Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 83land-users in the developing world. Though the field included anthropologists,in geography TWPE emerged out of long-standing interestsin the non-Western world among regional geographers and out of adissatisfaction with the ‘modernisation’ theory of the 1950s and 1960s.Thistheory had predicted that the developing world would follow the sametrajectory as the developed world.Yet, by the early 1970s, it was clear thatmany developing countries remained land-based (non-urbanised), poorand only partly industrialised. Drawing on political economy (a cluster ofleft-wing economic theories of which Marxism is one),TWPE inquired intohow uses of land and resources at the local level were conditioned by ahierarchy of social forces extending up the global level. For instance,Blaikie’s (1985) pioneering The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in DevelopingCountries constructed a bottom-up analysis from individual land-use decisions(e.g. what crops to grow, whether to pay for irrigation measures, etc.)to larger scales, at each level ‘examining the social relations that shapeopportunities and constraints for land users’ (Zimmerer 1996: 177). In thisregard, political ecologists shared Marxist geographers’ preoccupation withpower relations and large-scale societal structures – indeed, many earlypolitical ecologists were Marxists (like Michael Watts, whose researchI’ll discuss in the next chapter). Politically, they wished to alter thoserelations and structures so that poor, developing-world farmers would notbe forced into degrading the resources and environments upon whichthey depended for their livelihoods. The close connections betweenTWPE and critical-hazards analysis were later illustrated by the fact that PiersBlaikie co-authored the important book At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’sVulnerability,and Disasters (Blaikie et al. 1994).The main exceptions to the de-naturalising thrust of human–environment geography during this period were resource geography,Sauerian landscape geography and cultural ecology. As noted earlier,the former subfield emerged in the late 1960s when many governmentsand publics became concerned about the seemingly precipitous declinein natural-resource availability worldwide. Alarmist books like Blueprintfor Survival (Goldsmith et al. 1972), The Population Bomb (Ehrlich 1970) andThe Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) predicted a Malthusian futureof ‘overpopulation’, where a finite resource base would limit the numbersof people who can live on the planet. Others, though, were optimisticthat technological innovation and ingenuity would allow more peopleto live longer at a higher standard than ever before. In this context, the