Human impact = destruction of natural systems and processes

Familiar case?

• Starvation in West Africa = outcome of land productivity decreased due to soil depletion and nitrogen deficiencies caused by land over-exploitation for farming purposes. 
• Global markets affect local land practice and land change over time, changing soil quality and productivity as an outcome of human activity.

So how destruction appears and whom to blame?

Soil erosion. Deforestation. Desertification. Biodiversity loss. Water pollution. Atmospheric and climate changes. Environmental crisis is a pressing concern to producers around the world who are making a living off the land. But perhaps, more importantly, these topics are a central interest to apolitical ecologists, whose dominant narrative - that people destroy ecosystems out of ignorance, selfishness and overpopulation - is the central target of political ecology critique.

By responding to the environmental cries of Malthusians (advocates of population control) and technocrats ( technology should be in control of all decision making), political ecologists see environmental destruction presenting analytical challenges.

While popular accounts put blame on population growth leading to resource scarcity crisis and mass starvation, political ecologists account that what plays role is:

- socio-economic and institutional changes. They made poor communities and households more vulnerable to scarcity (holding less land and fewer rights to it);

- political economic change which made ecological systems more vulnerable to degradation. The progressive pressures placed by marginal communities on the land were environmentally destructive, causing declines in land productivity which was difficult and impossible to reverse when the process already started.

Today reading awakening book on political ecology. 

I have never before heard of this discipline, therefore it raised my curiosity, and I must say leading me to pretty amazing mind transformations. It offers a deeply critical view on ecology, and combines various disciplines (policies, rights, politics among other) when discussing subject of conservation.

Today I am reading a chapter dedicated to the forests. destruction of nature and human impact.

According to an author (Paul Robbins), once appearing in a protected forest, it is not only about its thickness what we can notice and shadows it generates, but as well incredibly creepy homogeneity of the scene. When trees planted in order, and have a structural pattern on the group, the presence of human impact is inevitable. Not only by a fact there is no human impact at all (because it is protected area) but rather that this forest is a creation of human. Forest represents a degraded scar, where commercial and state interests have halted its chaotic natural processes creating linear tracks....

This is no forest anymore. Rather as a dream of an engineer, a social construction of what a forest should look like, made by real political planning and an extremely large scale.

Animal species are here, many of them foreign to that region, like migrants from the other lands. Some are descendants of human introductions and experiments gone wrong.

What is natural and what is not, what should be preserved and what should not, what is degraded and what is not, what can be controlled and what cannot.

 Is forest a natural wilderness to be preserved from human impact and depredations of development? Is it a degraded scar, which demands restoration and disconnection from institutional mechanisms? Is it a social construction, revealing a human imagination what a forest should look like? Or is it chaotic tableau landscape powered by of nature which takes its own pace despite humanity's efforts at control? 

Investigating political ecological process and seeking explanations of environmental and social change, the answer, of course, is that it is all of these.

The forest - is a victim of utilitarian extraction which degradation defined by a decline in natural productivity, biodiversity or usefulness. The forest - is a product where nature constructed by human imaginary mind and collection of assumptions how a forest ought to look like. The forest - is a production, and industry for itself and for a human needs.


Political ecology only questions to define a process and who involved creating it, modifying it, making decision about it. Whether is a process of 'destruction' or 'construction' of 'environmental systems' or 'landscapes'.

Human-environment interaction has two ways: nature is 'destructed' through systems and human impact on environment. In a meantime 'ecology' is also something humans 'construct' through categories of knowledge and imagination. So, what is 'natural' and what is 'unnatural' in this case? 

It is predetermined in the first place by social and cultural concepts, assumptions, filters and structures.

Alarming Loss of Wildlife

Alarming Loss of Wildlife - is where I capture information on human-wildlife conflicts and alarming disappearance of wildlife (keywords: illegal wildlife trade, rainforest logging, ecocide, poaching, rhinos, great apes, Africa, Asia).

That's I guess is where my inspiration starts to reflect in this blog all what I guess it kind of urgent. I want to write this blog with a strong believe it can bring a value someway somehow. Either awareness, knowledge, or inspiration, yet with some small impact to play its role...

5 years in between...

Years passed since I took a leadership course with the Earth Charter to which I was also assigned to start writing this blog and complete few assignments. Many things happened in life since then. But what's important - is who I became as a result of those experience. And I must say it is a different person from a girl who was writing those blogs here back in 2008..

Yet still, it is me. This blog can not truly reflect who I am. Yet I am existing, thinking, inquiring, observing, creating... and still lead by the same force - my passion for this world, the planet, the humans, and the Nature.