By: Natalie Peyronnin Snider

Many of us are familiar with Political Science--"the social science discipline that deals with systems of government and the analysis of political activity and political behavior,"1--but have you heard of a discipline called Political Ecology? Researchers in the field of political ecology study "how differential power relations drive ecological issues, as well as the ecological issues that exist within politics."2

We were glad to welcome incoming University of Maryland Department of Anthropology Professor Dr. Yancey Orr as a guest lecturer to teach us all about how sociopolitical issues have shaped our relationship with the environment. As a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Orr has researched how transitional and non-western societies have engaged and understood the world around them through environmental knowledge, ethno-science and social theory.

A Country of Greats!
Although the field of political ecology is only about 40 years old3, the concepts can be applied to communities throughout history. Dr. Orr took us on a journey back in time through U.S. history, to the period before European settlement when Native American societies lived peacefully within their environment. We looked at three regions of the U.S. and how the societies- and thus the politics- are shaped by natural resources in the environment.

1. The Great Basin: Located in the valley between the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains on the west and Wasatch Mountains on the east, this region is known for low packages of natural resources. Tribes, like the Paiute Indians, form tight, small family bands that forage for plants and small animals that are adapted to the sparse environment.

2. The Great Lakes: Tribes in the plains have access to more resources (medium packages) and water than the Great Basin tribes, and thus form patrilineal bands. These bands include a collection of families, descended from the same male ancestor, that hunt larger prey such as deer together.

3. The Great Plains: The presence of large packages of resources, such as buffalo, led the Great Plains tribes to form composite bands that are made up of multiple patrilineal bands with a chief. Hunting in composite bands increased the success of tracking and killing buffalo.

Since the first people settled in the Americas, we can see how the environment and the resources available to them dictated the evolution of their sociopolitical structures.

Rules for Balancing Powers
Another key aspect of the environment that affects the political landscape of a community is the continuity and openness of the landscape. In Robert Netting's Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community4, a small, largely isolated, agrarian community demonstrates how an enclosed society can remain in balance with the environment over many decades without any Malthusian checks (i.e. disease or starvation that occur after the population has grown past their resources).5 Women around the world have been documented having over 50 babies and men fathering over 1,200 offspring, thus the growth of the human population can quickly outgrow the environment with no other external control mechanisms. This unrestrained population growth can lead to substantial environmental degradation. So, how is this Alps community of Torbel maintaining the political balance with the environment? They maintain balance by following sociopolitical rules that become ingrained into society such as:

• Marriage practices: both men and women would not marry until they had enough land to support a family
• Childbirth: older women had fewer children, thus waiting to get married resulted in fewer children
• Shifting wealth: the wealthy could afford to get married early and have more children, thereby splitting landholdings among more individuals and becoming poorer over time, while poorer families marry later, have less children and grow richer over time.

In the modern world, these isolated communities no longer exist, except within contrived experiments like Biosphere 2 (not to be confused with Pauly Shore's Bio-Dome).

Capitalizing on the Environment
The lack of balance between capitalism and the environment in today's society has led to a growing number of conflicts between sociopolitical practices and the environment. This leads to a high level of discourse fueled by deeply-held values about the economy and the environment. For example, in Southwest U.S., there is a battle over land-use between ranchers, developers of urban sprawl and environmentalists/naturalists who want to preserve the land for wildlife and recreation.6 In our world's oceans, there is a discourse over the industrialization of fishing that has led to large-scale overfishing.7 The various interested parties are ingrained in their values which range from maximizing profits, providing a livelihood for their families, or protecting the defenseless environment.

The Discourse of Climate Change and the Economy
The conflicts between the economy and environment will only increase as the impacts of climate change are felt worldwide. The degradation of the climatic environment has led to an increase in global warming that will cause drastic changes to the well-being of the environment and society. The politicized discourse of climate change is steeped in the economic impact of addressing the causes and impacts. Most estimates show a decrease in global gross domestic product (GDP) due to climate change.8

Some believe that the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions are too high, whereas others strongly believe that the long-term costs to the economy to address impacts such as sea level rise, health problems, and droughts will be higher than any economic cost to curb emissions today. The question we must ask ourselves is who bears this cost and when?

References
1. Wikipedia. (2018, September 10 last updated). Political Science.
2. Political Ecologies of East Asia. (No date). What is Political Ecology?
3. Wikipedia. (2018, September 2 last updated). Political Ecology.
4. Netting, Robert. (1981). Balancing on an Alp: Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community. Cambridge University Press, London, England. 278 p.
5. Malthus, Thomas. (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population. Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project (1998).
6. Brogden, Mette J. and James B. Greenberg. (2004). The Fight for the West: A political ecology of land-use conflicts in Arizona. Excerpt from Political Ecology across Spaces, Scales and Social Groups. Rutgers University Press. pp.41-60.
7. Mansfield, Becky. (2011). 'Modern' industrial fisheries and the crisis of overfishing. Excerpt from Global Political Ecology. Routledge Publishing. pp. 84-99.
8. Burke, Marshall, Solomon M. Hsiang and Edward Miguel. (2015). Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production. Nature 527, pp.235-239.