Paul Robbins
Biographic Data
| ID | 102117 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Robbins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Robbins |
| SIGNATURE | ROBBINS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2818-4732 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1223 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 19 |
Credit in agrarian India: Narrative policy struggles over farmer surplus
Coffee, Trees, and Labor: Political Economy of Biodiversity in Commodity Agroforests
Tropical and subtropical plantation agriculture has been shown to be compatible with the conservation of biodiversity, but the specific practices, conditions, and farmer strategies associated with such diversity remain poorly understood. In the ecologically rich region of India’s Western Ghats, specifically, farm-scale tree species diversity is a key structural condition explaining avian diversity. Surveying a sample of coffee plantations in the …
Green Sacrifice Zones, or Why a Green New Deal Cannot Ignore the Cost Shifts of Just Transitions
Revolutionary humility: Response to Gómez-Baggethun
The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. Diana K. Davis; The Politics of Scale: A History of Rangeland Science. Nathan F. Sayre
Is less more … or is more less? Scaling the political ecologies of the future
Revisiting and revitalizing political ecology in the American West
Return of the Repressed: Native Presence and American Memory in John Muir'sBoyhood and Youth
Naturalist John Muir has often been criticized for his relative silence on the role of native peoples in occupying, forging, and tending the environments that he so often described as wilderness. His work is further marked by the absence of reflection on the elimination of native peoples from the land in and around the exact locales he revered most in his writing. Muir’s The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, published in 1912–1913, is an anomalous p…
Scientific Opportunities in the Great Entanglement
Attending a symposium on the topic of “Ecological Novelty” can confront a visitor with a sense of environmental vertigo. Cats run amok in tropical ecosystems; invasive tortoises fill the niches of
Ecologies of the colonial present: Pathological forestry from the taux de boisement to civilized plantations
Tree-planting has long been an obsession of postcolonial environmental governance. Never innocent of its imperial history, the practice persists in global regimes of forestry today. For over two centuries, afforestation has been viewed as a panacea for a variety of ills including civilizational decline, diminished precipitation, warming temperatures, soil erosion, and decreasing biodiversity. As a result, tree plantations, despite their demonstra…
Turfgrass subjects
Estimates of lawn coverage are difficult to make, but turfgrass cover is estimated to be around 16 million hectares nationally. With private turfgrass estimated to exceed 23 percent of urban land cover, and lawn grass coverage increasing by well more than one hundred thousand hectares annually. The lawn, a significant chemical input and a massive multi-national economy, remains in hiding, if directly in plain sight, an artifact of personal choice…
Managing mosquito spaces: Citizen self-governance of disease vectors in a desert landscape
Baby bust: Towards political demography
Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, t…
Teaching through objects: Grounding environmental studies in things
The Pisa grammar decodes diverse human–environment approaches
Nietschmann and the diverse economies of the Miskito
Using historical political ecology to understand the present: Water, reeds, and biodiversity in the Camargue Biosphere Reserve, southern France
Mathevet, R., N. L. Peluso, A. Couespel, and P. Robbins. 2015. Using historical political ecology to understand the present: water, reeds, and biodiversity in the Camargue Biosphere Reserve, southern France. Ecology and Society 20(4):17. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07787-200417
Global assemblages, resilience, and Earth Stewardship in the Anthropocene
In this paper, we argue that the Anthropocene is an epoch characterized not only by the anthropogenic dominance of the Earth's ecosystems but also by new forms of environmental governance and institutions. Echoing the literature in political ecology, we call these new forms of environmental governance “global assemblages”. Socioecological changes associated with global assemblages disproportionately impact poorer nations and communities along the…
Can political ecology be hopeful ecology
Cries along the chain of accumulation
Ecological anxiety disorder: Diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene
The quickly changing character of the global environment has predicated a number of crises in the sciences of biology and ecology. Specifically, the rapid rate of ecological change has led to the proliferation of novel ecologies. These unprecedented ecosystems and assemblages challenge the scientific, as well as cultural, core of many disciplines. This has led to divisive debates over what constitutes a 'natural' system state, and over what kinds…
Environnement, discours et pouvoir
The Mutual Conditioning of Humans and Pathogens: Implications for Integrative Geographical Scholarship
