Katherine Albert. Department of Geography, Rutgers University. 54 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854. kalbert@rci.rutgers.edu. The Political Ecology of Regional Change in the ‘Acadian Forest’.

Critical political ecology has rejected prevailing geographical constructions, particularly the "Third World" versus "First World" binary, while inquiring into the validity of the bases for these persistent spatial ideals. This mediating practice has resulted in a call to revisit the region as a scale of analysis in geographic scholarship. The so-called First World political ecology literature has featured a special emphasis on the regional approach and the promises it holds for distinguishing and bounding political ecology; for achieving the multi-scale analytical ideals of the political ecological perspective; and for providing an alternative to various problematic epistemological and spatial confrontations characteristic of this approach. Utilizing case studies within a cross-border regional campaign in northern New England and eastern Canada to illustrate, this paper explores the evidence for the political ecological claim of ‘distinctiveness among regions’ in spite of commonalities between non-industrial and industrialized contexts (see McCarthy, 1998, 2000, forthcoming; Walker, 2003). At the same time, I argue that unanswered questions regarding the politics of designating and describing regions encompass dangers for reproducing limiting, and potentially unjust, geographical fictions.

British and American traditions of regional geography have transformed over time from a study of areal differentiation based on broad generalizations about space and an assumption of some form of homogeneity to an interpretation of the region as a ‘scale of experience’ marked by local expressions of global processes; instances of ‘sense of place’ among different societies; and sites for the production of social relations. The shift, in addition to the gradual incorporation of non-anglo conceptions of regional geography, results in confusion about the empirical qualities of regions. This paper addresses some of these questions, for example: What parameters justify the designation of space as a region? How can regions defined by different sets of features, characteristics and themes be analytically reconciled? Are justice concerns regionally contingent? More attention to the regional concept and its deployment can clarify the strategic uses of regional constructs by some actors as well as the political dimensions of defining regions in terms of the discursive struggles that privilege some conceptions of space, territory and rights over others.

Alec Brownlow, Temple University, Dept. of Geography & Urban Studies, 309 Gladfelter Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19122. alecb@temple.edu. (215) 204-1374. Fragmented Forest, Fragmented City: Environmental Change and Vulnerability in Philadelphia.

Processes of vulnerability to environmental change have been successfully demonstrated in many Third World contexts. Considerably less attention has been given to processes and patterns of urban environmental change in the developed world, the political significance of these changes to marginalized social groups, and the ability or inability of different communities to respond effectively to these changes. This paper explores the processes and patterns of urban forest decline and vulnerability in Philadelphia. First, I examine the relationships between economic and industrial decline and forest decay. Next, I suggest how patterns of forest decline intersect with historical patterns of racial separation in a manner that disproportionately impacts Philadelphia’s black neighborhoods. I suggest that the subsequent avoidance of these public open areas by the City’s black residents has significant implications for the management and political meaning of urban public space. Finally, I offer recent actions taken by local residents — especially women — to regain control over the meaning of and access to a vital urban resource. The insights derived from the application of traditional political ecology principles of marginalization, access, vulnerability, and resistance to the management and condition of distinctly urban resources facilitate the development of an urban political ecology.

Scott Carlin, Southampton College of Long Island University, Southampton, NY 11968. scott.carlin@liu.edu. (631) 287-8238. Biochemical Intimacy: Breast Cancer Politics' Redefinition of Science.

Combatting the toxic landscape of our petrochemical culture has been a mainstay of the environmental movement for the past generation. More recently, the breast cancer movement has advanced a feminist biochemical critique against NCI and the American Cancer Society. Their first level of analysis is that these organizations have failed to adequately address the environmental causes of breast cancer and the government's current strategies have failed to stem the continued rise in U.S. breast cancer incidence rates. At a second level, they critique systemic biases that fail to constrain corporate predatory health practices, emphasizing the need for new precautionary regulatory structures. While still nascent, the most interesting and potentially revolutionary aspect of this movement is its aspirations to construct an epistemology that connects science and love. Since Rachel Carson spoke of the intimacy with which we live with modern chemicals, a new generation of writers and activists has expanded upon her work to explore why notions of love and intimacy are critical to the movement's development. The movement, in calling for a science that affirms life and love, is trying to redefine the meaning of commodities and our relationship to the natural world. This emerging feminist-environmental health movement offers powerful insights into understanding the emerging ecological fault lines of the 21st century.

Deborah Che, Geography Department, Western Michigan University. deborah.che@wmich.edu. (269) 387-0604. Ecotourism Place Production, Timber Harvesting, and "Local Customs and Culture" in Northwestern Pennsylvania.

Ecotourism, an economic diversification tool most commonly applied in the Third World as a means to protect ecosystems, preserve local cultures, and spur economic development, has at times encouraged community-based economic development and restricted local productivist uses. This paper examines ecotourism development in First World, Forest County, Pennsylvania that would encourage amenity-based, locally-driven economic development as well as maintain local timber harvesting. Ecotourism development is viewed by local leaders as a means to stimulate growth in the Pennsylvania county with the highest unemployment rate; to preserve "local culture and customs" which are tied to timber extraction; and to justify continued access to the Allegheny National Forest, which makes up 42% of the county’s land base, and to its valuable, successional hardwoods. While ecotourism has traditionally focused on "undisturbed," protected lands, it may also take place in landscapes of past resource extraction (i.e. reclaimed quarries, logging heritage sites) and those in which current agricultural practices maintain cherished cultural landscapes. The latter are ecotourism "place products" with clear ecological, cultural, and geographical identities. It is argued in this paper that ecotourism involving past, current, and future resource extraction that local culture and customs are based upon and that assists in reproducing a unique forest, may also be considered an appropriate ecotourism place product.

Marla R. Emery, USDA Forest Service, Northeastern Research Station, Burlington, VT 05401-0968. marla.emery@uvm.edu. The Persistence of Subsistence in U.S. Forests.

Hunting, fishing, and gathering were the first (re)productive human-environment interactions in North America. They continue to play important roles in material and cultural survival in the twenty-first century United States. A rich body of descriptive studies documents subsistence activities in rural and urban areas by people from a variety of ethnic groups. We draw on this literature to examine the persistence of subsistence in U.S. forests.

Subsistence involves not only harvest of natural resources, but also a host of pre-harvest, harvest, processing, distribution, and exchange activities that strengthen and maintain kinship and social bonds, community and cultural identity. These activities take place within mixed economies, through which households combine income from the formal and informal spheres. Land tenure regimes both support and constrain subsistence practices. However, access to U.S. forests for subsistence seems is declining. We conclude that although subsistence supplies vital survival resources, to view it solely as a manifestation of poverty or a response to the capitalist world system is to accept the normative assumptions of the modernist project. Empirical evidence suggests, and subsistence practitioners insist, that it is an enduring human-environment interaction that creates wealth independently of, if dynamically articulated with, currently dominant economic and cultural forms.

Julie Guthman. University of California-Santa Cruz. 2515 Derby Street, Berkeley, CA 94705. jguthman@uclink4.berkeley.edu. (510) 549-2297. The Value of Land in the Land of Value: Organic Farming Meets California Exceptionalism.

Many of the seminal works in political ecology addressed the ecological effects of the uneven and disarticulated commercialization of peasant economies. Some (namely, Watts and Blaikie) specifically theorized a reproduction squeeze among economically marginal peasant farmers, who, when faced with falling commodity prices, were effectively forced to degrade their resource base, a process which only served to further their marginality (and perhaps reduce the value of the land they farmed). Periodically, California growers have also faced squeezes of sorts, but here in the most capitalistic, commercial, and high value agrarian economy in the world. In further contrast to that depicted in the political ecology literature, these squeezes have come as a result of the "over"-exploitation of labor and nature, profits from which were then capitalized into land values. In California, that is, squeezes have had little to do with early processes of commercialization (of land and crops), but, to the contrary, the logical extension of land becoming fictitious capital.

Since the 1980s, the squeeze of land values and farm prices has been a major cause for growth in the California organic sector. Growers are not only seeking higher value cropping regimes in the wake of the farm crisis, but also are responding to opportunities and constraints put up by commercial real estate development. What, then, does this dynamic suggest about the prospects for an ecological agriculture ? And what does it mean for addressing the social justice issues that have continued to dog the organic farming movement? If the nature of contemporary land markets constrains the ability to farm in a kinder and gentler fashion, the ecological and social problems of industrialized agriculture are unlikely to solved by an agrarian populist agenda which likens the so-called small farmer to Third World peasants.

Gail Hollander, Department of International Relations, 6600 SW 70^th Avenue, Florida International University, Miami, Florida 33143, Miami, Florida 33199. (305) 348-2593. hollande@fiu.edu. The Political Ecology of Everglades Transformation: Sugar Agroindustry and the Cuban Revolution.

This paper analyzes the profound transformation in the political ecology of the Florida Everglades in the decades following the Castro Revolution in Cuba. Since the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the US had regarded Cuba–the source of over half its supply–as its "sugar bowl." When, in 1960, President Eisenhower suspended trade with Cuba, Florida emerged as one of the significant "winners" in the fight to secure a larger share of the controlled US sugar market. My focus on this period reveals two important insights into the political ecology of the current Everglades restoration project. First, that the historic rupture of existing US-Cuba relations significantly expanded the geographic extent of industrial agriculture and restructured the social relations of production in place. I shed light on the national and international politics of this period to show how the industry was able to expand five-fold within five years, how it was able to secure an off-shore labor force, and how the social relations of plantation production were inscribed in the regional landscape. Second, that understanding the historic relationship between industrial sugar production in Florida and Cuba is key to explaining the contested claims about the role of agriculture in the destruction and restoration of the Everglades. The area subject to post-revolution expansion is now the focus of the largest ecological restoration ever attempted and the social relations of plantation production established during that period have provided the basis for mobilizing local resistance to restoration.

James P. McCarthy, Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University, 302 Walker Building, University Park, PA 16802-5011. jpm23@psu.edu. (814) 863-1782. Community-based Forestry as Exotic Policy.

Recent work in political ecology has asked whether and how its theories and methods, developed in Third World contexts, can be appropriately applied to First World settings. This paper examines a major empirical continuity between First and Third world political ecologies: the transference of community-based forestry (CBF) approaches from Third to First world settings. Specifically, it examines the introduction and rapid growth of CBF in the United States and Canada over the past two decades. This trend has been striking for several reasons, examined in detail in the paper.

First, it reverses the standard direction of policy flows in the conservation arena. Second, the Ford Foundation and a few other NGOs were critical in this transference, pointing to the bridging role of organizations that seek to affect governance in both First and Third settings and affirming the importance of political ecologists looking "up" as well as "in." Third, CBF has proved as protean in North America as elsewhere. Institutionalized largely under and by the Clinton administration for ostensibly progressive purposes, it has been wholeheartedly embraced by the Bush administration, which has used CBF discourse as a populist cover for its neoliberal environmental agenda. Meanwhile, Canada’s more corporatist model of forest governance has permitted it to go much further than the U.S. in implementing CBF and changing tenure categories. Fourth, many local and regional CBF actors in North America appear unaware of CBF’s roots in developing countries and unfamiliar with critical research on the subject. Yet the differences between First and Third world contexts are extremely important. Uprooted policy can be a dangerous exotic, and it is ironic that CBF, intended to counter universalized models of centralized, top-down conservation, is in danger of becoming itself a standardized approach.

Sandy Rikoon, Department of Rural Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia, Sociology Building, Columbia, Missouri 65211. RikoonSandy@missouri.edu. (573) 882-0861. Wild Horses and the Political Ecology of Nature Restoration in the Missouri Ozarks.

In 1991, the National Park Service announced their intention to remove a band of 25-30 wild horses from the Ozark National Scenic Riversway in southern Missouri. Residents living inside and nearby the protected area immediately protested the agency’s decision, and formed a local NGO to organize civil, legal, and legislative resistance.

As a case study, the wild horse controversy reveals the relevance of political ecology analyses in developed countries as actors with differential social, economic, and political power compete over definitions and control of nature. In part, the case revolves around contested social constructions of the horses themselves. To government scientists and managers, the animals represented a feral and exotic species with no legitimate place in agency-mandated ecosystem management and restoration scenarios. To many local residents, the horses had critical historical and cultural importance as icons of regional identity, history and personal experience, and as core symbols of communities increasingly marginalized by postindustrial and environmental movements.

The controversy extended far beyond local arenas and actors, however. It became an issue contested in regional and federal courts and, eventually, as part of the Contract for America introduced by a Republican Congress in 1996. In its political-ecological dimensions, the issue reveals how local conflicts reveal wider structural divides, and thus speaks to the issue of which social stakeholders shall have the power to impose their particular visions of the landscape.

Paul Robbins, Department of Geography, 1132 Derby Hall, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210. probbins@geography.ohio-state.edu. (614) 292-6001. Barstool Biologists Meet Forest Intellectuals: Local Knowledge and the Politics of Uncertainty in Montana and Rajasthan.

"Forest intellectuals," the critical human ecologists of underdevelopment, have established a well-known record in celebrating the ecological knowledges of subsistence communities in the contested wildlife conservation zones of the world. At the same time, however, similar battles are being fought over science, uncertainty, and wild animals in the American west, with far less and attention to local epistemologies. Often dismissed as "barstool biology," the ecological knowledges and practices of hunters, outfitters, and ranchers in the Northern Yellowstone ecosystem have striking parallels to those of conservation biologists, ecologists, and climate researchers, while diverging in surprising areas, especially regarding issues of uncertainty. Like their counterparts in the conservation zones of India, their struggles with conservation authorities revolve around what is not reliably known about ecological conditions and change. This paper reviews recent research amongst local resource users and researchers in Montana, comparing the results to those from ongoing research in rural Rajasthan, India. By rendering the question of local knowledge empirical, rather than hoping to "read it off" political affiliation and education, and by uniting research "near" with that "far away," a clearer picture of power, knowledge, and state conservation emerges from the divisive politics surrounding America's oldest national park.

