About the lecture

"It is widely accepted that politics and power relations are crucial in making things happen or not happen when it comes to environmental protection and regulation. For example, several popular but also scholar explanations of failures to advance action on climate change attribute these failures to uneven power relations and the influence of powerful economic interests. Political ecology is the field that has been advancing the systematic study of relations between power and environmental transformations for approximately the last forty years. This lecture will introduce the field of political ecology. The lecture will use examples from celebrated studies in the field to illustrate how political ecologists use diverse understandings of the ways in which power operates to explain the production of environmental degradation."