Response 7

Robbins was extremely uplifting for me to read after the constant, dense environmental policy of Kraft. As a social science major, there often seems little hope to make it in the world of environmental studies, yet Political Ecology defines much of itself just as that and in fact says, “surveying the changing fortunes of local people and the landscapes in which they live, probably comprise the largest share of work in political ecology” (13). This is exactly perfect for me, as I have been thinking for the past year that my dream job of being the intermediary between environmental policy and how it affects the communities that it regulates was a phantom. Apparently all along I’ve been looking for political ecology without knowing where to look. At Robbins’ mention of cultural ecology I nearly leapt up and proclaimed to the world how excited I was, since it sounds perfect for me—combining my background of anthropology and environmental studies at last!

Robbins again amazed me with his discussion of Malthusian population ideas. Probably since high school, I have been convinced that the population problem was the root of our environmental problems. If there were fewer people inhabiting the earth, fewer resources would be needed and we would therefore live more sustainably and without the issues we now face. Robbins accepts this idea and takes it several steps further. Population is an issue, yes. However, the style of life of that population is of even greater importance. If we all lived the way that the rural citizens of Peru live, the world would be a different place. And if the entire earth held the same “quality of life” as Americans, our resources would long have expired, leaving us with a dead planet. It is this way of life that is so important to change, not just the numbers of humans. We all know that we need to slow our use of those resources left on our planet, but being most focused on our way of life, we find it hard to step back and analyze ourselves and therefore see that how we live is entirely ridiculous. We are brought up to believe that we need all of these things—the laptop full of heavy metals and chemicals, the cars full of deadly fluids and batteries, light bulbs, cell phones all created of toxins that leach into our earth after we (readily) dispose of them. All of this I knew already, yet Robbins just makes me look at things from a new perspective. It is important to change what we have to be more sustainable, but it is most important to a complete paradigm shift into what is truly sustainable and change the way Americans think about the way they live. All of this again excites me as a social scientist, as I automatically see the importance of being culturally relative and instead of spurning other, “less developed” countries, we must instead strive to be more like them, to adopt their sustainable habits and rethink… everything.