We highlight an emerging mode of human–environment enquiry that is executed by cross-disciplinary teams, spurs innovation of hybrid methods, and leads to nonintuitive findings relevant beyond disciplinary framings or specific cases. The extension of this approach in health geography is particularly instructive. By focusing on material objects like soils, insects, or sewage, researchers from diverse epistemologies are compelled to translate concep…
Response from the book's editors
Is geographic education the next financial bubble
The neoliberalization of nature: Governance, privatization, enclosure and valuation
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their co
Ecological anxiety disorder: Diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene
The quickly changing character of the global environment has predicated a number of crises in the sciences of biology and ecology. Specifically, the rapid rate of ecological change has led to the proliferation of novel ecologies. These unprecedented ecosystems and assemblages challenge the scientific, as well as cultural, core of many disciplines. This has led to divisive debates over what constitutes a 'natural' system state, and over what kinds…
The Intersections of Biological Diversity and Cultural Diversity: Towards Integration
There is an emerging recognition that the diversity of life comprises both biological and cultural diversity.In the past, however, it has been common to make divisions between nature and culture, arising partly out of a desire to control nature.The range of interconnections between biological and cultural diversity are reflected in the growing variety of environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged.In this article, we present ideas from a numb…
Tracking Invasive Land Covers in India, or Why Our Landscapes Have Never Been Modern
The effects of rationalization and bureaucratization on the landscape are myriad and contradictory. The unforeseen environmental consequences resulting from modern planning create new geographies far beyond those of the planner's design. This article explores the land-cover effects of state-sponsored modernization efforts in the semiarid Godwar region of Rajasthan, India. Using satellite imagery, historical data, household production information,…
The politics of barstool biology: Environmental knowledge and power in greater Northern Yellowstone
Fixed Categories in a Portable Landscape: The Causes and Consequences of Land-Cover Categorization
In this paper I explore both the causes and the effects of defining land-cover categories for the mapping of landscapes. Utilizing a participatory remote sensing technique in a case example from Rajasthan, India, I demonstrate that local and expert characterizations of the environment are qualitatively and quantitatively divergent. Satellite imagery, I therefore conclude, is not an impartial tool for the settlement of debates about land cover but…
Comparing Invasive Networks: Cultural and Political Biographies of Invasive Species
Under what cultural and political conditions do certain species become successful invaders? What impact does species invasion have on human culture and politics? The work assembled in this special issue of the Geographical Review suggests complex interspecies interactions that complicate any answer to these questions. It demonstrates the need to advance a more integrative human/environment approach to species invasion than has hitherto been seen.…
The last enclosure: Resisting privatization of wildlife in the Western United States
Deer forests and the people cannot coexist...one or the other must yield...[Proprietors] follow a trade in deer with an eye solely towards profit... The huntsman who wants a deer-forest limits his offer
Beyond Ground Truth: GIS and the Environmental Knowledge of Herders, Professional Foresters, and Other Traditional Communities
The rotten institution: Corruption in Natural Resource Management
The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political Economy
Study of local environmental knowledge has led to a general critique of state epistemology, positing a controlling, official knowledge that crushes competing accounts of nature. Skeptical of that claim, in this paper I assess the differences between state and local knowledge empirically, using a case study of the Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary in Rajasthan, India, to explore the way knowledge varies across class, caste, gender, and affiliation wi…
Writing the New West: A Critical Review
A vast and growing interdisciplinary research effort has focused on the rise of the so‐called New West, purportedly the product of regional socioeconomic, political, and ecological upheavals in states like Montana and Colorado. Reviewing the growing research on this problem in sociology, economics, geography, and conservation science, this article identifies four central questions at the core of this diverse scholarship. Our review demonstrates t…
Paper Forests: Imagining and deploying exogenous ecologies in arid India
A Bug's Life and the Spatial Ontologies of Mosquito Management
This article uses the theory of Gilles Deleuze to address the disjuncture between (1) the mechanical, chemical, and thermal processes of transduction that determine the biogeographical life of the mosquito; and (2) the spatialities of historic and contemporary management strategies. The history of mosquito management reveals two operative spatial ontologies, one an immanent horizontalism underwriting an intimate strategy of detection and destruct…
Obstacles to a First World Political Ecology? Looking near without Looking up
Lawns and Toxins
Political ecology in political geography
