The Violent Environments - by Nancy Lee Peluso & Michael Watts (Paperback)

About the Book

Do environmental problems and processes produce violence? Current U.S. policy about environmental conflict and scholarly work on environmental security assume direct causal links between population growth, resource scarcity, and violence. This belief...

Book Synopsis

Do environmental problems and processes produce violence? Current U.S. policy about environmental conflict and scholarly work on environmental security assume direct causal links between population growth, resource scarcity, and violence. This belief, a staple of governmental decision-making during both Clinton administrations and widely held in the environmental security field, depends on particular assumptions about the nature of the state, the role of population growth, and the causes of environmental degradation.The conventional understanding of environmental security, and its assumptions about the relation between violence and the environment, are challenged and refuted in Violent Environments. Chapters by geographers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists include accounts of ethnic war in Indonesia, petro-violence in Nigeria and Ecuador, wildlife conservation in Tanzania, and "friendly fire" at Russia's nuclear weapons sites. Violent Environments portrays violence as a site-specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and societies, yet connected to larger processes of material transformation and power relations. The authors argue that specific resource environments, including tropical forests and oil reserves, and environmental processes (such as deforestation, conservation, or resource abundance) are constituted by and in part constitute the political economy of access to and control over resources. Violent Environments demands new approaches to an international set of complex problems, powerfully arguing for deeper, more ethnographically informed analyses of the circumstances and processes that cause violence.

Review Quotes

"Provides both a critique of the school of environmental security and alternative ways of understanding the connections between environment and science."--Book News, January 2002

"This book calls for a bold new fusion of a multifaceted political economy with environmental and cultural politics to address the real landscapes of violence. Opening up a vast new arena for debate, discussion, and political action, Violent Environments establishes convincing grounds for a thorough rethinking of the subject. The critique it offers is both compelling and desperately needed."--Karl S. Zimmerer, University of Wisconsin

"This important book offers a topical, richer and more complex approach to understanding the connections between population and the environment than does the current conventional wisdom. With a healthy variety of case studies and a focus both on a wide range of environmental topics and on the diverse forms of violence associated with environmental relations, Violent Environments is a unique and provocative collection."--Philip McMichael, Cornell University, author of Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective

"Violent Environments is a thought-provoking. . .volume that should be read carefully by all those interested in the various debates over environmental security. Many of the book's theoretical arguments and empirical findings provide important and timely challenges to mainstream approaches to studying the environment-violence nexus. Neo-Malthusian critics will find much to build upon in their efforts to develop a more systematic political economy/political ecology alternative."--Colin Kahl, University of Minnesota, Environmental Change and Security Project Report, Issue 8, 2002

About the Author

Nancy Lee Peluso is Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology and Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Michael Watts is Director of the Institute of International Studies and Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.