Book Chapter
The political ecology of weeds: a scalar approach to landscape transformations
Christian A Kull, Haripriya Rangan
INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL ECOLOGY | EDWARD ELGAR PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2015
Abstract
How do plants that move and spread across landscapes become branded as weeds and thereby objects of contention and control? We outline a political ecology approach that builds on a Lefebvrian understanding of the production of space, identifying three scalar moments that make plants into ‘weeds’ in different spatial contexts and landscapes. The three moments are: The operational scale, which relates to empirical phenomena in nature and society; the observational scale, which defines formal concepts of these phenomena and their implicit or explicit ‘biopower’ across institutional and spatial categories; and the interpretive scale, which is communicated through stories and actions expressing h..
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