Progress report in Political ecology II: Conjunctures, crises, and critical publics - Dr. Farhana Sultana
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Progress report
Progress in Human Geography
1–10
Progress report in Political ª The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
ecology II: Conjunctures, crises, sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/03091325211028665
journals.sagepub.com/home/phg
and critical publics
Farhana Sultana
Syracuse University, USA
Abstract
Political ecologists focus on power relations across scales to develop assessments of systems that produce
and maintain crises, such as the overlapping conjunctural crises of the coronavirus pandemic and climate
breakdown. Such analyses clarify processual and interconnecting factors, exposing the contours of uneven
differentiations and coproductions, while offering possible alternative futures. This report engages recent
scholarship wherein conjunctural analysis raises issues for how we understand socionatural processes and
outcomes, lessons learned, and the exigencies of critical publics in academia and beyond.
Keywords
capitalism, climate change, conjuncture, COVID-19
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to spatiotemporal scales, political ecology scholar-
break with the past and imagine their world anew. ship can help critically explain ongoing trajec-
This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway tories and explore alternatives. Furthermore,
between one world and the next. (Arundhati Roy, given the existential, epistemological, and onto-
Pandemic is a Portal, 2020)
logical crises wrought by the pandemic along
with simultaneous climate change, for political
ecologists – and indeed a progress report at this
Introduction current conjuncture – to not pause to analyze the
It is predicted that global pandemics will likely ramifications of the conjoint crises and lessons
become more frequent with climate change and learnt ‘would deny our ability, and arguably
thereby portend a ‘new normal’ (Forster et al., abdicate our responsibility, if we did not use our
2020; Watts et al., 2021). Transformational skills in geographical scholarship to help bear
changes to human–nature relationships and sys- witness and make sense of what is happening
tems will become necessary to alter this pro- and to help cultivate new critical publics’
jected trajectory. Such endeavors require (Rose-Redwood et al., 2020: 100). Indeed,
taking stock of emergent explanations and anal-
yses. Political ecology has a long history of
investigating, explaining, and exposing various
Corresponding author:
nature–society relationships. Since the corona- Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall,
virus (COVID-19) pandemic of 2020–2021 is Syracuse, NY 13244-0001, USA.
one of nature–society relationships at multiple Email: sultanaf@syr.edu2 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
praxis and public engagement are hallmarks of ideological and economic orders became more
political ecology beyond critical and analytical apparent (cf. Mbembe, 2003). Scholars such as
contributions. In my second report on political Nancy Fraser have argued that the far-reaching
ecology, I engage recent scholarship that eluci- impacts of the pandemic and climate breakdown
dates the concerns that conjunctural analyses are fueled by neoliberal globalization and capi-
raise for how we understand uneven and talist exploitation (Fraser, 2021). Relatedly, oth-
unequal socionatural processes and outcomes, ers have posited that the pandemic revealed how
what is at stake, possible alternatives, and the global circuits of capital created and maintained
exigencies of critical publics in academia and the pandemic (Malm, 2020; Wallace et al.,
beyond. 2020). Capitalism uses crises to reinvent itself,
so the pandemic offered fertile grounds for more
expropriation (e.g. foreign investments), exploi-
Registering Crises tation (e.g. wage labor), and commodification
How do we know or register conjoint crises, (e.g. health care). The rise of disaster capitalism
who are impacted and in what ways? In a con- in the wake of climate-induced disasters (e.g.
versation with geographer Doreen Massey, cul- hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico) as well as the
tural theorist Stuart Hall posited that pandemic (e.g. bailouts of corporations) led to a
conjunctural crises are the coalescing of pro- more significant accumulation of wealth for
cesses that produce distinctive realities and rup- some at expense of billions of others (Klein,
tures, whereby radical changes become possible 2020). Indeed, the COVID-19 virus was termed
(Hall and Massey, 2010). Crises are contextual, the ‘inequality virus’ as the wealthy shored up
material, and discursive (Castree, 2020). In the more wealth while many were pushed into pov-
public sphere, the pandemic was largely mis- erty with pandemic lockdowns, recessions, job
characterized as a health crisis and climate losses, and precarity (Morales et al., 2021).
