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ronmental politics only through the divergent meanings attached to that change by
individuals and groups with divergent powers. How might a greater engagement
with ecological relations contribute to a political ecologist's understanding of envi-
ronmental politics? The fact that a tree has microrhizal associations allowing it to
better capture nutrients released from vegetative burning or decay would seem to
have little role to play in the confl icts that surround one group's interest in cutting
the tree down and another group's interest in letting it stand for production or
preservation purposes. Under what circumstances would greater engagement with
ecological relations contribute to an understanding of the unfolding of politics sur-
rounding natural resources? I will explore these questions by focusing on two areas
of particular interest to political ecologists: differentiation of wealth and power, and
environmental governance.
Differentiation of wealth and power
Only those ecological relations that surround resources valued by human society
are likely to attract attention from those studying environmental politics. A classic
political ecology perspective conceptualises environmental politics as being consti-
tuted by struggles over 'access to resources.' Framed in this way, 'confl icts over
resources' are not simply here-and-now struggles over the resources made available
by productive ecologies but they are, in fact, socially mediated. Politics are between
people not between people and trees. Resource-related confl icts among people, while
having a material basis, are often expressed through the invocation of principles
governing social conduct: fairness, justice, past agreements, and historical precedent.
Therefore, it is diffi cult to disentangle rigorously the material, ideological, and
political roots of any confl ict.
This said, we can recognise that environmental change and ecological dynamics
do affect the nature of environmental politics. On a broad level, areas attracting
the interests of international capital (extractable resources) or conservation (biodi-
versity) have quite different political ecologies than other areas. Areas of greater
resources elicit greater investments into governance structures at the level of com-
munities, districts, and national governments. As a result, governance structures,
the potential for competing interests, and power differentials will be affected by the
human valuation of nature's objects (nature as 'resource') and the magnitude of
resources available for extraction.
At the level of the human community, early political ecology work has shown
that the temporal dynamics (Watts, 1983) and spatial heterogeneity (Blaikie, 1985)
of biological productivity, as mediated through social relations of production, play
important roles in the process of social differentiation of wealth and of ecological
vulnerability. High spatiotemporal variability of resource availability, by limiting
capital investment and primitive accumulation, could be seen to work against dif-
ferentiation. However, more predictable cycles of temporal variability allow the rich
to speculate across these cycles to their advantage and to the disadvantage of the
poor. While most of this work has focused on climatic variability, one could imagine
environmental changes leading to resource production dynamics that differ in their
predictability and spatiotemporal variability. By changing temporal resonances with
markets and spatial resonances with capital investment, such environmental changes
could, through changes in the distributions of wealth and power, affect environ-
mental politics.