Contentious Geographies

Dr Michael K. Goodman is a Lecturer in Geography at King's College London, UK, Dr Maxwell T. Boykoff, is a Research Fellow at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Dr Kyle T. Evered, is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Michigan State University, USA.

'Contentious Geographies is a tour-de-force. The editors link themes of environmental knowledge, meaning and scale across twelve diverse contributors' chapters to provide an insightful, coherent and critical approach to environment-society relationships. The case studies provide lucid illustrations of the political and epistemological basis of "contentious geographies" which lives up to the promise of the book's title.' Piers Blaikie, University of East Anglia, UK 'This engaging and accessible collection calls attention to the importance of knowledge in environmental controversy. In a wonderfully diverse set of essays, the collection makes the case for the significance of both explicit contestation over scientific knowledge and more diffuse and everyday ways of knowing places, environments, resources and people.' Becky Mansfield, Ohio State University, USA 'In the twenty-first century the word environment is almost always shrouded in politics: whose environment are we talking about? Whose environmental knowledge and practice? Contentious Geographies vividly shows how these questions - and the realities to which they speak - are deeply, sometimes violently, contested. Its originality and power is how the book moves "the politics of the environment" - a staple of political ecology - to an examination, through a panoply of rich case studies focusing on knowledges, meanings and scale, the forms and modalities through which the environment is contended. An important and path-breaking volume.' Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley, USA '...this book is a welcome addition to the discipline of Political Ecology, which to date has mainly focused on the politics of (environmental) knowledge and meanings with limited explicit consideration of how these manipulate scale and place to favour particular worldviews and policies. ... Significant credit must go to the editors for encouraging highly accessible contributions with an excellent balance between theoretical introductions and practical case studies. The book contains some of the clearest and up-to-date introductions to political ecology concepts, sparing readers unfamiliar with the language of the social sciences from too many '-alities' and '-isms'. Although aimed at a wide academic audience, the excellent contributions and variety of case studies makes it essential reading to practitioners and students in geography, environmental and development studies.' Land Degradation and Development '...accessible and pleasantly concise responses to the central questions of the volume.' Environment and Planning A 'By clearly developing the best traditions of political ecology in new directions the book lives up to [its] promise, and admirably so. Accordingly, it should be a valuable substantive and theoretical resource for scholars, researchers and postgraduate students alike.' The Geographical Journal

• Chapter 1 Contentious Geographies: Environmental Knowledge, Meaning, Scale, Michael K. Goodman, Maxwell T. Boykoff, Kyle T. Evered; Part 1 Translating Contentious Environmental Knowledge and Science; Chapter 2 The Contentious World of Jared Diamond’s Collapse, Tim Forsyth; Chapter 3 Fight Semantic Drift!? Mass Media Coverage of Anthropogenic Climate Change, Maxwell T. Boykoff; Chapter 4 Whose Scarcity? The Hydrosocial Cycle and the Changing Waterscape of La Ligua River Basin, Chile, Jessica Budds; Part 2 Conflicting and Shifting Environmental Knowledges, Livelihoods, and Power; Chapter 5 ‘Environmentality’ in Rajasthan’s Groundwater Sector: Divergent Environmental Knowledges and Subjectivities, Trevor L. Birkenholtz; Chapter 6 Discursive Spearpoints: Contentious Interventions in Amazonian Indigenous Environments, Logan A. Hennessy; Part 3 Environmental Movements: Contested (Re)Scaling of Knowledges, Problems and Narratives; Chapter 7 Confronting Invisibility: Reconstructing Scale in California’s Pesticide Drift Conflict, Jill Harrison; Chapter 8 Scale and Narrative in the Struggle for Environment and Livelihood in Vieques, Puerto Rico, Karen Schmelzkopf; Chapter 9 Making Local Places GE-Free in California’s Contentious Geographies of Genetic Pollution and Coexistence, Dustin Mulvaney; Part 4 Contested Production of Environmental Science, Law, and Knowledge; Chapter 10 Regional Power and the Power of the Region: Resisting Dam Removal in the Pacific Northwest, Eve Vogel; Chapter 11 Law of Regions: Mining Legislation and the Construction of East and West, Johanna Haas; Part 5 Fraught Spatial Technologies and Knowledge Construction; Chapter 12 1An earlier and shorter version of this chapter was published as an Introduction to Mapping Communities: Ethics, Values, Practice (East-West Center, 2005) that documents the collection of case studies covered by our project. Yet another shorter communication was published as ‘Mapping power: ironic effects of spatial information te