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Overview
Do environmental problems and processes produce violence? Current U.S. policy about environmental conflict and scholarly work on environmental security assume direct causal links between population growth, resource scarcity, and violence. This belief, a staple of governmental decision-making during both Clinton administrations and widely held in the environmental security field, depends on particular assumptions about the nature of the state, the role of population growth, and the causes of environmental degradation.The conventional understanding of environmental security, and its assumptions about the relation between violence and the environment, are challenged and refuted in Violent Environments. Chapters by geographers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists include accounts of ethnic war in Indonesia, petro-violence in Nigeria and Ecuador, wildlife conservation in Tanzania, and "friendly fire" at Russia's nuclear weapons sites.
Violent Environments portrays violence as a site-specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and societies, yet connected to larger processes of material transformation and power relations. The authors argue that specific resource environments, including tropical forests and oil reserves, and environmental processes (such as deforestation, conservation, or resource abundance) are constituted by and in part constitute the political economy of access to and control over resources. Violent Environments demands new approaches to an international set of complex problems, powerfully arguing for deeper, more ethnographically informed analyses of the circumstances and processes that cause violence.
Contributors:
Amita Baviskar, University of Delhi
Iain A. Boal, University of California, Berkeley
Aaron Bobrow-Strain, University of California, Berkeley
James Fairhead, University of London
Paula Garb, University of California, Irvine
Betsy Hartmann, Hampshire College
Emily Harwell, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Galina Komarova, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Moscow
Valerie Kuletz, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
James McCarthy, Pennsylvania State University
Rod Neumann, Florida International University
Nancy Lee Peluso, University of California, Berkeley
Ravi Rajan, University of California, Santa Cruz
Paul Richards, Wageningen University and Research Centre
Susan C. Stonich, University of California, Santa Barbara
Nandini Sundar, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi
Peter Vandergeest, York University
Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley
About the Authors:
Nancy Lee Peluso is Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology and Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Watts is Director of the Institute of International Studies and Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
Synopsis
Provides both a critique of the school of environmental security and alternative ways of understanding the connections between environment and science. The 16 contributions address topics including territory, custom, and the cultural politics of ethnic war in West Kalimantan, Indonesia; violence, scarcity, and meaning in Chiapas, Mexico; violence, environment, and industrial shrimp farming; victims of "friendly fire" at Russia's nuclear weapons sites; and state violence and self-surveillance in wildlife conservation in Tanzania. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Provides both a critique of the school of environmental security and alternative ways of understanding the connections between environment and science."-Book News, January 2002"Violent Environments is a thought-provoking. . .volume that should be read carefully by all those interested in the various debates over environmental security. Many of the book's theoretical arguments and empirical findings provide important and timely challenges to mainstream approaches to studying the environment-violence nexus. Neo-Malthusian critics will find much to build upon in their efforts to develop a more systematic political economy/political ecology alternative."-Colin Kahl, University of Minnesota, Environmental Change and Security Project Report, Issue 8, 2002
"This book calls for a bold new fusion of a multifaceted political economy with environmental and cultural politics to address the real landscapes of violence. Opening up a vast new arena for debate, discussion, and political action, Violent Environments establishes convincing grounds for a thorough rethinking of the subject. The critique it offers is both compelling and desperately needed."-Karl S. Zimmerer, University of Wisconsin
"This important book offers a topical, richer and more complex approach to understanding the connections between population and the environment than does the current conventional wisdom. With a healthy variety of case studies and a focus both on a wide range of environmental topics and on the diverse forms of violence associated with environmental relations, Violent Environments is a unique and provocative collection."-Philip McMichael, Cornell University, author of Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective