The 15 years between the first edition of this book and the one you now hold in your hands have continued to make the relevance and urgency of political ecology a difficult thing to gauge. On the one hand, the field has grown so dramatically, and in so many directions, that it is even easier to say of this contested enterprise that it has become too diffuse to matter. References to “political ecology” in the Web of Science database have more than tripled in the intervening years but now reflect a huge range of approaches. One might think that political ecology has finally “jumped the shark,” a phrase from the television industry suggesting the creative end of a franchise. I am sympathetic with those who may hurriedly wish to get on with the “next thing” as well as those who are still not sure what political ecology is, let alone whether it has a purchase on a special kind of explanation.

But the field is also marked by its ubiquity and vibrancy. Books with titles like Ecologies and Politics of Health (King and Crews 2013) and Land Change Science, Political Ecology, and Sustainability (Brannstrom and Vadjunec 2013) have shown how interest in political ecology has transgressed diverse disciplinary boundaries. A number of international political ecology networks, like ENTITLE and POLLEN, have emerged in the last several years, moreover, leaving the parochial Anglo‐American tradition behind and showing the energy of political ecology in Athens, Barcelona, Rome, Bangalore, Taipei, and beyond. Political ecology has fledged from the nest, for sure, and is now beyond any call to return to a marginal place in the footnotes. We are all political ecologists now, I suppose.

And if political ecology is no longer cutting‐edge, the world continues to be at the sharp end of vast entangled political ecologies. The United States has vowed retreat from international accords on climate change even while global consensus has connected the open sea lanes across the Northwest Passage with disastrous heat waves across Europe, increasingly uneven Asian monsoons, and cataclysmic calving Antarctic ice. Areas gazetted for conservation mushroomed in recent years without consensus on how to deal with the displacement of people and loss of productive resources this entails. Mining concessions have ballooned on indigenous land. Hazardous waste has perfected the habit of seeking out the world’s most marginal communities.

And Hurricane Katrina in 2005 came closer than perhaps any other single event of recent memory to tear back the veil on the structural inequalities of race and class in the United States, which are physically inscribed into the seascape, implicated in the ecological transformation of the coastal zone, and inseparably linked to the technologies that govern the flow of water through the Mississippi delta. That event came closer, but clearly not yet close enough. There is simply no way to pass through that obscure barrier without continuing to research, produce videos on, analyze, ecologically track, and mount soap boxes to shout about the swirling political and economic relationships that dialectically produce levees and slums, soils and dams, tourism and hunger, energy and climate, and people and things. I am forced to conclude that there is as much or more need for political ecology now than decades ago when my journey began, and the revised version of the book you have in your hands is the result.

Those familiar with the first and second editions will notice changes in the book, though perhaps fewer than between my last two efforts; I maintain a judicious attempt not to throw in the “kitchen sink.” I have attempted to update examples but many cases continue to draw on canon from the field. Many boxes have been added, including key recent works, but necessarily at the expense of some important older work. I have also made judicious cuts in the otherwise long‐winded prose, to the tune of 1 in 10 words or so. For those who miss my exegeses on the merits of cultural ecology, the 2004 edition is out there in circulation.

Most important, I have continued to stress, despite the frustration of some readers, that political ecology is not a method or a theory, nor even a single perspective. Rather, I maintain that political ecology is an urgent kind of argument or text (or book, or mural, or movie, or blog) that examines winners and losers, is narrated using dialectics, begins and/or ends in a contradiction, and surveys both the “objective” status of nature as well as stories about the status of nature.

In light of this last revelation, I have clung to the insistence that one might be a political ecologist only in the same way those who consistently and exclusively write gothic novels might be considered gothic novelists. But this should not encourage any of us – whoever we are or whatever we do – to shy away from researching, reading, writing, and witnessing political ecologies, whenever or wherever it is scientifically enlightening or socially and environmentally urgent. One need not be a political ecologist to mobilize the resources, or learn from the insights, of political ecology. I hope more non‐political ecologists continue to read and write political ecology; indeed, this may be our only hope.

