Knowing Nature

“Political ecology powerfully joins forces with science and technology studies in these wide-ranging essays to argue that descriptions of nature are never neutral. Knowledge, even scientific knowledge, always comes from somewhere. It is the product of particular perspectives and partial visions. This is a timely message from an exceptionally distinguished array of authors spanning several disciplines. In a time of despair for many environmentalists, they offer hope that a new politics of inclusivity, in knowledge and power, is possible—and will lead us forward.”

“Knowing Nature is an ambitious, illuminating, and much-needed series of original research papers and reflections on the marriage of political ecology with science and technology studies. It comprises research that is equally at home in undoing the intricacies of quantitative, complex models as in guiding the reader through the density of poststructuralist thought. Brilliantly led by Mara J. Goldman, Paul Nadasdy, and Matthew D. Turner—three of the most important scholars of the environment today—it will be welcomed and avidly read by students and scholars alike, and will repay their interest with deeper insights and ways of conceiving the relationship between ways of doing and knowing.”

“At a time when conservation, climate change, and poverty are merging into a single global agenda; when through a complex institutional alchemy biodiversity is being reduced to carbon; when the resolute clarity of models routinely elide complexity and erase the particularity of place; and when place-based conservation is giving way to market-based mechanisms that encompass production landscapes—it is imperative that existing approaches to knowing nature be reconsidered. Knowing Nature explores the confluence of political ecology and science and technology studies and in doing so challenges our understanding of the politics of knowledge and the making of nature(s).”