Environment and Planning E

Kampman, Halie

doi: 10.1177/25148486251353340pmid: N/A

According to public health reports, diet related diseases like diabetes and heart disease are spreading like wildfire across Ghana. Drawing on a case study of the city of Tema, I explore how residents account for these changes. Semi-structured interviews expose an unconventional explanation: residents blame chemical fertilizer for causing new diseases. Even though there is no evidence of a correlation between the two, I take such concerns seriously, using a political ecology approach to understand these perspectives within the broader historical context. Life histories and archival documents show that Tema's development was predicated on the destruction of traditional farming villages. As such, chemical fertilizer concerns are theorized as stand-ins for a broader set of concerns about modernization. Yet crucially, participants do not universally denounce Tema's urban development. They imagine how Tema could also offer solutions, articulating visions of what modernity can and should look like. I theorize their perspectives as embodied ambivalences indicative of postcolonial hybridity.

Caple, Zachary

doi: 10.1177/25148486251350860pmid: N/A

Challenging the universality of the Anthropocene Epoch, this article argues for a new conceptualization of the planetary situation focused on the landscape complexities of the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event. I ground this perspective with a historical and ethnographic tour of Lake Somerset, a water-filled phosphate pit in Central Florida that has become habitat for a colony of endangered wood storks. Displaced from their native Everglades, these storks utilize the lake's spoil-pile islands for their rookery. I argue that Lake Somerset, and the Holocene/Anthropocene transition generally, become legible by attending to processes of creative niche destruction: capital-generating disturbances that irreversibly alter the biophysical structure of space. At Lake Somerset, phosphate mining has locally eradicated the Holocene ecologies that came before and replaced them with pits and piles of mutilated soil that recolonize with invasive plants. The diasporic wood storks exemplify what I call a Holocene fragment––a long-established ecological form that survives in the ruins of the Anthropocene. Utilizing tools of natural history observation, ethnography, and environmental history, I argue that multispecies researchers are uniquely positioned to track the Holocene/Anthropocene transition across the earth's surface––a critical practice for understanding shifting patterns of life and livability in this time of radical change.

DuPuis, E Melanie

doi: 10.1177/25148486251351478pmid: N/A

The Big U, a design to protect the Lower Manhattan waterfront from sea level rise and storm surges, won millions in the Obama Administration's Rebuild by Design competition in 2014, and many other awards from the architecture community. Yet, ten years later, the original green design for the project has largely disappeared, replaced by a more engineered “gray” design that was vigorously resisted by resident groups. Through document analysis, observing and speaking with public-facing guides during planning meetings and events related to the project, as well as interviews with experts and officials, I explore the ways “resilience thinking” employs imaginaries of nature in nature-based solutions. Drawing on work in urban political ecology, I examine the idea of “working with nature” as a tool, and show how the BIG U plan relied on a kind of magical “unicorn” nature that denied the complex material reality of the Lower Manhattan waterfront. Through this case study, I explore how Western binary notions of nature-culture in green vs gray solutions leads to magical thinking and unicorn projects that become subject to definitional boundary contests.

Ghosh, Ritwick; Barral, Stephanie

doi: 10.1177/25148486251352710pmid: N/A

Failure has become an important analytical theme in the Neoliberal Natures literature. Failures of various neoliberal conservation schemes are often theorized in reference to inherent limits to neoliberal ideologies or in terms of place-based complexities in constructing market mechanisms. We extend this analysis by centering attention on the state and its dual relations with traditional industries such as oil and gas as well as with the emergent conservation industry. Much has been written about the state's role in promoting environmental markets, but there is room to understand how the state produces demand, primarily by making traditional industries pay for their environmental harm. Empirically, we analyze the use of market approaches to enforce the US Endangered Species Act. We show that the rise and fall of a market solution such as biodiversity offsetting is not primarily driven by efforts to commodify nature, but to resolve temporal and spatially localized barriers to accumulation. Rather than a sweeping roll-out of market forms, we observe the buildup of markets-at-hand – conditions where the market option is in reserve and can be mobilized on short notice as and when political economic conditions oblige regulated industries to seriously account for their environmental harms. Failure is not a bug, but a feature of neoliberal conservation.