Writing requires a rare space that is comfortable and intellectually challenging. I've been lucky to have had three such spaces. Thanks to Ohio State University Geography and Larry Brown for being my first intellectual home and to University of Arizona Geography and Development, John Paul Jones, and Sallie Marston for being my second. My last seven years as Director and Dean of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin‐Madison have been perhaps the most transformative for me, since I have been surrounded by so many pragmatists and innovators as to make my ambivalent commitments to problem‐solving more apparent, at least to me.

All of the researchers I approached in the preparation of this volume and the previous editions were invaluable, including Arun Agrawal, Tom Bassett, Fikret Berkes, Betsy Beymer‐Farris, Piers Blaikie, Harold Brookfield, Judith Carney, David Correia, Diana Davis, Susanne Freidberg, Larry Grossman, Julie Guthman, Suzanna Hecht, Christian Kull, Rebecca Lave, Tania Li, Nancy Peluso, Dianne Rocheleau, Joel Wainwright, and Michael Watts. I am also in debt to my many colleagues around the world, who answered e‐mails, read drafts, and explained complex problems so that even I could grasp them, including Simon Batterbury, Tor Benjaminsen, Denis Gautier, Tony Bebbington, Susanna Hecht, Noriko Ishiyama, Brad Jokisch, Thembela Kepe, Rheyna Laney, Becky Mansfield, Brian Marks, Kendra McSweeney, Ian Scoones, and Randy Wilson. My dawning recognition of the revolutionary power of international political ecology is owed to many, but these certainly include Giorgos Kallis and Christos Zagrofos. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus edited some of my most confusing text and restored to me some critical part of my modernity.

The several years of my own fieldwork described throughout the book would have been impossible without the help of David Bennett, Anil Chaangani, Ashwini Chhatre, Jody Emel, Susan Gilbertz, Douglas Johnson, David McGinnis, Krithi Karanth, Ilse Kohler‐Rollefson, Komal Kothari, S. M. Mohnot, Julie Sharp, and Hanwant Singh Rathore. Thanks also to Justin Vaughan and Ben Thatcher at Wiley‐Blackwell. The work and thinking of all members of my graduate “collective” are present throughout this volume, but most notably Trevor Birkenholtz, Kristina Bishop, Heidi Hausermann, Justyn Huckleberry, Stephen Martin, Katharine Meehan, Jennifer Rice, Vaishnavi Tripurenini, and Mayank Vikas. Thanks to Bob Toborg, Frank Forgione, and Dave Feroe for being the intended audience of the volume. The Department of Geography at the University of Denver and the Kulturstudier program in Ghana are wonderful institutions and were generous with collegiality and space. Thanks there to Andy Goetz, Matthew Taylor, Siri Fagerheim, and Liv Adams. Finally, and very likely against their wishes, Billie Lee Turner II and Andrew “Pete” Vayda remain inspirations for this work. China Mieville gave me a lesson on utopia and dystopia during our productive encounter in 2014 which I will never forget.

Most importantly, throughout the whole process Sarah Moore continued to insist not only that another edition of the book would eventually get finished (despite my strong doubts) but that at least one person would eventually agree to read it; her comments on and support for my writing have saved a great many confusions and embarrassments over the years (the word “penultimate” means next to last, for example; who knew?). Her knowledge of the politics of waste and consumption was invaluable and her contributions are evident throughout this book.

Having said this, the interpretations and perspectives contained within the text are my own, and I certainly can’t lay blame at anyone else’s feet for controversial, confusing, or bizarre claims. The reader will have to address any complaints to me.

When Hurricane Harvey made landfall in August of 2017, only 1 of an astonishing 17 named storms in North America that season, its winds ripped the top off the shining veneer that hides so many contradictions in the heart of the city of Houston. Waters rose throughout that city as the storm squatted overhead, raining between 30 and 60 inches (75 and 150 cm) down on the overdeveloped streets of metropolis. Four hundred square miles were underwater at the height of the flooding, which was nearly 10 feet (3 meters) deep in many locations. The storm spawned several tornadoes, which plowed through suburban neighborhoods. Power failed across the grid and several sites containing toxic hazards spilled their stored waste into the flooded streets where people waded, swam, and paddled their way to safety.

The ecology of this storm is political in so many ways.

