Lahore University of Management Sciences

ANTH 246 – POLITICS OF ECOLOGY

Fall Semester 2016-17

Instructor Shafqat Hussain

Room No. TBA
Office Hours TBA
Email
Telephone

COURSE BASICS
Credit Hours 4
Lecture(s) Nbr of Lec(s) Per 2 Duration 1hr 50mins
Week

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course covers social science approaches to issues concerning ecology, the environment, and
nature. Ecology and the environment are affected by larger political, social, and economic forces,
so we will also broaden our analysis to include wider spatial and temporal scales. We will examine
the current state of the field by looking at how it has evolved from critiques of cultural ecology and
environmental sociology. The course will examine the struggle for environmental resources and its
relevance for the construction of social identities and cultural meaning. That is, a part of who we
are very much depends upon what and how we use these resources, thus identity is indirectly tied
to the physical environment. We will also look at how environmental conservation shapes the
relationship between marginal communities and powerful institutions, such as the state,
environmental NGOs and public media.

STRUCTURE OF COURSE
The course is roughly divided into three sections. In the first section we will discuss the emergence
and evolution of the subject and its application. We will explore the interdisciplinary nature of the
field, focusing on how Political Ecology challenges the dominant paradigms and narratives of
degradation, and presents an alternative method of looking at the same reality. The second section
deals with historical ecology, focusing on the disparate ways in which nature and environment
have been viewed and valued. We will look at roots of environmentalism by examining US national
parks movement and British sport hunting practices. The third section engages the core issues in
political ecology such as human-wildlife conflict, environmental hazards and disasters,
environmentalism and indigenous people, and conservation and capitalism.

BOOKS AND READINGS

George Schaller (1979). Stones of Silence: Journeys in the Himalayas. University of
Chicago.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Class attendance and participation
It is required to attend all classes. You will lose one percent of your total grade for each class
missed without a valid reason. (My alarm did not go off and other such excuses are not considered
as valid reasons). If you haven’t missed a single class throughout the term you will get full points.
You will be expected to have done the assigned readings and have prepared yourselves for
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discussion for each class.

Quiz
In order to make sure that you all do the readings, I will be giving quizzes in the class. The quizzes
will be based on the reading material assigned for that class. The quizzes will cover factual and
theoretical questions, so make sure to do the reading carefully and pay attention to details as well
as the argument of the paper. There will be a total of seven quizzes during the term. I will drop one
quiz with the lowest grade. I will announce the date for each quiz in class.

Mid-Term and Final Exam

The exams will be based on material covered during the lectures and discussions and comprise of
both short answer (100-250 words) and long answer (250-400 words) questions. There will be
between 12-14 questions in this part and you will be asked to answer between 10 -12. So there will
be a choice. We will discuss the exam format in class before the test date.

Grade Structure

This is the breakdown of the final grade:

Class attendance & participation: 10%

Quiz 40%
Mid-term, Exam 25%
Final Exam: 25%

Some Basic Rules:

No electronic devices – voice recorders, ipods, etc. – are allowed in the class, as I believe recording
devices encourage students not to pay attention to the lectures in the class. Also no laptops are
allowed for taking notes in the class, given the possible distractions they offer - checking emails,
upgrading facebook, etc. Please switch off your cell phones before coming to the class. Please do
not come to class if you are more than ten minutes late. Late arrivals create an unnecessary
distraction for the instructor as well as for the other students.

COURSE STRUCTURE AND SCHEDULE

Week 1: Introduction & Background to the Course
1. Paul Robbins (2004). Chapter 1 (What is Political ecology) in Political Ecology: A Critical
Introduction.
2. Piers Balikie (1987). The Political Economy of Soil Erosion, {ONLY}Chapter 4, pp:50-78
3. Peter Walker (2005). Political Ecology: Where is the Policy? Progress in Human Geography. Vol. 30.
No. 3: 382-395.

Week 2: Tracking the roots of environmentalism

1. Karl Jacoby (2004). Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History
of American Conservation by Karl Jacoby University of California Press. [selected chapters]
2. William Cronon (1996). The Problem with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, in
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York & London: W.W. Norton
Company.
3. Roderick Nash (1967). Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale University Press. [selected chapters]
4. WWF – Pakistan Wildlife Inquiry Report 1968 [unpublished report]
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5. Richard Grove (1990). The Origins of Environmentalism. In Nature. Vol. 345: 11-14.

