Critical Political Ecology: The Politics of Environmental Science

Rating:
Summary: At last a book that seems to speak my language
Review: I like this book, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in politics of environment. I am a climatologist who is trying to understand more about environmental policy, and I have often felt that the world is divided into people who understand science but not politics, and social scientists who seem to be disconnected from the real world. This book seems to fall in the middle because it criticizes many scientific assumptions about environment, but doesn't fall into the trap of those people who seem to think that any science is bad, or that everything is just social discourse. In fact this book tries to show how to get a better sense of reality about environmental change. It speaks my language because it is actually quite hopeful about getting science right and more engaged with the political process, even though it is critical about some elements of how environmental science is talked about. I enjoyed it because it showed that it is possible to remain scientific about environment plus political too. It also has a lot of discussion about 'political ecology' that I found interesting.

Rating:
Summary: A more intelligent version of the Bjorn Lomborg debate
Review: I was really drawn to the debate last year about that Danish statistician who wrote 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' because I always felt that environmentalists overstated problems, but at the same time, I felt that Lomborg was putting it too simply. This new book, Critical Political Ecology, takes on this whole issue in a different way by looking more deeply at the questions of what is an environmental problem, and the politics of who (and when) someone experiences it, before actually rushing off to measure it. It actually shows how wrong and simple Lomborg is! But it also shows that many popular ideas about environmental problems are also simplistic because they overlook the politics of how problems are seen to be problematic (and who by). Its a good book because it does not simply say 'yes the environment is in crisis' or 'no there is no such thing as crisis' but shows us how we can both understand how environmental problems happen, and the politics of how we see them as problems. This book shows a much better way to question environmentalism in a practical way than Lomborg's sensationalistic effort... It certainly got me thinking...