Geoscience Reference
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often based on the idea of protecting external nature (Braun, 2002). This suggests
that, because it fundamentally refers to notions such as economy, society, and envi-
ronment, any discussion of 'sustainability' is always caught up in this politics of
knowledge. It also suggests that strategies to achieve sustainability may be based
on faulty foundations, and hence may contribute to problems rather than solutions.
For example, Benjaminsen et al. (2006) show that deeply held visions of ideal land-
scapes and human-environment relations infl uence seemingly objective scientifi c
notions (such as 'carrying capacity') and serve to obscure socio-ecological relations
that do not fi t these models, thus leading scientists and policymakers to privilege
environmental sustainability over its social and economic dimensions.
Another way geographers present a very different sense of human-environment
integration is by working to
explain
(rather than simply describe elements of) par-
ticular socio-ecological systems. In political ecology (broadly defi ned) researchers
reject both the idea that people are only agents of destruction (i.e. humans are
outside of nature) and simplistic explanations of environmental degradation and
poverty (e.g., overpopulation or backwardness of local people) (Robbins, 2004;
Castree, 2005). Researchers document various ways that people - in multiple times
and places - have managed to create healthy (sustainable!) socio-ecological rela-
tions, and they document the breakdown of these healthy relations as a result of
struggles over control of resources. Asking why people do what they do, researchers
have found that environmental degradation often results from extensive political
and economic processes, including state intervention and integration into capitalist
markets (e.g., Prudham, 2005). Problems in one place may be caused at least in part
by practices that are quite distant. By offering alternative explanations of both
environmental degradation and poverty, this research provides the basis for a cri-
tique of orthodox approaches to both development and conservation, such as those
offered by the World Bank and major conservation organisations (Robbins, 2004;
Goldman, 2005).
This research also provides the basis for a critique of sustainability as a dimen-
sion of both global environmental politics and academic discussion. For one, most
literature on sustainability fails to address these relations of power that shape what
people do. As outlined above, even research that claims to be 'integrative' avoids
addressing the politics of socio-ecological relations. Additionally, and partly because
of this failure, sustainability is itself part of the politics of control over resources.
Reference to the idea of sustainability is a way of making claims about who should
have access to resources, on what basis, and for what purpose. In this vein, Adams'
(2001) infl uential work on the history of sustainability gives attention to the deep
roots of the idea of sustainability in colonial conservation practices, and shows how
orthodox approaches to sustainability reproduce faulty explanations of environ-
mental problems and their solutions. Other recent research argues that the promi-
nence of sustainable development in international debate refl ects that it is a form
of geo-politics and extension of state power (e.g., Luke, 2005), and shows that
efforts to create sustainable livelihoods must attend to gender dynamics, which are
key to understanding how people organise access to resources and use of the envi-
ronment (Hovorka, 2005). These examples show that sustainability participates in
and must take into account power dynamics of multiple types and also at multiple
scales, including households, states, and international relations.
Attention to sustainability in multiple contexts and scalar confi gurations brings
us to the second major contribution that geographers make to the study of sustain-