change as an environmental crisis. Some crises Concurrently, the same capitalist class contin-
are chronic, and as Rob Nixon argues about ued to produce massive carbon footprints that
climate change, involve slow violence (Nixon, further exacerbated climate breakdown (Wilk
2013). Others are abrupt and temporarily con- and Barros, 2021).
strained, such as the pandemic. The immediacy A range of scholars have argued that the pla-
and urgency with which the pandemic forced netary challenges of pandemic and climate
states, societies, and individuals to act were in change are outcomes of extractive capitalism,
stark contrast to the slow temporality and inertia commodification, and financialization while
with which climate has been addressed (Mar- noting how these are expressed through contex-
kard and Rosenbloom, 2020; Phillips et al., tual socio-spatial inequities. Confronting com-
2020). Both crises are global but uneven emer- mon underlying structures of exploitations,
gencies with differentiated responses and lived oppressions, dispossessions, and degradations
experiences (Sultana, 2021). There is inequita- thereby become necessary (Fernando, 2020).
ble distribution of material burdens from Climate change increasingly produces sacrifice
diverse vulnerabilities to, exposures from, and zones, wherein those made vulnerable by capit-
abilities to cope with these dual nature–society alism’s predatory methods of accumulation are
challenges. acutely harmed. Frequently, the same commu-
The pandemic brought into sharper relief the nities facing climate impacts more severely are
coproductions of inequities, vulnerabilities, and also the ones facing greater pandemic inequi-
marginalizations. The harsher realities of the ties. The political economy of the pandemic
necropolitics that undergirds the current global shows colonial patterns, where poor and raciallySultana 3
marginalized communities in the Global North nonhuman nature into processes of control,
and entire countries in the Global South were collaborations, exploitations, and extractions.
subjected to colonial attitudes in public health Extractivism is increasingly understood beyond
(Bump et al., 2021; Richardson, 2020). Racia- site-specific extractions to wider political
lized treatment of minoritized communities economies of production and social reproduc-
occurred across different contexts (e.g. greater tion (Arboleda, 2020). The continuities of
pandemic mortality rates among Black commu- destructive capitalist extractive approaches to
nities in the United States; ramped up xenopho- ecosystems sit alongside the violent ruptures
bia against Asians globally). Colonial racial that the global pandemic wrought in reconfigur-
abandonment, gendered violence, and eco- ing societal, political, and health behaviors in
nomic precarity further intensified globally inequitable ways. The emergence, spread, and
throughout the pandemic (Liebman et al., impacts of the virus operated along pathways of
2020). Various context-specific outcomes can modes of production, consumption, travel, and
be understood through the racialized and colo- health-care systems (Sell and Williams, 2020).
nial ideologies of disposability and grievability, Emerging infectious diseases such as
in that there are differences in who is deemed COVID-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome
worthy of grieving and who is not (cf. Butler, (SARS), Ebola, and viral epidemics may follow
2004). Some lives were deemed disposable the global trajectory of wildlife habit destruc-
from pandemic deaths with denials of their right tion and agribusiness models (Davis, 2020).
to breath (Mbembe, 2021) and subsequent glo- Ongoing expansion of large-scale industrial
bal vaccine apartheid (Byanyima, 2021). That agriculture with intensified monocropping and
these are concurrent with long-standing climate livestock production, concomitant changes in
necropolitics is not surprising to critical scho- dietary habits and global food chains, and
lars (DeBoom, 2020). The co-constitutive expanding frontiers of human–wildlife encoun-
nature of these crises thus revealed similar pat- ters are expected to increase zoonotic spillovers
terns of colonialities, racial capitalism, and lack and transmissions (Akram-Lodhi, 2021; Gibb
of sufficient solidarity or justice. These cri- et al., 2020). Agri-industrial complexes are at
tiques disabuse persistent notions of ‘we are all the forefront of habit destruction and deforesta-
in this together’ (e.g. Guterres, 2020). tion, loss of biodiversity, commodification of
land and water, and intense industrial farming
becoming dominant globally (Flachs, 2020).
