The Robbins (2012) Political Ecology text gave me so much trouble when I tried to go straight back into it as a “refresher” before diving into my other accumulated political ecology readings. I kept opening and then closing it, and I couldn’t figure out why – I had already pushed through it once, a year and a half ago. After giving myself permission to read anything else, it made sense. It turns out that I’d gotten everything I could out of Robbins until I went into the other perspectives and realized what I’d gotten wrong or incomplete in my first read of the book. Now I can understand – and place properly within political ecology thought – things that eluded me before (in some cases without knowing it), like the Chapter 3 section “Objects, Actor-Networks, and the Problem of Materiality,” his words on subjects and governmentality, and to a degree the precepts of urban political ecology. After reading outside that book for a while, everything was so much better contextualized.
Sometimes you just have to take out your brain and scrub it on some different rocks.
MY BARBARIC MAUP 