Week 3: National Parks

1. Mark David Spence (1999). Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the
National Parks. Oxford University Press. (Introduction, ch. 3, 8 and conclusion).
2. Are Knudsen (1999). Conservation and Controversy in the Karakoram: Khunjerab National Park,
Pakistan. In Journal of Political Ecology. Vol. 6: 1 – 29.

3. George Schaller (1977). Stones of Silence [selected chapters]

Movie: PBS documentary on National Parks (Ken Burns)

Week 4: Radical Environmentalism

1. Arun Agrawal and Kent Redford (2009). Conservation and Displacement: An Overview. In
Conservation and Society. Vol. 7, No. 1:1-10.
2. Vandana Shiva (2004). Future of Food: countering globalization and recolonization of Indian
agriculture. Future. Vol 36, No. 6: 715-732.
3. Ramachandra Guha (1997). The Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti-humanism:
Wildlife Conservation in the Third World. The Ecologist. Vol 27, No. 1:14-20.

Week 5: Discourses of Degradation- Misreading the Landscape

1. Melissa Leach and James Fairhead (2000). Fashioned Forest Pasts, Occluded Histories?
International Environmental Analysis in West African Locales”, Development and Change 31
(2000): 35-59.

2. Michael Dove (1994). The Existential Status of the Pakistani Farmer: Studying Official
Constructions of Social Reality. In Ethnology. Vol. 33, No. 4: 331-351.
3. George Schaller (1977). Stones of Silence [selected chapters]

Week 6: (Un)Natural disasters

1. Michael Dove and M. H. Khan (1995). Competing Construction of Calamity: The Case of 1991
Bangladesh Cyclone. Population and Environment. 16(5): 445-471
2. Shafqat Hussain (2011). Natural Disasters in the Age of the Drone. Paper presented at the 107th
Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Montreal.
3. Dr. Att-ur-Rehman. Nature or HAARP. Dawn, October 17, 2010.
(http://archives.dawn.com/archives/70288)
Movie: The Storm (PBS documentary on Hurricane Katrina

Week 7: Community-Based Conservation

1. Arun Agrawal and Clark Gibson (1999). Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of
Community in Natural Resource Conservation. In World Development. Vol. 27, No. 4: 629-649.
2. Mountain Areas Conservancy Project. UNDP Project Document [unpublished report]

Week 8: Fall Break or Mid-term

Week 9: Colonial Hunting and Governance

1. Shafqat Hussain (2012). Forms of Predations: Tiger and Markhor Hunting in Colonial
Governance. In Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 46, No, 5:1212-1238.
2. Rangarajan, M. 2001. India’s Wildlife History. Permanent Black. Delhi [chapter 3]
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Week 10: Human-Wildlife Conflict
1. James Proctor, 1998.The Spotted Owl and the Contested Moral Landscape of Pacific
Northwest in Animal Geographies
2. Shafqat Hussain (2003). The status of snow leopard in Pakistan and its conflict with local
farmers. In Oryx. Vol. 37 (1): 26-33.
3. Shafqat Hussain (2000). Protecting the Snow Leopard and Enhancing Farmers’ Livelihood: A
pilot Insurance Scheme. In Baltistan in Mountain Research and Development. Vol. 20 (3): 224-229.

Week 11 – Neoliberal Conservation

1. Ken McDonald. 2004. Developing 'Nature': Global Ecology and the Politics of
Conservation In Northern Pakistan. In Confronting Environments: Local Environmental
Understanding in a Globalizing World. James Carrier (Ed).
Lantham: AltaMira Press.
2. Shafqat Hussain. 2007. Do economic Incentives Work. In Seminar, No. 577: 39-44.

Week 12 – Representations and environmental politics of Indigenous people

1. Kent Redford (1991). The Ecologically Nobel Savage. In Cultural Survival Quarterly. Vol. 15, No. 1:
2-5.
2. Beth Conklin and Laura Graham (1995). Shifting Middle Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-
Politics. In American Anthropologist. 97(4):695 – 710.
3. Shimshal Nature Trust – Fifteen Year Management Plan.

Week 13 – Nature and Recreation

1. Paige West and Carrier, J (2004). Ecotourism and Authenticity: Getting Away from it all? In
Current Anthropology, Volume 45, Number 4: 483-498.
2. David Butz (2000). Sustainable Tourism and Everyday Life in Shimshal, Pakistan. In Tourism
Recreation Research, Vol. 27 (3); 53-65.

Week 14: Climate Change

1. Heather Lazrus & Carol Farbotko, “The first climate refugees? Contesting global narratives of
climate change in Tuvalu”, Global Environmental Change 22 (2012): 382-390.

2. Guest Speak [TBA]

Week 15: Revision and final exam