Commonalities and Conjunctures Closer understandings of contextual ecosystem
What critical insights and tools do political destruction, pathogen epidemic, and agricul-
ecology perspectives provide for better under- tural practices of accumulation thus become
standing the crises of our times? Established essential (Bledsoe, 2019; Neimark, 2016). Loss
political ecology scholarship on extractivism, of local control over animal husbandry, agroe-
racial capitalism, and resource frontiers are cology, soil regeneration, and biodiversity
helpful. While the pandemic felt novel or abrupt results from the incorporation of ever-
to the general public, it is a conjunctural out- expanding geographical areas into capitalist
come of global processes set in motion centuries extractivist systems of plantationocenes (cf.
ago. Colonial extractivism and racial capitalism Haraway, 2015) – when combined, these
produce local socioecological crises (Davis increase vulnerabilities and impoverishment of
et al., 2019), and the pandemic further facili- populations and contribute to coproducing pan-
tated extractivism of both labor and nature by demics and ecological injustices. Such practices
capital. Capitalist expansion relies on enrolling also increase greenhouse gas emissions that4 Progress in Human Geography XX(X) exacerbate climate change while fueling zoono- tenuous, making global supply chains more tic viruses to spread (Tollefson, 2020). Warmer robust and equitable became ostensible during temperatures with climate change are expected the pandemic (Benton 2020). Resistance to to further increase transmissions and pathways extractivism and ecological exploitation have of global infectious diseases (Phillips et al., been growing, often under the age-old ‘environ- 2020). mentalism of the poor’ (Guha and Martinez- Some climate solutions have also resulted in Alier, 1997; Martinez-Alier, 2014). For the intensification of industrial extraction and instance, Indigenous tribes in Brazil self- greater exploitation of disparate ecologies. New isolated during the pandemic for protection extractive and resource frontiers are emerging while using the pandemic to strengthen further for climate mitigation with the search for carbon a collective resistance to state-sponsored indus- capture and storage as well as raw materials for trial extraction and conflicts (Menton et al., renewable energy sources, resulting in land 2020). However, resistance endeavors are fre- grabs and dispossessions (Ye et al., 2020). quently most visible and repressed at resource Sacrifice zones are linked to climate solutions extraction frontiers, commodity frontiers, and such as the Green New Deal and other forms of sites of encroachment, where justice is either green capitalism, which fuel climate colonial- delayed, denied, or ignored (Gonzalez, 2021). isms (Kolinjivadi, 2020; Zografos and Robbins, Resistance movements that challenge capital- 2020). Land grabs for financial speculation and ism’s fixes demonstrate the overarching impor- agri-biofuels for usage in hyper-capitalist tance of collectivizing and solidarity-building economies exacerbate local economic precarity, as strategies and lived experiences of resistance food crises, and conflicts in historically impo- and for envisioning alternative futures and more verished communities across Latin America, just relationships with nature (Dunlap and Asia, and Africa (Manzi, 2020; Wallace et al., Jakobsen, 2020). Anti-capitalist and anti- 2020). Similarly, privatization of water and gas, exploitative articulations and reformulations expanding monocrop plantations, and land/ have become further clarified and garnered water grabs intensify community conflicts with wider attention in the current conjuncture. I con- states and transform how states function in these sider these next. contexts (Cons and Eilenberg, 2019; Kenney- Lazar, 2019). Complex global formations of trade policies, institutional arrangements, and Alternative Visions and Pathways development ideologies extend violent extracti- How should academic researchers relate to the vist frontiers, land dispossessions, and consoli- ‘real world’ they study? While extractivism, date racial capitalism globally (Dunlap and neoliberal capitalism, and concomitant exploi- Jakobsen, 2020; Liebman et al., 2020). Ulti- tations have proceeded and are remade in the mately, neoliberal capitalism undertakes the interregnum (cf. Gramsci, 1971), they have also extractive capture of value, while devaluing and been contested, reconfigured, and navigated in destroying the material conditions of nature and several different ways. The material and discur- labor in the process (Ye et al. 2020). sive cracks emergent from overlapping crises of There are different tenors and registers of the pandemic and climate/ecological breakdowns solutions to the capitalist crises of the pandemic revealed intervention points for political ecolo- and climate breakdown. Calls for increasing gists to consider reimagining, regenerations, biodiversity of livestock and crops have been and reparative possibilities. These are proposed strident (Sandbrook et al., 2020; Wallace along various pathways – such as agroecology, et al., 2020). Since food systems are often food sovereignty, and various anti-capitalist
