Political-industrial ecology: An introduction

Political ecology and industrial ecology have emerged as influential, but distinct, intellectual thought traditions devoted to understanding the transformation of nature-society relations and processes. Evolving from the pioneering work by physicists and environmental engineers in the late 1960s (e.g. Ayres and Kneese, 1969), industrial ecology emerged as a distinct field in the 1990s (Graedel and Allenby, 2003). It is a largely normative project that seeks to quantify and dematerialize the resource stocks and flows of industrial ecosystems, product life cycles, and societal metabolisms. To systematically dissect production-consumption processes across cradle-to-grave phases (e.g. extraction, manufacturing, use, reuse), industrial ecology deploys material flow analysis, life cycle assessment, environmental input-output modeling, amongst other methods, and has cultivated more abstract principles and practices such as industrial symbiosis and socio-economic metabolism. As the field has matured, industrial ecology has branched out by becoming more heterogeneous, not only in terms of topical foci and methodology, but also in terms of how it understands the material basis of societal transitions (cf. Vienna School of Social Ecology; Haberl et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the overwhelming focus of industrial ecology is on the material rather than social dimensions of resource use. Political ecology emerged at roughly the same time (the term is usually attributed to Wolf in 1972) out of concern that environmental science and dominant narratives of environmental change were ‘apolitical’ in that they did not sufficiently consider the role of social and, especially, political economic processes in shaping these outcomes (Robbins, 2012). Its roots are much older than this, of course, with inspiration ranging from Humboldt and Marsh to Kropotkin and Marx. Political ecology has evolved to become a powerful thought tradition that now reaches across geography to cognate fields such as anthropology, environmental sociology, development studies, environmental history, and science and technology studies (STS). Political ecology investigates connections between political economy and environmental change, with special attention to issues of equity, power, access, and governance. Epistemologically and methodologically pluralistic, by explicitly questioning and destabilizing apolitical accounts of environmental change, political ecology is decidedly critical. Despite the shared focus on nature-society relations, until recently, industrial ecology and political ecology have not substantively engaged each other. This is curious given that both fields study resource flows and their transformation. As Liverman et al. (2003, p. 273) lamented in a review on global change research, despite obvious synergies, “Relatively few geographers have been involved in the study of industrial ecology.” But geographers and political ecologists are starting to engage in new and exciting ways. This has been sparked by the potential of leveraging theoretical and methodological strengths of each field to more deeply explore how ecological, political, and socio-economic process shape the relationships between a product, commodity, or material process, its primary inputs and outputs, and the relevant social and ecological implications. This led Newell and Cousins (2015) to propose the creation of a new subfield, political-industrial ecology, to enable the cross-fertilization of ideas, epistemologies, and approaches between political and industrial ecology. This editorial provides the opportunity to introduce a working definition, rationale, and process for this emerging subfield: