Foundational Concepts: The Politics of Nature

Struggles over resources are deeply distributional: who owns what, who does what, who gets what, what do they do with it? Struggles over resources are also struggles over meanings and visions of the future. Is nature a commodity and resource, a hazard and threat, a source of goods and services, an Eden, artifice, or wasteland? To understand human-environmental relations we need to think not only about questions of power and distribution but about the stories we tell and are told. This week we will begin to engage some of these concerns by exploring in very broad terms something we might call 'the politics' of nature.

In your readings this week, you will engage this theme by exploring some of the different ways the environment has been framed and conceptualized as an object of concern within human-environment geography and mainstream environmentalism. What are some of the solutions put forward? What do these solutions tell us about how the problem has been diagnosed? How might we be able to better understand the root causes of change and transformation? While we will think about these themes throughout the whole semester, the readings for this week provide a helpful start. Magdoff and Foster supplement the material covered in your textbook by exploring the complex relationship between capitalism and environmentalism.