Parker, Naomi; Searle, Adam; Turnbull, Jonathon

doi: 10.1177/25148486251353339pmid: N/A

Birding is a form of wildlife recreation that often involves exclusive communities and spaces, where both access and practice are policed along hegemonic lines. This paper examines the experiences of birders from marginalised communities who, through online networks, were able to challenge birding's historical hegemonies during the COVID-19 lockdowns and beyond. Our research participants were members of the Self-Isolating Bird Club (SIBC), a grassroots birding group founded on social media in 2020, which challenged preconceptions concerning both who wildlife was for and how it could be enjoyed. We contextualise the SIBC alongside other digitally-empowered wildlife communities and theorise these practices as ‘glitches’ in contemporary environmentalism. We present glitches as generative fissures that dissent, dismantle, and disorient the status quo, yet their impacts are generally understood to be fleeting and momentary. Engaging Legacy Russell's manifesto, Glitch Feminism, and recent geographical scholarship on the glitch's political atmospheres, this paper examines the conditions in which the fleeting impact of glitches can gain duration and engender lasting social change. Informed by affirmative, qualitative accounts of female-identifying members of the SIBC, we outline the participatory work through which the disruptive effects of glitches can endure and note their implications for wildlife recreation spaces like bird hides, parks, and nature reserves, which have historically made non-conforming bodies and marginalised people feel unwelcome or unsafe. Accounting for such duration, we develop work on glitches in digital geography and digital ecologies by conceptualising ‘glitch environmentalism’.

Manosalvas, Rossana; Hoogesteger, Jaime; Hidalgo-Bastidas, Juan Pablo; Boelens, Rutgerd

doi: 10.1177/25148486251353634pmid: N/A

During the last decades, Ecuador's páramo wetlands have become increasingly important sites for environmental governance. Historically, these humid, highly biodiverse Andean moorland ecosystems were seen as empty desolate and unproductive spaces, and later, between the 1960s and 1990s, as spaces for expanding the agricultural frontier of rural communities. Since the end of the 1990s, this changed as páramos came to be seen as important spaces for biodiversity and water conservation. Using the Foucauldian notion of governmentality we show, first, that a new “narrative” about these spaces leads to new state and non-state interventions that rearrange the socio-material relations in these ecosystems. Then we analyze how the “conservation narrative” has been translated to projects and programs that advance biodiversity conservation and the water regulating capacity of paramos. By analyzing the most important Ecuadorian paramo conservation initiatives of the last three decades, we show how this takes place through different techniques of government that aim to conduct-the-conduct of rural communities. The latter we argue, is a continuation of a centuries old pattern of governing marginalized rural populations to serve the interests of the ruling elite. Historically, this process created longstanding socio-environmental injustices that current initiatives are failing to address. The latter makes many of the conservation interventions fragile in the long run.

Ravikumar, Ashwin; Lock, Will

doi: 10.1177/25148486251356196pmid: N/A

Despite Peru's adherence to economic and environmental policy guidance from multilateral institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and United Nations agencies, deforestation in the Amazon region has remained stubbornly high. While recent scholarship has shown prevailing conservation policy programs in the Peruvian Amazon to be largely ineffective, there is little analysis of why Peru's conservation and development program has failed to address the underlying drivers of deforestation. In this article, we ask whether Peru's prevailing conservation policy has meaningfully challenged the extractivism and cash crop expansion that ultimately drive deforestation. To answer this question, we analyze recent political ecology scholarship alongside interviews we have conducted over the past decade with Amazonian community members, environmental nonprofit staff, conservation workers, and state functionaries. Our analysis shows that Peru's conservation policy has relied on three major pillars: (1) establishing protected areas alongside decentralization reforms, (2) implementing payments for ecosystem services schemes, and (3) expanding ‘green’ commodity production through a range of state programs. We analyze how each of these have been implemented in practice, showing how they have each accommodated and reinforced, rather than challenged, the expansion of extractive industries. In this way, Peru's approach to conservation and development in the Amazon can be understood as part of an emerging ‘commodities consensus,’ wherein conservation and extractivism mutually support and legitimize one another. We conclude by contrasting conservation under the ‘commodities consensus’ with more radical visions of conservation rooted in agroecology and expansive land rights, suggesting that political ecologists and social movements work to analyze and challenge conservation under the commodities consensus.

