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2004). Clearly focused on questions of power and politics since its inception, politi-
cal ecology has also often relied upon ethnographic methods to access the lived
experiences of peasants and/or 'land managers' subject to political-economic trans-
formations and global structural forces.
Many of political ecology's major concerns are fi nding their way into more
mainstream environmental research and policy development. The new focus on
community impacts of regulations, community participation in environmental issues
and attempts to mitigate environmental injustices are all recent developments that
clearly intersect with political ecology research. In the case of fi sheries in the United
States, for example, new federal regulations make clear that the impacts of fi sheries
regulations must be assessed relative to both 'fi shing communities' and to questions
of environmental justice (Olson, 2005; St. Martin, 2006). While often contradictory,
these mainstream adoptions of political ecology concerns nevertheless suggest a
broadening of the environmental fi eld such that questions of uneven and unjust
impacts, if not power, might be acknowledged and addressed. With this broadening
there is also an expansion of ethnographic methods as a way to address these
issues.
Where power is understood as the result of political economic structures, eth-
nography has played an important role as the method by which political ecologists
can closely examine the effects of power on local people, their livelihoods and their
environments. The question of power and its relationship to the environment is,
however, not just a question of forces from above and their impacts locally but one
of struggles across scales involving a host of individual moments, actors and enact-
ments (e.g., Sletto, 2005). Since Foucault, understanding power requires not just an
analysis from the top down but
[...] an ascending analysis of power, starting, that is, from its infi nitesimal mecha-
nisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques
and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been - and continue
to be - invested, colonised, utilised, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended etc.,
by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination. (Foucault,
1980)
In this conception of power, ethnography's role is again vital. Here it not only gives
us access to impacts but works to explain power itself, how it emerges through
and within daily interactions and how it is aligned with power mechanisms,
practices and dominations. Furthermore, similar to the above concerning subjectiv-
ity, ethnography's explication of power can also be recast as an intervention into
power, its maintenance, its disruption or its redirection.
Scale, global/local
Understanding scale and the relationships between processes operating at different
scales remains a major research task of geography. This is also true of environmental
geography. Much of this work has focused on the downward effects of 'macro' scale
processes associated with power - global, national and regional - where places and
communities were most often seen as 'recipients' of those global processes be they
economic, environmental or cultural (Hart, 2004). This is true for both traditional
environmental geography that relies upon quantitative impact analyses and for
political ecology that reveals impacts through a variety of methods including those
