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in very static, teleological treatments of 'environment' and 'society' interaction. The
question of integration remains a major conundrum within people-and-environment
study - how can we simultaneously treat 'ecological relations' and 'social relations'
as following multiple, divergent logics while embedded within interacting, open
systems? Political ecological research has contributed more sophisticated treatments
of the multiple-scaled social relations that surround natural resource use to the
society-environment tradition in geography. However, while improving on previous
approaches, it has generally failed to produce full, balanced depictions of dynamic
ecology-society interaction. As described above, a major weakness has been a rela-
tively shallow engagement with the complexity of ecological relations.
In this section, I avoid replaying arguments about whether a 'political ecology'
approach needs to engage more deeply with ecological relations. Prescriptive decla-
rations either way do little to clarify the costs and benefi ts of greater engagement
with ecological relations. The position taken here is that the appropriate level of
engagement (fi gure 12.1) depends on the research question(s) and the specifi cs of
land-use ecology (sensitivity of the ecological parameters to human extraction
pressures). Each of these issues will be explored in the following two sections.
Research questions and political ecological engagements with
ecological relations
Just as it is not feasible or desirable for political ecologists to study all aspects of
society, it is not feasible to study all aspects of the biophysical environment when
performing social-ecological change research. How political ecologists frame their
studies has a signifi cant effect on the appropriate level of engagement with ecological
relations. No matter how one divides 'human society' from the 'biophysical environ-
ment', all human activities infl uence the environment. One's study is concerned with
the interaction of what human activity(ies) with what ecological parameters? How
is the 'environment' categorised and 'change' viewed in terms of spatial and tem-
poral scales? These questions relate directly to how society-environment interaction
and environmental change is framed and conceptualised. This has a strong effect
on the research questions posed in political ecology research which in turn infl uence
the appropriate level of engagement with ecological relations (fi gure 12.1).
For example, deforestation has been a major topic of political ecological studies
of social-ecological change. Not only is this a major environmental problem in many
parts of the world, it is most commonly framed by political ecologists and others
in ways that require much less engagement with ecological relations. Deforestation,
as typically treated, is short-term change in land cover resulting from the removal
of trees by humans. Compared to other environmental changes (e.g., soil fertility
decline, species composition shifts in vegetation, or wildlife population declines), it
is much more tractable without signifi cant fi eldwork or engagement with ecological
relations. The documentation of change is straightforward and the evidence pointing
to an anthropogenic cause is clear. It is analogous to describing vegetation removal
associated with anthropogenic prairie fi res - the short-term losses are clear. What
is complicated is how these removals of vegetation affect soils, seed stocks and
microclimates, which in turn, will infl uence the vegetation that will replace what
has been removed. While in the prairie case, research focused on ecological impact
would most likely engage with the ecological relations implicated in post-fi re suc-
cession, the environmental change narrative in deforestation research tends to stop
at initial vegetative loss.
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