The cultural and political ecology of reed-cane craftsmanship in Lake Eber

The current study examines the interactions of people living around Lake Eber with the lake and their use of it from a cultural and political ecology perspective. In this context, fieldworks were carried out in different periods of 2018-2019. At the same time, observations and interviews covering the research subject were carried out. In the study, it was determined that aquatic plants such as common reed, reedmace, lakeshore bulrush and common cattail are cut from the Lake Eber and are used as building materials and in the production of rush mats, beach umbrellas, prayer rugs, reed pillows, floor mats (straw) and tomb mats. On the other hand, it was observed that the interest in reed-cane craftsmanship and the production of reed-cane products is decreasing every year. This is caused by drought, pollution and eutrophication processes seen in the lake. Based on the results of the study, we suggest that more field studies should be done to examine the factors that threaten the lake ecology and projects should be conducted to improve the situation in the lake.

Scalar fixes of environmental management in Java, Indonesia

This paper analyses the emergence and fixing of scales in struggles over environmental issues. Using the example of watershed and coastal management in Java, we show how political framings of environmental matters and struggles over resources are linked to scalar regimes. We conceptualise these regimes as scalar fixes in which scales of intervention and scales of knowledge production are bound by environmental narratives and social–ecological processes to produce lock-in effects for prolonged periods of time. In our empirical case, particular scales were central in providing ‘problem closure’ and legitimising interventions while precluding other problematisations. Sedimentation of the Segara Anakan lagoon, first desired to support conversion into a rice bowl, was later framed as threat caused by upland peasants. The lock-in of interpretive framings and scales of observation and intervention, which was linked to politics of forest control, impeded debate on the various causes of sedimentation. With our newly defined concept of scalar fixes we contribute to understanding environmental narratives and related knowledge, providing a complement to the micro-perspectives on the stabilisation of knowledge claims currently discussed in cultural and political ecology. In doing so, we offer an approach to scalar analysis of environmental conflicts linking environmental narratives with the material social–ecological processes enrolled.

Cultural Ecology

Cultural ecology in the 1990s was a highly productive and rapidly growing specialty group within geography. The group’s scholarship has contributed to a number of core themes and concepts in geography and in related fields within the social and biogeophysical sciences and humanities (Butzer 1989, 1990a; Porter 1991; B. L. Turner 1997a; Zimmerer 1996c). This review evaluates the central research contributions—findings, themes, concepts, methods—of North American geographical cultural ecology over this decade (1990–9). The evaluation is based on the clustering of the contributions of the 1990s into eight main areas: long-term cultural ecology; resource management; local knowledge; pastoralism; environmental politics; protected areas; gender ecology; and environmental discourses (Figs 8.1 and 8.2). Notable accomplishments and characteristic approaches are reviewed in each area. Emphasis is placed on the continued evolution of the common ground of cultural ecology and its most prominent offshoot, political ecology. A nature-culture or nature-society core is central to advances of the 1990s. This core is made up of interacting dialectical processes of culture-and-consciousness and domestic-and-political economy, on the one hand, and non-human nature, on the other hand (Zimmerer and Young 1998: 5). Increased awareness of this recursive interaction has led to a historical perspective that is common to much work in cultural and political ecology during the past decade (Figs 8.1 and 8.2). Culture and society in environmental interactions are considered with new importance granted to the multiple forms and contingencies of spatial scale, from the local to the global, as well as varied temporal frames. Culture and society are conceptualized in new ways while, at the same time, the biogeophysical environments themselves are thought of as increasingly complex and less spatially and temporally predictable than was previously presumed.