Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science (review)

Critical Political Ecology offers an excellent foundation in a new approach to political ecology that addresses a wide variety of environmental policy problems resulting from the separation of science and politics. "Critical" political ecology differs from other forms of political ecology in that it seeks to make the political framing of science more transparent and takes a critical approach to the unquestioned use of science as a neutral backdrop to politics. Intellectual debates in critical theory, critical realism, and critical science all inform critical political ecology.

Tim Forsyth argues that the ecological "laws" underlying much political debate need to be considered part of environmental politics. He challenges orthodox views about the environment such as equilibrium within ecosystems and homeostatic regulation of systems, as well as largescale models like the General Circulation Model for understanding climate change. Many scientific prescriptions based on orthodox explanations have not only been ineffective against environmental problems such as declining soil fertility or socalled desertification, but they have restricted people's livelihoods. Forsyth calls for more locally determined forms of environmental management and greater public participation in the formulation of environmental science, not just access to science. In doing so, studies in critical political ecology can be used to achieve social justice in environmental policy and build on earlier studies in regional political ecology and liberation ecology.

Critical political ecology challenges the notion put forth by liberation ecologists that social movements arising from subaltern voices have been successful in reframing environmental discourse. Instead, Forsyth argues that social movements have been overrated in their ability to act as truly autonomous or even powerful agents. It is the most powerful voices within movements that have been able to attract some attention, but these voices often do not speak to the kinds of environmental risks experienced by the less powerful. Advocacy coalitions rarely reflect anything other than the preexisting institutional bases of knowledge.

Statements about "global" environmental change reflect local framings and practices of wealthier, "advanced" societies. There are hidden politics in discussions of deforestation, desertification, climate change, pollution, and genetically modified organisms. Forsyth exposes how discussions about environmental problems reflect, or fail to reflect, the perspectives of different social groups. For example, during colonial rule, forestry policies regularly failed to incorporate local knowledge about the benefits of controlled burns, and colonial forest policies often were staunchly anti-burning. More recently, international advisory organizations including the International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have described slash-and-burn (shifting) cultivation in wholly negative terms reminiscent of colonial resource managers. Other "neutral" bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been charged with favoring tree planting schemes from which IPCC members would likely profit financially. Perhaps the best known of the hidden politics of science controversies was over how to measure greenhouse gas emissions within tropical deforestation models. The debate took place in the 1990s between the World Resources Institute (WRI) and an Indian non-governmental organization. The WRI report focused on overall population rather than per capita emissions (to the detriment of poorer countries), used Italian rice fields as the standard for wet-rice methane estimates globally, and did not include historic deforestation even though greenhouse gases have lives of many years.

Orthodox approaches to environmental risk focus on reducing biophysical changes brought about by factors considered to be the main causes of risk. Forsyth points out that reliance on biophysical changes as agents of risk can be problematic because such changes may be experienced in different ways by different groups of people rather than being "immutable mobiles" in that the changes are considered problematic by every social group that experiences them. Alternative approaches seek to not only reduce negative biophysical changes but also increase the ability of societies to adapt to changes by reducing the exposure of certain social groups to particular environmental changes.

Another of the author's criticisms of orthodox scientists...