Kevin St. Martin, Department of Geography, Rutgers University, 54 Joyce Kilmer Drive, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045. kstmarti@rci.rutgers.edu. (732) 445-7394. Locating Community and Commons in the Industrialized Fisheries of the Northeast.

The discourse of fisheries science and management as applied to the industrialized fisheries of the "North" invariably reduces fishing communities to the interests of individual boat owners. Through a variety of rhetorical, scientific, cartographic, and regulatory practices, fishing communities are disconnected from the commons upon which they depend. Rather than active agents, they become the context/residence of the essential subject of fishing, the "fisherman." The mutually constitutive nature of fishing communities and their commons is, however, becoming more clearly seen by a number of researchers, and understanding the mechanisms of that mutual constitution may suggest new forms of management conducive "community economies" even within the industrialized fisheries of the "North." This paper reports on an ongoing research project focused on the relationship between community and commons in terms of the local environmental knowledge of fishers. Using participatory research methods, the project seeks to facilitate the discussion and imagination of a viable future for fishing communities in the industrialized "center" and to link those communities to their commons via the inscription of local knowledge in the form of a social atlas of fisheries in New England.

Joel Wainwright, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, 414 Social Sciences, Minneapolis, MN 55455. wain0012@umn.edu. The Postcolonial Politics of Highway 55 in Minneapolis.

This paper addresses two lacunae within the literature on political ecology: the limited engagement with postcolonial theory and the relative absence of research on the politics of roads. This paper fills these gaps through an analysis of a recent conflict over the rerouting of Highway 55 in Minneapolis. During the course of a three-year struggle over the project, claims about the historical, cultural, and ecological importance of the space where the highway would pass were raised by an ephemeral coalition of environmentalists, homeowners, and the Mendota Dakota indigenous community. This paper offers a postcolonial reading of two of the key texts that evaluate the claims at the center of the conflict over the reroute. First, I consider the Cultural Resource Assessment (1999) that was prepared by a team of scientists to respond to the claims made by the anti-reroute coalition. In particular, I examine the way scientific methods and narratives framed the space and scale in which the importance of the site was determined. Second, I offer a critical reading of Our way or the highway: Inside the Minnehaha Free State (2002), a history of the conflict that doubles as a sympathetic ethnography of the anti-reroute coalition. Reading these texts through the lens of a postcolonial political ecology yields two novel arguments: (1) science often works to produce the effect of state territorialization, or the iterative making of the space of the state, by placing cultural and ecological phenomena ‘within’ the space of the state; (2) the use of ethnography to study environmental social movements is productive, but also deeply problematic. Without careful consideration of the ways that knowledge is constituted, one runs the risk of recapitulating colonial narratives about nature and culture.

Peter A. Walker, Department of Geography, 107 Condon Hall, 1251 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-1251. pwalker@uoregon.oregon.edu. Reconsidering ‘Regional’ Political Ecologies: Toward a Political Ecology of the Rural American West.

Political ecology has recently seen a long-overdue movement toward studies of environmental conflicts in advanced capitalist societies, far from the rural African, Latin American, and Asian societies that constitute the great majority of studies in the field. This shift has raised questions about the commonalities and differences between ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ political ecologies — questions that present broader challenges and opportunities for the field. The question of commonalities and difference in ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ political ecologies is hemispheric; recent research in political ecology consists primarily of local-scale studies, leaving the field poorly positioned to address such broad-scale comparative questions. Appropriately, local political ecology studies challenge the stability of the ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ as meaningful geographic frames posed in these questions; but in dismantling these frames without suggesting alternatives for broader-scale analysis there is danger of moving political ecology toward even greater emphasis on specificity and difference and pushing consideration of broader-scale processes farther into the background. This is a serious challenge in a field already criticized for sprawling incoherence. This article argues that one response to these challenges is to reconsider the concept of ‘regional’ political ecologies. Regional approaches can retain the greatest strengths of recent political ecology in revealing the importance of local-scale social dynamics while situating these dynamics within broader scales of regional (and global) processes — providing greater coherence while avoiding such problematic frames as the ‘first’ and ‘third’ world. To illustrate, a brief case study and discussion are presented that consider a regional political ecology of the rural American West.