
(de)appreciation in resource economics - are all different ways in which the media-
tion between social and environmental change have been conceptualised.
When fi rst introduced, Blaikie and Brookfi eld's 'access to resources' concept
provided a novel mediating link (Ribot and Peluso, 2003) between social change
(processes, powers, and institutions affecting how people can make effective use to
resources) and ecological change (changes in the physical availability of resources).
In this way, it provided a means through which to think about the relationship
between environmental and social change without reducing the social to the ecologi-
cal (Watts, 1983) or ignoring the ecological relations infl uencing resource proper-
ties. While ecological relations (as defi ned above) were not fully incorporated in the
broad schema of political ecology (beyond the recognition that resources are dis-
tributed unevenly across rural landscapes), chapters in Blaikie and Brookfi eld (1987)
do seriously engage with the complexities of measuring soil erosion and understand-
ing land degradation processes.
In refl ecting on political ecology's engagement with ecological relations, I do not
seek to replay earlier debates about where the 'ecology' is in political ecology (well
summarised by Walker, 2005) or the mirrored set of arguments of where the 'poli-
tics' are in political ecology (see Watts, 1990). It can be said that such debates are
necessary for political ecology to establish its identity as a fi eld of study and stake
its claim on an interdisciplinary intellectual terrain. Still, I adopt here a much more
modest but potentially more illuminating position here - the appropriate level of
engagement should be determined by the questions being asked about particular
places at particular historical moments.
1
By engagement, I refer to the level of
understanding (and incorporation into the study) of the ecological relations of rele-
vance to the people-environment relation being studied.
2
By adopting this position,
I leave open the possibility of research approaches that mix methods and episte-
mologies. Such mixed approaches, while less pure, have attracted signifi cant interest
and debate within people-and-environment studies and political ecology in particu-
lar over the past decade.
Increasing analytical engagement with ecological relations involves the successive
recognition and understanding of: ecological heterogeneity, ecological dynamics,
responsiveness to human resource use, longer temporal scales of response, and the
embeddedness of the ecological parameter within a wider set of ecological relations
(fi gure 12.1). All analysts are aware of the complexity of ecological relations. Where
they differ is the degree to which they engage with these complexities in their analy-
ses of people-environment relations. I locate some examples of different levels of
engagement in fi gure 12.1 with the general level of engagement increasing as the
number of the level increases (1-7).
By presenting this simple diagram (fi gure 12.1), I hope to stimulate greater refl ec-
tion by political ecologists of what is lost and gained by adopting different levels
of engagement with ecological relations for understanding people-environment