Authority and Environment: Institutional Landscapes in Rajasthan, India
To date, there have been few systematic assessments of the role of social institutions—rules, norms, and systems of authority and power—in creating and reconfiguring natural environments. In the desert grass and shrub lands of Rajasthan, India, where multiple, contending institutions govern village resources in a state of legal pluralism, the need for such research is pressing. Here, state political interventions vie against traditional common an…
A Forest of Contradictions: Producing the Landscapes of the Scottish Highlands
While total global forest cover is decreasing, in many parts of the world forests are on the rebound. Uncritical examinations of this phenomenon credit the benign diffusion of capitalist development for this “forest transition.” More critical readings of this question—including green Marxian and poststructuralist approaches—might conclude something very different, however. In this paper, we explore the question of expanding forest cover, using th…
Producing and Consuming Chemicals: The Moral Economy of the American Lawn
The burgeoning application of fertilizers and pesticides to residential lawns, which has begun to offset the gains made in reducing the use of chemicals in agriculture, represents a serious environmental hazard in the United States and elsewhere. Increased use and purchase occur specifically among a sector of consumers who explicitly and disproportionately acknowledge the risks associated with chemical deposition, moreover, and who express concer…
Ecologies of the colonial present: Pathological forestry from the taux de boisement to civilized plantations
Tree-planting has long been an obsession of postcolonial environmental governance. Never innocent of its imperial history, the practice persists in global regimes of forestry today. For over two centuries, afforestation has been viewed as a panacea for a variety of ills including civilizational decline, diminished precipitation, warming temperatures, soil erosion, and decreasing biodiversity. As a result, tree plantations, despite their demonstra…
Turfgrass revolution: Measuring the expansion of the American lawn
There and back again: Epiphany, disillusionment, and rediscovery in political ecology
Interrogating Land Cover Categories: Metaphor and Method in Remote Sensing
The increasing sophistication of classification techniques used in land use and land cover analysis has not been matched by attention to the origin and effects of land cover categories. While classifications appear unproblematic and self-evident, they carry with them their own histories, meanings and effects, which remain largely unexamined. In an effort at such scrutiny, we examine the origins of land cover categories deployed in remote sensing …
Baby bust: Towards political demography
Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, t…
Mobile Pastoralists: Development Planning and Social Change in Oman
Authority and Environment: Institutional Landscapes in Rajasthan, India
To date, there have been few systematic assessments of the role of social institutions—rules, norms, and systems of authority and power—in creating and reconfiguring natural environments. In the desert grass and shrub lands of Rajasthan, India, where multiple, contending institutions govern village resources in a state of legal pluralism, the need for such research is pressing. Here, state political interventions vie against traditional common an…
Paper Forests: Imagining and deploying exogenous ecologies in arid India
Nomadization in Rajasthan, India: Migration, Institutions, and Economy
Meat matters: Cultural politics along the commodity chain in India
In a period when the global market is generally supposed to be erasing local meaning and applying uniform significance to objects and consumers, cultural commodity politics are in fact proliferating. Drawing on the case of the Indian meat economy, I argue here that the further that commodities travel in economic life, the more they affect and are affected by non-economic systems of signification. Specifically, the expanding livestock commodity ch…
Meat matters: Cultural politics along the commodity chain in India
Beyond Bias? The Promise and Limits of Q Method in Human Geography
Q method is a quantitative technique for eliciting, evaluating, and comparing human subjectivity. We introduce the method here and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, especially with regards to its incorporation into human geographic research. We conclude that Q method is particularly appropriate for human geographies informed by anti-essentialist notions of the subject and constructivist accounts of social and natural reality. Claims by the f…
Interrogating Land Cover Categories: Metaphor and Method in Remote Sensing
The increasing sophistication of classification techniques used in land use and land cover analysis has not been matched by attention to the origin and effects of land cover categories. While classifications appear unproblematic and self-evident, they carry with them their own histories, meanings and effects, which remain largely unexamined. In an effort at such scrutiny, we examine the origins of land cover categories deployed in remote sensing …
The rotten institution: Corruption in Natural Resource Management
Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management
