Political ecology, initially conceived to better understand the power relations implicit in management and distribution of natural resources in the developing world, came "home" to the American West in the 1990s and 2000s. This groundswell of research did much to problematize socio-environmental conflicts in the region, long typified by tensions over land and resources, identity and belonging, autonomy and authority. Since first touching down in the West, however, the "big tent" of political ecology has only grown bigger, incorporating new perspectives, epistemologies, and ontologies. At the same time, the nexus of environment and society is perhaps even more salient today, amid a regional conjuncture of populist revolt, climate change, and rapid political economic transformation. Here we reflect on three longstanding regional concerns-energy development, wolf reintroduction, and participatory governance-leveraging the pluralism of contemporary political ecology to better understand their contemporary incarnations. In so doing, we highlight the need to bring together insights from both "traditional" approaches and newer directions to better understand and engage contemporary challenges, with their heightened stakes and complexity. Such an approach demonstrates what we might learn about global processes in this place, as well as what insights regional praxis (often woefully provincial) might gain from elsewhere-new ways of seeing and doing political ecology. Our goal is to generate discussion among and between political ecologists and regional critical scholars, initiating new collaborative engagements that might serve the next wave of political ecology in the 21st century American West.
Communities reliant on subsistence and small-scale production are typically more vulnerable than others to disasters such as earthquakes. We study the earthquakes that struck Nepal in the spring of 2015 to investigate their impacts on smallholder communities and the diverse trajectories of recovery at the household and community levels. We focus on the first year following the earthquakes because this is when households were still devastated, yet beginning to recover and adapt. Through survey questionnaires, focus group discussions, open-ended interviews, and observations at public meetings we analyze physical impacts to farming systems and cropping cycles. We investigate respondent reports of loss and recovery through a new social-ecological recovery assessment instrument and find that diversification of livelihoods and access to common resources, alongside robust community institutions, were critical components of coping and recovery. There was widespread damage to subsistence farming infrastructure, which potentially accelerated ongoing transitions to cash crop adoption. We also find that perceptions of recovery varied widely among and within the typical predictors of recovery, such as caste and farm size, in sometimes unexpected ways. Although postdisaster recovery has material and psychosocial dimensions, our work shows that these may not change in the same direction.
In Spring 2015, a series of earthquakes and aftershocks struck Nepal. The earthquakes caused significant changes in labor and land availability, cash income needs, and land quality. We examine how these post-earthquake impacts converged with ongoing agricultural shifts. Earthquake-related socio-economic and landscape changes specifically motivate the adoption of cardamom, Amomum subulatum, a high-value ecologically beneficial, and low labor commercial crop. We investigate reasons for the increased interest in cardamom post-earthquake, and challenges associated with it. We find that adopting cardamom serves as an important post-disaster adaptation. However, more broadly, unevenly distributed interventions coupled with the high capital costs of agricultural transition exacerbate social differentiation in communities after the disaster. Adoption is often limited to economically better off smallholder farmers. This paper extends previous research on disasters and smallholder farming by highlighting the specific potential of disasters to accelerate agricultural transitions and resulting inequality from the changes.
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