Political and event ecology: critiques and opportunities for collaboration

1. "Against political ecology": the rebirth and development of event ecology Political ecology has faced two main critiques throughout its recent development. In a very influential article, "Against political ecology," Andrew Vayda and Bradley Walters (1999) argued that political ecologists were making a priori assumptions about the linkages between local environmental change and national and global political economic systems. The second critique has been that there is no need for the term "ecology" in political ecology, since research in the field had only indirectly focused on ecology and environmental changes. According to Vayda and Walters (1999: 268), human-environment interactions can be explained by "placing them within progressively wider and or denser contexts." They propose "event ecology" as a research method to be carried out by following two basic steps: "... begin research with focus on the environmental event [which they equate with environmental change] that one wants to explain and then work backward in time and outward in space so as to construct chains of causes and effects leading to those events and changes" (Vayda and Walters 1999: 169, emphasis added). They explain that one of the greatest advantages of using event ecology in human-environment research is that it encourages researchers to use whatever method and theory best suit the research questions, without having to follow any prescribed disciplinary and programmatic imperative. They argue that no a priori unit of analysis, like the 'ecosystem' or the 'watershed', is needed. Yet, the history of these ideas does not end here. Walters and Vayda, in "Event ecology, causal historical analysis, and human-environment research" (2009) reformulated what they called the "limited rationale" of their own previous event ecology approach. They addressed critiques of event ecology and made substantial and relevant changes. They incorporated, for instance, the construction of causal histories of interrelated social and biophysical events through a process called abduction—eliminative inference and reasoning from effects and causes. This basic and ingenious idea adapted counterfactual analysis for use in their event ecology. As they explain it, counterfactual reasoning comes into play to ascertain whether or not the presence of a particular antecedent event had causal influence over the event under scrutiny. To solve this puzzle, the following question should be asked: If this antecedent factor or event were absent, would the event of interest have turned out the same? Walters and Vayda say that where the answer is negative, such an event or factor has causal importance (2009: 541). In sum, what Walters and Vayda propose is a stepping-stone methodology to advance research concerned with understanding the driving forces of environmental change, one that is empirically and inductively driven, instead of a priori assuming general causes of change. According to them, "theory-driven research" involves studies that are testing theories and hypotheses previously established (a priori), and this style of reasoning tends to dismiss empirical and problem-oriented approaches. In this article, I discuss the origins and progress of event ecology and demonstrate its strengths and limitations vis-à-vis the development of political ecology research. Drawing on the case of a recently recognized quilombola community within a nature conservation unit in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, I propose a collaborative event ecology that combines the rationale of event ecology with critical perspectives inspired by political ecology's focus on power relations, conservation, and justice. This article is divided into 11 sections. Section 2 reconstructs the history of event ecology with its epistemological strengths and limitations. Then the article focuses on the rise of quilombos in Brazil and the challenge of reconciling the presence of traditional groups within nature-protected areas. After describing the biophysical, human, and institutional settings where the study was conducted, I move to a critique of the application of wilderness perspectives for nature conservation in Brazil, more specifically to the Atlantic Forest biome. In section 7, drawing on ethnographic data, I lay out the approach I propose to complement and modify event ecology. Inspired by conversations on environmental justice perspectives, I demonstrate that what is nature conservation for some may signify oppression, cultural loss, and negative livelihood changes for others.