The making of an uneven shore: How coastal management and housing policies shaped racial inequality in asbury park NJ

Recent work in urban geography and political ecology has explored the roots of housing segregation in the United States within governmental polices and racial prejudice within the real estate sector. Additional research has demonstrated how coastal management practices has largely benefited wealthy, white communities. In this paper, I bring together insights from these two strands of research to demonstrate how both coastal management and governmental housing policies combined to shape racial inequalities within and around Asbury Park, New Jersey. By focusing on the period between 1945 and 1970, I show how local, state, and federal actors repeatedly prioritized improving and protecting the beachfront areas of the northern New Jersey shore while promising to eventually address the housing and economic needs of the predominately Black ‘West Side’ neighbourhood of Asbury Park. This paper demonstrates that not only did governmental spending on coastal management largely benefit white suburban homeowners but also came at the expense of promised spending within Black neighbourhoods. The case study has implications for other coastal regions in the United States in which housing segregation persists. As climate change and sea level rise unfold, the history of racial discrimination in coastal development raises important considerations for efforts to address emerging hazards and risks.

Waste in islands: a political ecology perspective on postcolonial metabolism

Islands are tightly connected to globalized material flows, with specific constraints and vulnerabilities. They are not closed metabolic loops of consumption, production, and waste, favorable to the circular economy. Small islands allow the observation of the material outcomes of circulation, from overflowing dumpsites to marine debris washing up on the shore. We argue that islands are key territories for better understanding the Capitalocene, precisely because of the ways in which they are connected to (rather than isolated from) globalized material flows. This article is a comparative geographical analysis of waste realities in three French/formerly French island territories: Ndzuwani (Comoros), Réunion, and New Caledonia. It builds on metabolism analysis and waste studies—in particular waste colonialism—to address the different perspectives that these approaches open up for the study of island territories. The long-term sociohistorical context of each island helps to explain contemporary waste management policies and practices. A material flow analysis makes it possible to sketch out metabolic profiles that show the contribution of prevailing mining and agricultural industries to waste generation. The comparison of current situations regarding household waste discourses and economies shows how these territories are characterized by waste accumulation.

Uphill Battle: Forest Rights and Restoration on Podu Landscapes in Keonjhar, Odisha

In response to the global climate emergency and biodiversity loss, environmental advocates promote ecological restoration of millions of hectares of the world’s degraded forest lands. Lands of high value to restoration are home to nearly 300 million people, including 12% of low- and middle-income country populations. In this article, I respond to calls for greater empirical investigation into the social impacts of forest landscape restoration. Through spatial and ethnographic analysis of forest restoration in Keonjhar, Odisha (India), I show that state-led afforestation efforts contradict a decade of forest tenure reform which sought to decentralize and decolonize forest governance. I explore how state-led efforts ignore (and inhibit) the continued protagonism of forest-dwelling communities in forest regeneration on their customary lands. Weaving accounts from 1992 onwards across six villages and 22 plantations, I characterize state strategies as an ‘uphill battle’: by systematically selecting shifting cultivation (podu) uplands for enclosure and tree plantation, forest agencies contribute to a lose-lose situation where neither forest restoration nor forest rights are realized. Investigating this process from colonial forest policy to the present, I leverage a critical political ecology perspective that supports calls for rights-based restoration.

Beyond subject-making: Conflicting humanisms, class analysis, and the “dark side” of Gramscian political ecology

This article examines conflicting conceptualizations of the human subject in political ecology and geography: Foucauldian views of “subject-making” and Gramscian views of “the person”. While Foucauldian work holds that the more complete exertion of power, the more coherent subject-making, Gramscian historical–geographical perspectives counter that, the more complete exertion of power, the more incoherent persons and their class-based collectivities. Outlining incongruities between these approaches, I argue that the “dark side” of Gramscian political ecology—with its emphasis on incoherence and fracture–allows geographers new nuance in understanding the human subject, although not without challenges to the actual writing of such scholarship.

Monster plants. The vegetal political ecology of Lacandonia schismatica

This paper presents a story about a plant – Lacandonia schismatica  – who subverted disciplinary traditions in botany and reconfigured its geopolitical orders of knowledge. To tell this story, we focus on Lacandonia’s plantiness, Lesley Head and colleagues’s (2012) concept to signify each kind of plant’s unique biophysical characteristics, capacities, and potentialities, and through which they co-produce the world. We trace how L. schismatica intervened in, and (re)configured processes of knowledge production, environmental politics, and identity formation in the Lacandon Forest, Chiapas, Mexico, where it was found. Lacandonia’s plantiness came into being through sudden macromutations; this unexpected but viable plant species participated in reviving an old debate in evolutionary biology: macroevolution versus gradualism. We also analyze how Lacandonia’s plantiness compelled shifts in environmental politics in Chiapas and identity formation in Frontera Corozal, the Chol community where L. schismatica was first located. We conclude with a brief reflection on the implications of vegetal ethics for addressing contemporary environmental crises. 

Reshaping Louisiana’s Coastal Frontier: Managed Retreat as Colonial Decontextualization

This article describes social encounters produced through climate adaptation policy experimentation focused on managed retreat—a framework increasingly used by academics and planning professionals to describe various kinds of planned relocations from areas exposed to environmental hazards. Building on scholarship that examines the political ecology of resettlement and adaptation (Shearer, 2012; Maldonado, 2014; Marino 2015; Whyte et al. 2019), I draw on five years of ethnographic work conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders as their longstanding Tribal resettlement planning was transformed by government investment. I found that Louisiana’s Office of Community Development relied on Tribal-led planning to garner federal funds, used those funds to transform the resettlement, and used planning process and documentation to erase the rationales behind and aims of Indigenous-led planning—a process I liken to Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)’s notion of decontextualization as a colonial strategy of erasure. I contend that state decontextualization of the resettlement from a struggle for cultural survival to managed retreat policy experimentation reproduced a frontier dynamic whereby colonial and capitalist coastal futures are rested upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lifeways, institutions, and self-determination. Constructions of risk and community and timelines published in planning documentation were particularly important state tools used for decontextualization. Ethnographic accounts of such processes can inform future resistance to eco-colonial schemes within climate adaptation.

The Political Ecology of the Decentralized Water Management in Zimbabwe

The chapter assesses the notion of local scale and decentralization that emanates from the IWRM principles. Evaluation of the benefits of decentralization was done through the political ecology lens that critically examines fairness and power struggles across spaces. Sanyati catchment was used to draw empirical evidence in light of the theoretical expectations of decentralization towards catchment water security. Qualitative approach was used to collect data. Interviews were the main sources of data collection. The findings showed that decentralization has failed to produce the desired results compared to what is assumed in the dominant narrative that highly esteems the decentralization management approach. The chapter showed that what brings results are not local scales and suggests that probably fair and transparent resource distribution and allocation at any scale may bring about water protection that does not trigger the tragedy of the commons.