Nature and Culture

Faced with the ecological crisis, it is necessary to elaborate a cosmopolitical stance. Such a cosmopolitics indicates the degree to which traditionally political categories are in fact products of the ecological landscape. Bruno Latour helps us theorize just such a cosmopolitics. I argue that Latour allows us privileged access to the diverse agencies composing our ecological condition. Latour is primarily an ecological thinker. I explore Latour's own formulations of a cosmopolitics and points of contact between Latour and the broader tradition of political ecology as exemplified by the American environmental theorist Aldo Leopold. I claim that Latour's cosmopolitical program benefits from being placed into dialogue with classic ecological formulations such as Leopold's conception of the land community and its various normative implications—his so-called “land ethic.”

In the last two decades, new academic journals, textbooks, and research networks attest to ecologists’ rising interest in cities. How did ecologists come to enter cities and to view them as places worth studying? To what extent does this new interest launch a broader redefinition of the type of knowledge that matters in ecology? Drawing on the new political sociology of science, and using a review of publications in urban ecology, we argue that the politics of urban ecological knowledge does not merely correspond to the promotion of a new subfield of ecology dedicated to cities: it has launched instead a broader, contested redefinition of the goals, practices, and relevance of ecology as a whole. We unpack the tensions between a “city-driven agenda” aiming to integrate ecological science into the interdisciplinary field of urban sciences, and an “ecology-driven agenda” aiming to research cities as part of ecological discipline.

This article presents the Hudson Valley of New York State as a broadly relevant case study to explore how the introduction of non-native species has historically served as a crucial facet of US (and pre-US) settler colonialism, undermining the more-than-human worlds tended by Native peoples and replacing them with assemblages of species conducive to European settlement. In it, I draw from long-term fieldwork with (non-Native) anti-invasive species practitioners who are increasingly doubtful about their ability to protect already stressed habitats from the ever-accelerating tide of new invasive organisms, despite their dogged efforts. In these desperate circumstances, what would it mean to shift from the prevailing approach that treats each new species in isolation and instead address the factors that enable invasiveness in the first place?

In the current study, we depart from migration biographies of first-generation Moroccan migrants living in Belgium to understand how environmental factors interfere in migration decision making and how its importance varies over life stages. Most Moroccan migrants came to Belgium as labor migrants or family “reunifers,” so little research has inquired whether and how environmental changes have played a role in making migration more appealing, at least during certain stages of people's lives. By applying a case study approach to three selected Moroccan migrants’ biographies, we aim to meticulously demonstrate how peoples’ migration aspirations have gradually developed over the life course and cannot be pinned down to either natural, cultural, or socio-economic factors. Rather, they should be understood within the wider changing socio-economic and natural environment while considering the interplay of factors within these environments.

Handelsman, Jo. 2021. A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath our Feet. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Evans, Matthew. 2021. Soil: The Incredible Story of What Keeps the Earth, and Us, Healthy. Australia: Murdoch Books.