First, the most likely chain of causation makes a tidy circle of political irony. Warm gulf waters fed the intensity of the storm and its seemingly endless supply of rain. These waters, in turn, have experienced elevated temperatures for some time – the average water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico during the period between August and October has risen between 1 and 2 °F (1.1 C) over the last 40 years. These waters have warmed in response to overall regional warming, especially throughout the summer, and the period leading into storm season. That warmth has in turn been driven by the increased loading of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which are predominantly released by the global petrochemical‐based economy. That economy built Houston, of course, which is home to more than 5,000 energy‐related firms. The disaster in Houston is a tragic loop.

This is made all the more complicated by the fact that many of the foremost community and political leaders in the region either deny trends in climate change, or accept them with the caveat that they are “natural.” The events of Hurricane Harvey are as much about the political impacts of storytelling – claims about nature – as they are the physical impacts of a storm.

At a more local level, moreover, the storm's effects were exacerbated (or perhaps even caused) by the history of urban development. A vast carpet of impervious pavement covers the city, disallowing the torrential rainwater from seeping into the wetlands, grasslands, and streams that the city displaced over decades. That blanket of cement was encouraged to cover the land by a local political system that doggedly eschewed basic instruments of urban planning, including zoning codes that might keep flood‐resilient land covers on the ground. Deeply vested development interests keep these lax laws unchanged, since reforms might be costly or inconvenient. Harvey's flooding is by no means a natural disaster; it is precisely an unnatural one.

There is a deeper and even more problematic politics to the ecology of the 2017 Hurricane season, however. The spectacular scenes of flooding in an American metropolis, however startling, represented a short, relatively minor event, relative to the impacts of that season on other parts of the region. Puerto Rico was ravaged under the heavy rains and high winds of Hurricane Maria in September, and the impacts of the storm were far more devastating for the people of that island than for those of Houston. The death toll remains unclear at the time of writing, but will likely eclipse that of Hurricane Katrina, once all the grim accounting is done. The electrical grid failed totally, as in Houston, but its restoration in Puerto Rico would take months. Hospital systems failed. Half the island was still without power by the turn of the New Year. Thousands were put out of their homes while aid to rebuild families and businesses languished in storage. More than 140,000 Puerto Ricans fled to the state of Florida alone. This has been a devastating spectacle of neglect, rooted in a colonial and racist history.

The reasons for these incredibly divergent outcomes, after all, have nothing to do with geography and everything to do with political economy. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States and not a state, acquired in a lopsided military conflict more than a century ago. As such, its residents are US citizens but ones who have repeatedly been treated as less‐than‐equal by their mainland counterparts. The lack of attention to the suffering on Puerto Rico stands in marked contrast to the rapid response in Texas.

This outcome was made all the worse by local political economic conditions, insofar as Puerto Rico entered the hurricane season reeling from a debt crisis that left the island's infrastructure frail and vulnerable. That debt crisis was itself a product of local mismanagement and a grossly disadvantaged position in the global economy. Like all other “natural” disasters, events on Puerto Rico show the terrible unevenness of human vulnerability.

The 2017 hurricane season tells us many things. It highlights that environmental hazards and transformations are unequally distributed, with winners as well as losers. It shows the dialectical relationships between people and things: investors, carbon, and rain; developers, blacktop and water. It reveals a system of relationships that begin and end in contradictions. It points to the way claims about nature matter to nature itself. It shows that nature is inextricably entwined with political economy.

It also suggests the need for a wide‐ranging kind of research and theory to understand fully, from technical assessment of ocean–atmosphere relationships and the extensive study of oil markets, to intensive survey of urban development investment and state‐led institutions of redistribution. This single season might tell us many crucial stories.

This book is an effort to survey these kinds of tales and to describe the hard work that underlies researching and telling them well. By introducing political ecology, a field that seeks to unravel the political forces at work in environmental access, management, and transformation, I hope to demonstrate the way that politics is inevitably ecological and that ecology is inherently political. But more than this, I intend to show that research in the field can shed light on environmental change and dynamism, thereby addressing not only the practical problems of equity and sustainability, but also basic questions in environmental science.

The normative goal of the book is not over‐ambitious. By explaining and constructively exploring the body of research sometimes called political ecology, I intend only to clarify the most persuasive themes in a highly disparate body of writing and show the politics of nature to be both universal and immediate. This, I think, may make a small contribution to helping us all break from an image of a world where the human and the non‐human are disconnected, a fiction that remains so stubborn a part of our modern reasoning that it is as difficult to unimagine as it is to picture a world without patriarchy or class. I believe, however, that an alternative picture, where nature and society are undivided, is as much an act of remembering as one of inventing. Since the popular environmental movement has already done such an admirable job of getting many of us started, it may only be a matter of completing the revolution by rendering it more explicitly political.

