Abstract

Discovering Political Ecology (Cederlöf and Loftus 2024) is a co-authored textbook that seeks to narrate the origins of political ecology with and against what might be referred to as the Anglo-American canon. This project is not without risks given the pedagogical appeal of a simple narrative. After introducing the book and its broader approach, I want to consider its broader aims and question how we might teach political ecology and environmental justice with and against their origin stories. For political ecology, that origin story is one of a paradigm shift in which cultural ecologists overcame the limits of “the site” to develop an analysis focused on a nested hierarchy of scales. For environmental justice, the story is one that takes us from struggles over dumping in dixie to Love Canal and the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. The first narrative is rooted in a predominantly Anglo-American body of engaged scholarship, the second in the informed praxis of North American social and environmental movements. In this seminar, I want to develop a conversation around how we might teach political ecology and EJ in ways that challenge Anglocentrism and acknowledge far more diverse origins to this body of scholarship and informed environmental praxis.