Abstract
The Anthropocene is not only an epoch of anthropogenic dominance of the Earth’s ecosystems, but also an epoch characterized by new forms of environmental governance, institutions, and uneven development. Following the literature in political ecology, we are calling these new forms of environmental governance, “global assemblages.” A key argument from a political ecological perspective is that socio-ecological changes historically disproportionately impact communities in the Global South, and minority and low-income communities in the Global North. While global assemblages are powerful mechanisms of socio-ecological change, we demonstrate the ways transnational networks of grassroots organizations can challenge their negative social and environmental impacts, and thus foster socio-ecological resiliency.
This paper is based on discussions that emerged out of the Ecological Society of America’s Earth Stewardship Workshop on June 18–19, 2012 in Chevy Chase, M.D., funded by the National Science Foundation. We are grateful to Sue Silver and the editorial staff at Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment for allowing us to publish a modified version of “Global assemblages, resilience, and Earth Stewardship in the Anthropocene” (Ogden et al. 2013). Some research for this paper is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants DEB-0823293 and DEB-1237517.
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Notes
- 1.
During the last decade, the Ecological Society of America has initiated a broad Earth Stewardship platform (Chapin et al. 2015 this volume [Chap. 12]). This platform includes a call for a more action-oriented science that is oriented toward understanding pathways to sustainability (Chapin et al. 2011, see also Sayre et al. 2013).
- 2.
For the most part, the “politics” of political ecology has concerned itself with the means by which people exert control over other people, as well as the environmental transformations (deforestation, desertification, for example) spurred by these material processes (Blaikie 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987). Paige West has defined political ecology as “a sophisticated contemporary theory of accumulation by dispossession and the vast effects of this ongoing process” (2012, p. 30; see also Biersack and Greenberg 2006; Neumann 2005; Paulson and Gezon 2005; Peet and Watts 2004). This scholarship has produced critical appraisals of the symbolic and material absorption of other beings within capitalism and other arenas of socioeconomic power—including through discursive regimes, practices of governance, and contests over resources and the equitable distribution of environmental risk.
- 3.
- 4.
The outcome of this large-scale project involving the Chilean National Academy of Science and nearly 100 researchers who attempted to establish sustainable forestry and biological reserves in Tierra del Fuego was unexpected, and shows the limitations of purely technical scientific approaches in conservation.
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Ogden, L. et al. (2015). The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene. In: Rozzi, R., et al. Earth Stewardship. Ecology and Ethics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12133-8_10
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