It is my hope, therefore, that though this book is aimed at an academic audience, it presents the claims of the field in a plain enough way that picnickers, hikers, and hummingbird‐watchers can find in it a compelling argument for the way their concerns are implicated in those of working communities, disenfranchised minorities, and subsistence producers around the world. In this sense, the book departs from some theoretical and programmatic approaches to the politics of nature, especially those that eschew alliances with traditional environmental movements. This rejection of “bourgeois” environmentalism, a hallmark of some political economic approaches to nature, is both shortsighted and impractical; what more radical challenge to the political economic status quo exists in US law than the Endangered Species Act?

Having said this, it is also my goal to persuade those concerned about the condition of forests, the threat of climate change, and the fate of wild animals that it is no blasphemy to admit that the world is crafted by political forces and human industry, even and especially those dearly held wildernesses that sell so many Sierra Club calendars. At the same time I hope to encourage those concerned with more traditional political economy that an increased sensitivity to the influence (and perhaps even the interests) of non‐humans is essential for better politics, explanation, and ethics. The potential power of a popularized political ecology is so great, in fact, that merely shedding a few tightly clasped shibboleths on either side might make way for a very new world, emerging from these dark times when progressive politics in both human and non‐human realms seem so painfully paralyzed.

The Goals of the Text

It would be impossible to survey the field of political ecology in its entirety. The contributors are too many, the breadth of topics too vast, and the regional diversity too great. I do not, therefore, intend here to provide exhaustive case studies of political ecological research (see especially Peet and Watts 1996a; Peet, Robbins, and Watts 2010; Bridge, McCarthy, and Perreault 2015b) or a general account of the relationship between science and politics (Forsyth 2003), since this is a task well performed by others. Neither can I place this field and approach within the longer history of geographic science in more than a cursory way, though there are other excellent sources for this (Castree 2005, 2011), nor do I intend to survey the world system as a whole, pointing to the processes, players, and dynamics that are at work politicizing the natural environment. Many excellent books survey the condition of global debt, the position of local producers in commodity markets, and the dwindling power of the state in managing nature (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Sheppard et al. 2009).

Rather, I intend to do something different here. Whereas most summary texts on the state of global political ecology are designed to show political ecology as a body of knowledge, this book is designed also to show political ecology as something people do. And whereas collected volumes highlight a number of separate and distinct cases, this book also gropes for common questions that underlie them. Finally, where some work highlights the field as a specific approach, I suggest instead that it constitutes a community of practice and characterizes a certain kind of text, albeit an extremely valuable one.

The book is also designed to serve as an introduction and companion volume to the key books, articles, arguments, and research statements that make up the core of the field, and should serve to introduce any interested party to its major works and contested ideas. In this regard, it is offered as a remedy for the purported problem that the field is so fragmented that citation in it, as senior political ecologist Piers Blaikie once remarked, “is largely a random affair.”

But more than this, the book is a critical review of the work that goes on in the field, one that advocates a very particular vision of which approaches work and which do not and which lines of inquiry have the most political and analytic power and which do not. In the process, I further hope that the book reveals areas where the field might yet improve its analytical tools. I hope to show, notably, that political ecological analysis and argument have shifted from a focus on the destruction of environments, with a stress on human influences, to a more powerful focus on the production of socio‐environments and their co‐constitution by many kinds of human and non‐human actors. Even so, the book will suggest that there may and must be ways to move “beyond” political ecology or to leverage political ecological texts to better effect. Even while showing the strength of the approach, therefore, the book is written to demonstrate weaknesses, while pointing the way forward towards a more coherent and simultaneously more critical way of doing research.

