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Despite the visibility of natural resource use and access for indigenous and rural peoples elsewhere, less attention is paid to the ways that development patterns interrupt nontimber forest products (NTFPs) and gathering practices by people living in urbanizing landscapes of the United States. Using a case study from Lowcountry South Carolina, we examine how urbanization has altered the political-ecological relationships that characterize gathering practices in greater Mt. Pleasant, a rapidly urbanizing area within the Charleston-North Charleston Metropolitan area. We draw on grounded visualization-an analytical method that integrates qualitative and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data-to examine the ways that residential and commercial development has altered collecting sites and practices associated with sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia sericea [Michx.] P.M.Peterson) and three other plant materials used in basket-making. Our analysis focuses on the ecological changes and shifts in property regimes that result; we detail the strategies basket-makers have developed to maintain access to sweetgrass and other raw materials. This research highlights how land development patterns have disrupted historic gathering practices, namely by changing the distribution of plants, altering the conditions of access to these species, and reconfiguring the social networking that takes place to ensure the survival of this distinctive art form.

Nicole Graham began her dissertation fieldwork with the intention of examining indigenous Australian land laws. However, Bundjalong author and historian Ruby Langford Ginibi told her,``while white researchers were curious about blackfellas' laws about country, too often they were ignorant of the relationship between law and land in their own culture'' (page xiii). Using this critique as inspiration, Graham decided to trace the historical, geographical, and philosophical trajectories of`Anglo-centric' property law. In Lawscape she uses this research to argue that modern property law is``dysfunctional'' because it is focused solely on relationships between people, leaving it disconnected from place and maladapted to ecological realities (page 7). With clear and purposeful prose, Graham calls for a paradigm shift in legal theory and practice, away from anthropocentric-abstracted property rights, toward a property system that recognizes networks of interconnection between people and place (page 18). Drawing on film, literature, legal cases, legislation, as well as social and economic theory, Graham offers a truly transdisciplinary analysis that both graduate students and established scholars will find valuable.The major strength of Lawscape is the author's ability to bring together a wide variety of literatures. In her introduction Graham critiques the behavioral and environmental sciences for their anthropocentric definitions of place because they reinforce hierarchical understandings of nature and culture (page 12). Alternatively, she praises legal geographers for offering a nonanthropocentric philosophy of law (see Blomley et al, 2001), but her approach requires a more materially grounded analysis (page 16). Graham draws on Jessica Weir's (2009) theory of landscape connectivity' because it can uncover the inalienability of people^place relationships, challenging the abstract and placeless paradigm of modern property law (page 13). Overall, Graham does an excellent job of reviewing and critiquing a wide variety of literature to build her`lawscape' approach. One puzzling aspect, however, is her simple definition of place as`t he physical,`natural' world'' (page 5). It is clear that Graham wants to ground property law in the material world, but given her familiarity with the geographic literature it is odd that place serves as little more than a stand in for the physical environment.Graham successfully links property law and the physical landscape through a dialectical chapter layout, which introduces theoretical concepts and then promptly grounds them in the material world. For example, in chapter 2 she analyzes the philosophical treatises of Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and John Locke to show how language and discourse create an alienable and placeless Anglo-centric property law. In chapters 3 and 4 Graham grounds thesè`t heoretical models of people and things'' in the material world, demonstrating that property law supported the spread of European land-use practices to colonial spaces where they were incommensur...

Political ecology has emerged as an interdisciplinary space where concepts from the physical and social sciences are utilized to understand nature‐society relationships. In this paper, we explore how political ecologists have used concepts from nonequilibrium ecology to address concerns over the interactions between land management and livelihood practices. We begin by demystifying how equilibrium and nonequilibrium have been used in ecology, demonstrating the dialectical relationship between these divergent frameworks and how each impacts understandings of living systems. Then, we review how political ecologists employ these concepts to examine environmental knowledge production, as well as the role of livelihoods and anthropogenic disturbances in conservation and restoration. We also discuss how nonequilibrium ecology has shaped our own research trajectories and finish the paper by offering some reflections on the possibilities and pitfalls for political ecology’s use of nonequilibrium ecology to bridge the physical‐human divide in geography.