Knowing Nature
Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Mara J. Goldman and Matthew D. Turner
PRODUCTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE: SCIENTISTS, COMPLEX NATURES, AND THE QUESTION OF AGENCY
Introduction
Matthew D. Turner
1 Politicizing Environmental Explanations: What Can Political Ecology Learn from Sociology and Philosophy of Science?
Tim Forsyth
2 Debating the Science of Using Marine Turtles: Boundary Work among Species Experts
Lisa M. Campbell
3 Technobiological Imaginaries: How Do Systems Biologists Know Nature?
Joan H. Fujimura
4 Agency, Structuredness, and the Production of Knowledge within Intersecting Processes
Peter J. Taylor
5 Fermentation, Rot, and Other Human-Microbial Performances
Mrill Ingram
6 Ferricrete, Forests, and Temporal Scale in the Production of Colonial Science in Africa
Chris Duvall
APPLYING ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE: THE POLITICS OF CONSTRUCTING SOCIETY/NATURE
Introduction
Paul Nadasdy
7 “We Don’t Harvest Animals; We Kill Them”: Agricultural Metaphors and the Politics of Wildlife Management in the Yukon
Paul Nadasdy
8 Political Violence and Scientific Forestry: Emergencies, Insurgencies, and Counterinsurgencies in Southeast Asia
Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Lee Peluso
9 Spatial-Geographic Models of Water Scarcity and Supply in Irrigation Engineering and Management: Bolivia, 1952–2009
Karl Zimmerer
10 The Politics of Connectivity across Human-Occupied Landscapes: A Look at Corridors near Nairobi National Park, Kenya
Mara J. Goldman
Part 3
CIRCULATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE: NETWORKS, EXPERTISE, AND SCIENCE IN PRACTICE
Introduction
Mara J. Goldman
11 Rooted Networks, Webs of Relation, and the Power of Situated Science: Bringing the Models Back Down to Earth in Zambrana
Dianne Rocheleau
12 Circulating Science, Incompletely Regulating Commodities: Governing from a Distance in Transnational Agro-food Networks
Ryan E. Galt
13 Reclaiming the Technological Imagination: Water, Power, and Place in India
Roopali Phadke
14 Circulating Knowledge, Constructing Expertise
Rebecca Lave
15 Experiments as “Performances”: Interpreting Farmers’ Soil Fertility Management Practices in Western Kenya
Joshua J. Ramisch
Conclusion
Matthew D. Turner
References
List of Contributors
Index
“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).”
Biological Sciences: Ecology
Geography: Cultural and Historical Geography
Sociology: Demography and Human Ecology
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