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These disjunctures are surprising given the emphasis within policy and scientifi c
circles, illustrated by terms such as sustainability and degradation, on understanding
the longer-term persistence of an ecosystem's productive potential. They are not
surprising however when we consider temporal framing issues. Changes that are
short with respect to human lifetimes and planning horizons are less likely to be
ignored by researchers. Changes that are seen as long are more easily ignored. This
is due to conceptual, policy and methodological issues. It is more diffi cult to study
processes that transcend human lifetimes. These changes are less tractable and
actionable by policymakers. Returning back to the deforestation example, the time
needed for forest structures to be reestablished is longer than those for the reestab-
lishment of herbaceous cover on a burned prairie. But is this the appropriate crite-
ria? Are we not interested in post-deforestation ecological changes for their own
sake not simply with an eye towards the reforested landscape? Adopting the defor-
ested landscape as the endpoint implicitly treats subsequent ecological change as
long-term and therefore emphasises structural recovery or return to 'climax' as the
post-disturbance change of concern.
Endpoints of change are necessarily established in all research. The choice of
endpoints refl ects not only how social-environment interaction is conceptualised and
framed both spatially and temporally (as described above) but also the environmen-
tal change's policy relevance, economic importance, and feasibility of study. Political
ecologists are more likely to incorporate the effects of resource extraction on eco-
logical relations that have a direct infl uence on economy and politics. This results
from their interest in the recursive relations between political economy and ecology
over time. Therefore, 'ecological relations' captured within political ecology research
are more likely to be those within which human-defi ned resources are implicated.
Second-order effects of resource extraction that have little potential for strong feed-
back to human economic activity (effects of resource extraction on ecological popu-
lations of little economic importance) are less likely to be studied (e.g., at level 7 of
fi gure 12.1). In this way, political ecology research of social/ecological change has
an inherent anthropocentric emphasis.
It is important to acknowledge that the framing of research is not solely governed
by conceptual issues - more practical concerns come into play. Despite the impor-
tance of soil degradative processes to the original framers of political ecology
(Blaikie, 1985; Hecht, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfi eld, 1987), anthropogenic changes
in the physical and chemical properties of soils have not continued to attract
attention from political ecological analysts of social-ecological change (with excep-
tion of Gray, 1999). In these ways, the preponderance of social-environmental
change research performed by political ecologists and other social scientists is
focused on environmental changes, such as deforestation, that are more tractable
by outside observers. Therefore, the level of engagement with ecological relations
may remain limited due to the diffi culties, especially in light of the background and
training of political ecologists, of performing certain types of environmental change
research.
Land-use ecology and political ecological engagements with
ecological relations
Despite the early calls for greater engagement with the biophysical world, the vast
majority of political ecological research shares with other social scientifi c counter-