This book deals with the topic of traditional ecological knowledge specifically in the context of natural resource management. An issue of today is how humans can develop a more acceptable relationship with the environment that supports them. Growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge is perhaps indicative of two things: the need for ecological insights from indigenous practices of resource use; and the need to develop a new ecological …
The Practical Politics of Knowing: State Environmental Knowledge and Local Political Economy
Study of local environmental knowledge has led to a general critique of state epistemology, positing a controlling, official knowledge that crushes competing accounts of nature. Skeptical of that claim, in this paper I assess the differences between state and local knowledge empirically, using a case study of the Kumbhalgarh Wildlife Sanctuary in Rajasthan, India, to explore the way knowledge varies across class, caste, gender, and affiliation wi…
Lawns and Toxins
Tracking Invasive Land Covers in India, or Why Our Landscapes Have Never Been Modern
The effects of rationalization and bureaucratization on the landscape are myriad and contradictory. The unforeseen environmental consequences resulting from modern planning create new geographies far beyond those of the planner's design. This article explores the land-cover effects of state-sponsored modernization efforts in the semiarid Godwar region of Rajasthan, India. Using satellite imagery, historical data, household production information,…
Fixed Categories in a Portable Landscape: The Causes and Consequences of Land-Cover Categorization
In this paper I explore both the causes and the effects of defining land-cover categories for the mapping of landscapes. Utilizing a participatory remote sensing technique in a case example from Rajasthan, India, I demonstrate that local and expert characterizations of the environment are qualitatively and quantitatively divergent. Satellite imagery, I therefore conclude, is not an impartial tool for the settlement of debates about land cover but…
Obstacles to a First World Political Ecology? Looking near without Looking up
Turfgrass revolution: Measuring the expansion of the American lawn
A Forest of Contradictions: Producing the Landscapes of the Scottish Highlands
While total global forest cover is decreasing, in many parts of the world forests are on the rebound. Uncritical examinations of this phenomenon credit the benign diffusion of capitalist development for this “forest transition.” More critical readings of this question—including green Marxian and poststructuralist approaches—might conclude something very different, however. In this paper, we explore the question of expanding forest cover, using th…
The Lawn‐Chemical Economy and Its Discontents
The daily geographies of consumption represent some of the most ecologically important and economically complex frontiers for critical research. Among these, the turfgrass lawn is perhaps the most overlooked, owing to its very ordinariness. Despite the serious risks posed to human health and ecosystem viability by high‐input lawn systems, little critical scholarship has engaged the lawn, especially as a structured economic phenomenon. This paper …
Networks and Knowledge Systems: An Alternative to “Race or Place”
Political ecology in political geography
Producing and Consuming Chemicals: The Moral Economy of the American Lawn
The burgeoning application of fertilizers and pesticides to residential lawns, which has begun to offset the gains made in reducing the use of chemicals in agriculture, represents a serious environmental hazard in the United States and elsewhere. Increased use and purchase occur specifically among a sector of consumers who explicitly and disproportionately acknowledge the risks associated with chemical deposition, moreover, and who express concer…
Beyond Ground Truth: GIS and the Environmental Knowledge of Herders, Professional Foresters, and Other Traditional Communities
Pastoralists Inside-Out: The Contradictory Conceptual Geography of Rajasthan's Raika
Pastoralism in Rajasthan, as elsewhere in India, has for many years been declared to be in a state of 'crisis'. Decline of pasturage and capitalisation of agricultural production regimes have long been identified as culprits in 'squeezing' the region's livestock producers out of the economy (Salzman 1986). Reports of the death of Rajasthani pastoralism, however, have been greatly exaggerated; livestock production in the region continues to boom a…
Culture and Politics of Invasive Species
Culture and Politics of Invasive Species." Geographical Review, 94(2), pp. iii–iv Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul RobbinsDr. Robbins is an associate professor of geography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721
Comparing Invasive Networks: Cultural and Political Biographies of Invasive Species
Under what cultural and political conditions do certain species become successful invaders? What impact does species invasion have on human culture and politics? The work assembled in this special issue of the Geographical Review suggests complex interspecies interactions that complicate any answer to these questions. It demonstrates the need to advance a more integrative human/environment approach to species invasion than has hitherto been seen.…
Political science (50 works) · Geography (42 works) · Politics (35 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Ecology (30 works) · Economics (29 works) · Law (29 works) · Biology (25 works) · Ecology (22 works) · Environmental ethics (19 works)