Soleimani, Kamal

doi: 10.1177/25148486251359040pmid: N/A

This article examines everyday nationalism in East Kurdistan (also known as Rojhelat) and its resilience within the framework of Kurdish ecological activism. Centering on Sharif Bajwar, the leading eco-nationalist figure in the region, it explores the literary expressions and narratives that emerged from the commemorations and rituals following his tragic death in a wildfire on August 25, 2018. Through the analysis of speeches, slogans, and interviews, the study illustrates how environmental and nationalist struggles intersect in suppressed national communities like Kurdistan. In doing so, it highlights the strong connection between environmental awareness and the Kurdish nationalist movement, contributing to the growing scholarship on eco-nationalism and everyday nationalism studies. The article also explores the perceptions and responses of the Kurdish people in Rojhelat, shedding light on their lived experiences and unique interpretations of Kurdish ecology within the daily political sphere. Employing a flexible chronological approach, the study delves into various aspects of Bajwar's beliefs and initiatives, offering critical insights into his influential role in shaping Kurdish eco-nationalism.

Eccles, Stephanie

doi: 10.1177/25148486251359484pmid: N/A

This article critically examines Factory Farm Gas (FFG) generated from industrial animal waste from North Carolina's (US) hog sector, revealing how this corporate-driven, government-subsidized sustainability initiative, aimed at addressing the sector's methane emissions, ultimately serves to expand and entrench industrial animal production. FFG depends on the large-scale concentration and confinement of farmed animals, whose waste is managed in lagoon sprayfield systems now retrofitted with an anaerobic digester to promote the production and capture of biogas. These techno-political objects illuminate how waste management governance and technologies become central to processes of spatial and economic fixing, power consolidation, and capital accumulation. By challenging the framing of biogas as a renewable energy source, this article argues that FFG is more than just a greenwashing tactic by situating it within critical literature on agro-energy networks to highlight how it can lead to unanticipated factory farm expansion and new sites for accumulation. In North Carolina, this emerging economy unfolds amid a decades-long struggle to phase out the lagoon sprayfield system. Using a political economy framework and drawing from fieldwork and interviews, this article traces how anaerobic digesters entrench the interests of agribusinesses and energy sectors, sustaining polluting and emission-intensive practices while generating new geographies of factory farming, including centralized gas upgrading facilities and pipelines. By critically examining these dynamics, this article underscores the need for interdisciplinary research and coalition-building across environmental justice, energy, and food justice movements to contest the entrenchment of industrial animal agriculture within renewable energy transitions.

Boast, Hannah

doi: 10.1177/25148486251360896pmid: N/A

This article identifies an ‘environmental turn’ in contemporary Palestinian arts and activism. It argues that environmentalism, mediated especially through food, is an increasingly important frame through which Palestinians and their supporters narrate the idea of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle to metropolitan audiences, and through which identification and solidarity are solicited and received. It outlines this turn through an examination of Palestinian visual artist Jumana Manna's documentary Foragers (Al-yad al-khadra, 2022). Manna's film portrays the criminalisation of foraging for za’atar and ‘akkoub in Palestine/Israel and has been widely screened internationally in the wake of Israel's 2023 war on Gaza. Foragers situates the struggle of Palestinian foragers, and in turn, the Palestinian struggle for the land, in relation to key vocabularies of contemporary environmental politics and culture, including food sovereignty, agroecology, indigeneity, posthumanism, and foraging itself. In this way, it activates key metropolitan trends, showing the possibility for an environmental framing to generate commitment from new audiences, while also enabling critiques of the political failings of posthumanist thought. I conclude by noting some limitations of the environmental turn, including the risks of essentialism and of inadvertently reinforcing Zionist narratives by overlooking Palestinian urban life prior to the creation of Israel. Nevertheless, the article argues for the significance of the environmental turn as a distinct and promising direction in a growing international solidarity movement.