Abstract
I had the very real pleasure of reviewing Loftus’ draft manuscript for the University of Minnesota Press for its consideration of publication. Along with another anonymous reviewer, I am in the privileged position of seeing not only the final copy of this book but also where it began. I said in my initial review, and I’ll say now again, that I very much enjoyed the book and see it doing important intellectual–political work by helping codify and solidify the terrain of urban political ecology (UPE). As Loftus discusses, since the early 2000s, the notion of UPE has been picking up intellectual traction, and while there have been several highly cited papers on the topic, there has yet to be a full-on comprehensive book length treatment of the larger theoretical evolution that has underpinned the emergence of UPE. As somebody who often advises MA/PhD students interested in this topic, this book now provides a widespread and sophisticated introduction for people to gain deep access to a host of historically complex ideas central to the evolution of UPE and well beyond.
The origin story does not tend to get mentioned much, but in my estimation, Erik Swyngedouw properly coined the phrase “Urban Political Ecology” some 15 plus years ago in 1996 in his paper titled “The city as a hybrid: On nature, society and cyborg urbanization” published in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. In that paper, Swyngedouw, like Loftus does in this book, drew deeply on the robust urbanist traditions that have helped politicize human geography and simultaneously drew theoretical inspiration from synergies that were brewing at the intersection of political economy, political ecology, and science and technology studies. Both Swyngedouw then and Loftus now help explode uneven social power relations through the notion of urban metabolism by mixing deeper understandings of representational, discursive, ideological, material, and biochemical constellations of power. For both, UPE in name is much less important than are the theoretical threads that are shown to be both multidirectional in their intellectual networked trajectories and omnipresent within many larger bundles of geographic social theory.
In going beyond the “old man” (Swyngedouw was Loftus’ advisor which seems worth mentioning), Loftus’ skillfully crafts his argument in Everyday Environmentalism by taking his readers on a historical–theoretical journey through the thinking of an assorted, albeit primarily Marxist, band of thinkers who he uses to orchestrate a clear explanation as to what is at stake in UPE. This cast of characters includes the likes of Neil Smith, Henri Lefebvre, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Marx/Engel; a right jolly intellectual festival indeed. If it comes off a little “great man” centric (something I brought up in my initial review), this is based on the evolution of this particular literature to date. However, in addition to these thinkers, Loftus also brings in other important insights from important feminist thinkers like Donna Haraway, Nancy Hartstock, and others.
There is maturing of UPE that becomes visible in Loftus’ work in useful and provocative ways. The socionatural assemblages of urban environmental processes that are front and center in the book are almost more important for showing the topographies of possibility for generating a more democratic urban world than rather simply for narrating past takes on nature and society. To this end, Loftus organizes ethnographic insights from his research in South Africa related to water politics to embody his theoretically inflected narrative as they continue to unfold throughout the informal settlements of Durban. This inclusion of fieldwork enlivens the politics of possibility within the interrelated and interconnected movements described as UPE. The quotidian requirements, potentials, emancipatory promises, and threats to survival churn to produce new connotations and qualities for understanding what is always intended, but often overwhelmingly difficult to articulate through adding “Urban” and “Political” and “Ecology” together.
As for all reading this book now, I suspect it is impossible to not think about Neil
Smith’s role in the story of UPE and how transformative a book Uneven
Development, and other of Smith’s work, was for opening the possibilities
of there to ever be something called UPE. As Loftus details Smith’s articulation of “the
production of nature” is based on a particular spatializing of Marxist theory for
understanding both capitalism and nature beyond what Marx, Engels, Schmidt, or Lefebvre
accomplished. As Loftus discusses in Smith’s work, the supremacy of capitalist
ideologies and twin modes of production and accumulation re-created nature to mirror the
capitalist dynamics. This intervention has many important ramifications for
comprehending, let along intervening in, the production of urban environments. From this
work, come radical geographic possibilities for framing a more holistic, less dualistic,
way of seeing nature and society as reciprocally constituted in the other, but always in
ways that lead to the uneven developments as demanded by capitalist political economy.
Loftus internalizes this logic into his own argument and suggests that: Both on epistemological and ontological grounds, dualistic understandings of
nature and society should be rejected. They harbor deep conservatisms and fail
to capture the way in which life is made through defying such mythical
boundaries. Stating this is the easy bit. Figuring out what it means for an
environmental politics, and understanding of the urban, and for a program of
political change is a far more complex problem. (2012: 18)
What does this mean for everyday political acts that can help us understand how forms of
radical democratic practice can produce explicitly different forms of nature from the
forms we see so often determined through the marketization of all things natural? This
is one of the more important questions that in my reading of this book that Loftus
poses. While this is an implicit goal in much of the UPE work done to date, there is
still considerable effort necessary to make these pathways explicitly political, so as
how to imagine putting them in action. When we look at some of most important work on
the production of nature, we do not get much a road map for thinking about
praxis-oriented social control over the production of nature, as is evidenced in this
passage from Smith: Socialism is neither a utopia nor a guarantee. It is however the place and the
time where and when the unity of nature becomes a real possibility. It is the
arena of struggle to develop real social control over the production of nature …
Socialism is the struggle to judge necessity according not to market but to
human need, according not to exchange-value and profit, but to use value … Truly
human, social control of the production of nature, however, is the realizable
dream of socialism. (2008:89)
Related to praxis, Loftus explicitly invokes Gramsci, as he has done elsewhere in extremely useful ways, and suggests (p. 85) “through producing nature, humans and their environments coevolve. Consciousness of this coevolution emerges through active involvement in the process.” So then, Loftus shows us how this rubber can meet the road through a historical–geographical set of struggles around water provision struggles and twin urbanization of the informal settlement of Inanda in Durban. To bring these theoretical and empirical threads together Loftus (p. 104) says “As we see through the changing historical geography of Inanda, hegemony can be rethought as a particular mix of consent ad coercion that is achieved in part through historically and geographically specific relationships with nature.”
I think this book will help push UPE to new levels of sophistication and political relevancy, period. Loftus brings together smart intellectual foundations with forward looking politics in a way that responds to some of the critiques of past discussions of UPE. This to me is the very definition of intellectual praxis. At a time when climate change, food shortages, water shortages, air quality deterioration, and a long list of other explicitly political issues are bearing down on urban environments, UPE is one of the most important intellectual terrains for understating future nature/society relations. While I have more of a vested interest in this idea than some, I do not think that undercuts my argument that we need more theoretically sophisticated lenses through which to better comprehend the interrelated and interconnected uneven power relations that continues to squeeze the life out of people living in cites. Loftus helps show us that we need to better understand the circumstances of people’s struggles within their urban environments in the most robust of ways, and we likewise need to understand the circumstances of people’s survival and even flourishing within their urban environments. In sum, Loftus’ narration helps us (or at least me) understand through his nuanced everyday environmentalism how to better articulate the age old question of who benefits and who suffers through the particularities of the production and construction of urban environments amidst wildly uneven and often unscrupulously wicked political moments.