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.