I will not provide and rehearse, however, the laundry list of more typically pronounced criticisms often made of the field – usually centered on the fact that it is too focused on the broadly defined “underdeveloped world,” that it is too “rural” in character, and that it lacks commitment to scientific ecology. These claims are true, but such biases, as discussed here, grow quite inevitably from the professional and intellectual seeds from which the tree of political ecology sprouted – critical development research, peasant studies, environmental history, cultural ecology, and postcolonial theory. We have already seen in the past few years how political ecology has become more symmetrically concerned with the traditionally defined “first world” and urban areas and issues. We have also seen an unprecedented set of partnership emerge, within political ecology (and its sibling: critical physical geography) towards taking environmental systems and science seriously. These changes have not guaranteed, however, that political ecology approaches have become more coherent, or that the use of either ecological science or critical deconstruction has been managed with greater rigor. These explanatory problems, I argue, are prior to, and more important than, the specific topical and regional choices made in research.

The Rest of the Book

The remainder of this book directs itself to describing political ecology as a set of grounded arguments, attempting to show what makes political ecology researchers tick, what makes their work urgent to them, and what useful lessons they have provided for addressing important questions.

In Part I, I describe how political ecology came to be the way it is, with its inherent possibilities and limits. Chapter 1 introduces the term political ecology, distinguishing it from apolitical ecologies of various kinds, and showing a unity of practice amidst much diversity of thought. Chapter 2 reviews the deep roots of this line of inquiry, arguing that political ecologists have been around a very long time. Chapter 3 describes the historical development of a critical science of the environment, showing the disparate fields and eclectic tools that converged in the last three decades of the twentieth century to give greater analytical form to the field. This chapter is dense with history and referencing, but is intended to be a source to which the reader can return. Chapter 4 draws this opening section to a close to stress the common character of diverse political ecological texts: they stress winners and losers, are narrated with dialectics, begin or end from contradictions, and stress simultaneously the politicized state of the environment and the politicized nature of accounts about the state of the environment.

The three chapters in Part II review challenges to the field from a range of sources. Chapter 5 examines challenges from ecology, and the question of environmental change as environmental degradation or destruction, while Chapter 6 attends to challenges in the way researchers have considered the environment to be imaginary or constructed. Chapter 7 examines other approaches to nature/society study, including those in “land change science” and those from the perspective that stresses “causal” explanation. These approaches are shown to provide useful, indeed critical, lessons for political ecology, while at the same time they continue to reflect and reinforce some problems political ecology has evolved to address.

Part III examines five central theses of political ecological research, each in its own chapter, which I describe as degradation and marginalization (Chapter 8), conservation and control (Chapter 9), environmental conflict and exclusion (Chapter 10), environmental subjects and identity (Chapter 11), and political objects and actors (Chapter 12). The case materials in each chapter are selected to represent a range of research regions across the world, including cases from the “developed” and “underdeveloped” worlds. The biases of my training and experience will be evident throughout. The research described comes predominantly from the discipline of geography, though it is coupled with work in environmental history, development studies, anthropology, and sociology. While I have tried to include examples from both the global north and south, including cases from North and South America, Africa, and Asia, I have mentioned little of Western or Eastern Europe or of Australia. Research and theory in English predominates in the volume, despite the strong parallel threads of continental European political ecology (Whiteside 2002; see also the volume in French by Gautier and Benjaminsen 2012). Referencing of North American work outweighs that from other places. Finally, numerous international case examples were cut in final editing, owing to a lack of space.

Each of the chapters in this section also includes case histories of how, in my own work, I have tried to do research, and how on many occasions I have been tripped up by hidden pitfalls. These sections only reflect what I have done in research rather than what political ecologists have done more generally, but I think my methodological choices are not unique and the problems I have faced are common not only to political ecology, but also to much research in general.

The conclusions in Part IV will critically evaluate the status of the field and point to ways political ecology can expand and improve. My central argument here is that political ecology must attend to the future, by imagining new alternatives based either on the promises of degrowth or on a kind of emancipatory and modest modernism, all the while breaking loose from both the apocalyptic and green utopian imaginaries that otherwise hold the future captive.

Scattered throughout the text are boxed critical summaries of important individual contributions to political ecology and the people who made them. These are based on my own reading, but wherever possible these also include direct reflections and responses from those authors kind enough to provide them.

The sum of the effort can only be said to give the reader a “feel” for a field of practice that certainly has come to be influential and whose reach has crossed many social and environmental sciences. Curiously, however, for a field of this stature, it seems odd that political ecology is so hard to define! We first must attend to why this might be so.