Sultana 5 systems to resist capital’s spatial and socioeco- Degrowth is a vision that favors egalitarianism logical fixes and profit-driven logics of ecolo- and redistribution over expansion, calling for gical destruction (Escobar, 2017; Moore and reduction of hyper-consumption, especially in Patel, 2017). Confronting necessary structural industrialized economies, to pursue climate jus- and systemic changes is tempered with tice that centers the needs of historically over- bottom-up strategies, such as mutual aid, soli- exploited economies. Its relevance has gained darity networks, and shared governance to sus- popularity to reimagine an alternative system tain lives and livelihoods (Cadieux et al., 2019; to the material and discursive pursuits of capi- Nelson, 2020; Springer, 2020). Together, these talist growth that fuel ecological breakdown and highlight the interconnections and interdepen- rifts (Paulson, 2020). Degrowth, nonetheless, dencies of individuals and systems in survival remains an arena of considerable debate within beyond the capitalist framework, while caution- political ecology (Gómez-Baggethun, 2020; ing the limitations of seeking singular solutions. Robbins, 2020). Resistance movements against capitalist Moving closer to home, the destabilization of exploitation and dispossessions are comple- social reproduction conditions, wrought by both menting and collaborating with existing envi- the pandemic and climate crises, drew public ronmental justice activism (Martinez-Alier attention to the contours of care work (UN et al., 2016). Environmental, labor, and social Women and UNEP, 2020). While care work justice movements have become sites for think- became increasingly necessary and a site of ing of alternative futures (Svarstad and Benja- struggle during the pandemic, the importance minsen, 2020). Indigenous environmental of care work, social reproduction, and revaluing movements globally have challenged notions this ‘low-skilled’ labor was evidenced (Dang of modernity and progress, despite repression and Viet Nguyen, 2021; Ho and Maddrell, from state and corporate actors (Scheidel 2021). Scholars have long demonstrated the et al., 2020; Toumbourou et al., 2020). Calls for intersectional gendered, racialized, and classed decolonial environmental justice approaches, nature of the burdens of care work (Bhatta- especially from Latin America, underscore sub- charya, 2017). Such fault lines became increas- verting structural, ecological, and cultural vio- ingly visible throughout the pandemic. Beyond lences (Navas et al., 2018). New forms of recognition and addressing such concerns, Indigenous resistance such as buen vivir and praxis of healing collectively, sharing empathy, ubuntu have been advocated for (Broad and radical care, and commoning become more pro- Fischer-Mackey, 2017; Kothari et al., 2014), found (Paulson, 2019). However, care work is even as the limitations of both are noted (McDo- also necessary to address ecological crises nald, 2010; Radcliffe, 2018). Farmers alliances (Bauhardt and Harcourt, 2018). The pandemic globally that are resistance movements from highlights how the care of self and others is below, such as La Via Campesina (Busck and intimately imbricated in the care of the earth Schmidt, 2020), have garnered considerable and more-than-human geographies, whereby attention in support of food sovereignty and species interconnectivity needs to be better agroecological resurgence. Relatedly, youth cli- understood and heeded. Such care-full connec- mate activism has emerged as a site of anti- tions challenge ongoing alienations and crises capitalist resistance (O’Brien et al., 2018). produced from capitalism, colonialism, and Another body of scholarship and praxis gain- development. Care of ecological systems relies ing traction against endless capitalist growth on humans and nonhuman nature, highlighting that exacerbates extractivism has been the need for a critical understanding of the ways degrowth (Hickel, 2020; Kallis et al., 2020). that alternative futures necessitate radical
6 Progress in Human Geography XX(X) rethinking and relating (Simpson, 2021). Geo- learning and coproducing a world that fosters graphers JK Gibson-Graham’s insights on fem- reparative relations, localized solutions, com- inist belonging in the Anthropocene through munity sovereignty, mutual aid, nurturance of more-than-human regional development – biocultural relations in places, regenerative belonging in non- and anti-capitalist projects economies, degrowth, agroecology, and prac- that promote nurture, enhance resiliency, and tices of care and commoning. Engaging mean- conviviality of both humans and nonhuman col- ingfully with a range of alternatives offers the lectives – are particularly prescient (Gibson- possibilities to not only confront ongoing and Graham, 2011). emergent crises but also configure trajectories Alternatives to epistemic violence have been beyond the projected ‘new normal.’ sought with the denaturalization of Eurocentric values, economic rationality, and the coloniality of power. Greater attention is given to explore Conclusion relationality, convivialities with nonhuman Contra Jameson (2003), systems failures open nature, and abolition ecology that involves possibilities for imagining an end to capitalism ethics, care, and reparations (Montenegro de by suggesting radically different worlds and Wit, 2021). Narratives of endurance and refusal emancipatory potentials. Political ecologists are invoked to break from a past that fosters and cognate scholars are increasingly theoriz- white supremacist politics of climate apoca- ing and investigating alternative ecological lypse (Davis et al., 2017; Whyte, 2020) and futurities and relationalities. The pandemic instead towards BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and underscored how human societies are intercon- people of color) futurisms that provide alternate nected and entangled in the world via extrac- flourishing (Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). tion, production, distribution, consumption, Fighting racial capitalism through emancipa- and disposal of goods and services of everyday tory internationalization across differences and life. Post-pandemic narratives to build back borders are proposed in calls for abolition of better, that largely involve capitalist restructur- systems that produce these harms (Heynen and ing and retrenching, could instead be a portal – Ybarra, 2021). Shared lifeworlds became more one that would do well to heed the scholarship widely known and scholarship on pluriverse covered within this review – that when taken ushered in conversations around the existence together, focus on undoing the violences of of many worlds in one world (Escobar, 2020; capitalism and colonialism (Rodriguez, 2020). Kothari et al., 2019). Escobar (2020) posits that The very processes that gave rise to the conjoint a ‘radical relationality’, the deep interconnect- crises of the early 21st century, while globally edness of all living forms, is critical to reima- occurring but extremely uneven spatially and gining viable and just futures. Other worlds socioecologically, are being questioned even as within, under, and between extractive relations these processes are repackaged as solutions to the of colonialism and capitalism are visible when very problems. decolonizing nature away from ‘resource’ by The alternative visions, arising out of cri- reckoning with colonial and capitalist legacies tiques of interlocking systems of colonialism, (Tsing, 2015). capitalism, imperialism, financialization, and Therefore, thinking from below to resist capi- techno-managerialism, can offer radical alter- talist extraction involves feminist, Indigenous, natives to the capitalocentric present and sub- and queer logics to counter the dualism of Euro- vert the ‘new normal’. The pandemic was centric epistemologies and colonial capitalism. generative for fostering debates on how to do Post-pandemic reimaginations encourage capitalism differently or resist it altogether (e.g.
Sultana 7
decarbonization gained more traction to tackle justice. Thus, for political ecology to further
climate mitigation, as did state-led investments/ nurture critical publics, it becomes imperative
interventions protecting public health and social to rigorously engage with anti-capitalist cri-
safety nets during the pandemic). As a result, tiques and pedagogies, while exploring alterna-
power relations at various scales and distribu- tive futurities and emancipatory potentials.
tion of power across peoples have been ques-
tioned. This opens up possibilities to nurture Acknowledgments
alternative imaginaries and revolutionary I am indebted to Noel Castree and Alex Loftus for
potentials, while addressing the tensions critical feedback on this second report written while
therein. Scholars have argued that post- the second year of a worldwide pandemic was well
pandemic development urgently tackles several underway. All errors can be blamed on the pandemic.
issues to alter past trajectories. At an interna-
tional scale, some have called for a greater focus Declaration of conflicting interests
on redistribution, debt cancellation, reduction in The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
consumption and travel, regenerative agricul- est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
ture, convivial conservation, and a move away publication of this article.
from aggregate growth that compounds climate
breakdown (Büscher et al., 2021). Similarly, Funding
post-pandemic transformations necessitate a The author(s) received no financial support for the
rethinking of international development models research, authorship, and/or publication of this
and political ideologies of growth imposed article.
across the post-colonial world by global institu-
tions and imperial states (Leach et al., 2021). ORCID iD
These important critiques and analyses should Farhana Sultana https://orcid.org/0000-0003-
not fall by the wayside going forward. 3050-5053
Ultimately, radical solidarities and collectiv-
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