In September of 2019, I facilitated a class about the ecological footprint with 12 Peruvian high school students as part of my Environmental Leaders Club in Carhuamayo, Junín. Following a manual provided to me by the United States Peace Corps, the lesson began by leading students through an activity demonstrating neo-Malthusian ideas of population growth and resource scarcity: as the human population grows, increased pressure is places on resources, and this growth thus represents one of the foremost ecological threats facing humanity today. The second activity was comprised of calculating the students’ ecological footprints, which determines how many Earths it would take to support their lifestyles.
There I stood, helping students from an Andean town of 4000 people, largely supported by livestock ranching and agricultural production, calculate the extent to which they consume the planet’s resources and guiding them through ‘lifestyle changes’ dictated by the U.S. government. Yet about 45 kilometers north of our classroom lies the world’s second largest silver mine, located in the city of Cerro de Pasco. In a literal sense, the Raul Rojas open pit mine swallows the city, and its tailings and drainage render Peru’s second largest lake, Lake Chinchaycocha, the most polluted lake in the entire country. Children in the city have dangerously high levels of lead in their bodies and nose bleeds, chronic coughs, and migraines at alarming rates. In 1996, the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency in the city and promised that it would be relocated, a promise that has yet to be kept.
Standing in the classroom that day, my gut twisted around the unshakable feeling that something was deeply wrong. Yet I continued teaching, following the Volunteer Oath to which I had pledged a year earlier:
“I, Ailin McCullough, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”
For a long time, during the remainder of my Peace Corps service and after, I struggled to organize the complex thoughts that I began to experience on that day. Why focus on the individual actions of community members when large transnational corporations are largely responsible for the environmental degradation experienced by the communities around Lake Chinchaycocha? In fact, why focus on individual actions at all? Does mining even benefit these communities in any way? And what right did I have, as a white, middle-class U.S. citizen, to tell these people what to do with their lives and resources? These questions remained mostly unanswered, or at most partially understood, because I did not have the appropriate analytical toolkit to approach them. This remained the case for multiple years, until I began to engage with political ecology in 2021.
Political ecology is a field that seeks to link environmental problems to social, political, and economic contexts in order to uncover the root drivers of those problems. It is a tradition born out of multiple academic disciplines, including geography, sociology, anthropology, and hazard studies. Specialists from these disciplines who study political ecology (though not all of them would call themselves ‘political ecologists’) place special emphasis on the role of power, political economic structures, knowledge, discourse, and social construction in determining social and environmental outcomes. Questions that scrutinize who wins and who loses, what assumptions underlie environmental laws, policies, and regulations, and how the material and social worlds are mutually responsive are situated at the center of political ecology.
With these understandings in mind, answers to the many questions I asked myself in Carhuamayo that day began to become clear. An overwhelming focus on individual actions is - put simply - the result of the neoliberal turn in the United States during the 1980s and deliberately seeks to shift responsibility onto consumers and away from polluters (in fact, the ‘carbon footprint’, an ecological footprint-adjacent concept, was created by British Petroleum). Mining benefits Peru as a whole in some important ways by connecting the country to the global economy, but those benefits fail to trickle down to the communities that bear the brunt of mining contamination. And finally, I had no right to be tell my students how to live more ‘sustainably’, yet the Peace Corps continues to use mostly well-meaning, young Americans as pawns for the projection of soft power abroad.
Yet my very first introduction to political ecology - my advisor Dr. Brian Petersen’s course on the topic - quickly demonstrated that political ecology is (or at least should be) far more than an academic field. In this course, we read selections from Dr. Paul Robbins, a political ecology-oriented geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who powerfully claims that political ecology is a “community of practice.” In other words, political ecology is not only made up of academics and researchers, but also activists, conservationists, human rights defenders, community organizers, and more who share a normative worldview. This community of practice is guided by the fundamental assumption that contemporary society is wrought with injustice and thus research should seek to support positive change by improving environmental conditions, reducing human suffering, and actively constructing more just societal structures and systems.
Engaging with political ecology quickly transformed my academic trajectory. In May of 2023, I defended my M.S. thesis, titled Protected and Extractive Spaces: A Political Ecological Analysis of Conservation and Mining Around the Junín National Reserve, Peru. My research drew upon the many ideas I learned from political ecology, both through Dr. Petersen’s class and his graduate student lab, to explore how conservation activity and subsoil metal mining co-transform the physical and social landscapes in central Andean Peru. However, the influence that political ecology has had on my life extends far beyond my desk where I spent hours reviewing literature, far beyond Dr. Petersen’s office where our lab group met weekly to discuss critical geography, far beyond the classroom where I presented and defended my thesis. In many ways, engaging with political ecology has dramatically shifted the ways in which I view, understand, and interpret the world, reflecting the field’s extension beyond academia to the community of practice in which I now find myself. These shifts are quite diverse and extend across many facets of my life. More than ever before, I interpret events and ideas in terms of the underlying political economic structures and systems that produce them. I view the more-than-human world (a term I would have never used ‘pre-political ecology’) around me differently while out hiking or camping with friends. And interestingly, when I returned to Lake Chinchaycocha in 2022 to conduct fieldwork for my thesis, it was an entirely different place in my eyes compared to when I lived there from 2018 to 2020. While some of this is owed to having more life experience and a bit of distance, the deeper and more explanatory understandings of the area’s physical and social landscapes that political ecological analysis afforded me entirely transformed my perception of what goes on there.
Political ecology’s focus on scrutinizing and unpacking assumptions has been an integral facet of these shifts. And I see such assumptions all around me, everyday. For example, during a group conversation at a hostel in Ashland, Oregon while I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail this summer, someone posed the question: what actions can we take to effectively address issues around natural resource degradation? Another hiker was quick to respond: we need to put a cap on human population growth. Political ecology would teach one to think about the generalizing assumptions associated with such a claim: that all people use and consume resources in the same ways and at the same rate, meaning that reducing the number of people who use resources would contribute to sustainability. The truth is, however, that people do not use and consume the world’s resources at the same rate. Niger is a case in point - a country that leads the world in birth rates, yet has an average ‘carbon footprint’ that is 160 times smaller than that of the United States. The question thus becomes: sustainability for whom? Upon whom would the burden of curbing population growth fall? These types of questions are where political ecology has much to contribute. When your starting point differs so drastically from what is well accepted and poorly-scrutinized, the types of questions you ask and answers to which you arrive will also be drastically different.
I should note that political ecology is simply one lens through which to understand the world around us. It is not ‘better’ than other fields or some sort of be-all and end-all. In fact, the field is frequently criticized for excelling in critiques of the status quo and ‘business as usual’ while failing to offer meaningful solutions. Despite this shortcoming, however, I see political ecology as a useful analytical toolkit for diagnosing modern social and ecological problems. For me, this toolkit has been profoundly compelling. Engaging with political ecology has made me a better version of myself - a more informed citizen and activist, a more critical environmentalist, a more responsible outdoor recreationist, and a more compassionate member of society. Above all, it has taught me a crucial lesson in trying to improve social and environmental conditions: while it may not excel in offering solutions, in order to offer such solutions you must first have a clear understanding of the root of a given problem. And that is, without a doubt, political ecology’s wheelhouse.
[Lake Chinchaycocha, Peru. Photograph by Ailin]
Comentarios