Daily Reflection diary

Feminist ecological perspectives view care as  a foundational, relational practice essential for sustaining both human and ecological life.   Examples of care include: Rituals, propitiation rituals in families. Example: Mang Doh Communities conduct local events to showcase the environment.  Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) conceptualizes care through multiple interconnected dimensions: Material Care Practices : These include tangible, everyday actions like cooking, cleaning, and farming that sustain both human and ecological life. For example, women are often in charge of cooking; they are not just enslaved labor, but they provide material care, symbolized by food. Emotional and Affective Labor : FPE emphasizes how emotions and affective connections play a crucial role in environmental interactions. For instance, women's relationships with contaminated water sources are deeply emotional, influencing their decisions and interactions with the environment.  Ethics...

 FPE : An interdisciplinary framework examining how gender, environment, and power intersect. Origin : Since the 1990s, influenced by political ecology and feminist theory. Examples include: Global North (Western communities):  Analyzing climate activism in Europe about how women's role in climate policies is often neglected. Global South (Asia, India): Vandana Shiva's ecofeminism critiques corporate control of seeds, highlighting women's knowledge of traditional ecology. Key thinkers include:   Rocheleau Environmental knowledge and practices are gendered, shaped by individuals' community roles and interactions.  She advocates for integrating gender analysis into environmental research to understand the differentiated impacts of ecological changes on men and women.   Thomas Slayter  focuses on the political dimensions of resource access, highlighting how gendered power relations influence environmental decision-making.   She calls for critically exami...

 Both are concepts to explain human and environmental relations through intersections of power, ecology, and urbanization.  Plantation ecology: Examines the interconnectedness between the environment and power structures within plantation systems. It explores how plantations are racialized and capitalist landscapes. Key Features of PE: Designs a monocultural agro-system , replacing indigenous cultivation culture. This system is practiced mainly due to its profit-based motives, relying on racialized laborers who are exploited and provided with lower wages. Due to the colonial powers, most of the native communities have been made the predominant ones in exploiting their own natural resources.  Racial Capitalism: Capitalism and racism are intertwined, leading to the exploitation of marginalized racial communities in the labor market, leading to disparities in wages, opportunities, and employment.  Long-term ecological hauntings : Due to the depletion and use of chemica...

 This concept examines the power associated with plants.  Plants are treated as agential beings concerning the human agenda. Plantations are used for political reasons to impose supremacy over the native lands.  Examples discussed are: Sandalwoods:   Treated as goods to generate the economy.  Shapes political dynamics by building a network while marketing.  Either the person with resources or the person with great income is considered to be powerful.  Tangerines/Oranges: (Tsheylu) Fruits such as tangerines are a great income source for people in the southern part of Bhutan. Not only do they sell inside Bhutan, but they also trade across different countries such as India and Bangladesh.  People owning most trees of Tsheylu are the stakeholders of the community; they are considered rich due to the income they generate through trading it.  Power in this case is achieved through income/wealth.  Plant + Climate = Migration  Climate chang...

 The imperial weight of tea on the politics of plants, plantations, and science by Bengt G. Karlsson The main idea of this article is about tea becoming the prominent agent for power dynamics. To summarize this article: Tea production was initially controlled by China; they were known for maximum tea production and income generation, which was used for their economic development. Later, the British used this imperialist ideology to expand their power and generate income with capitalist perspectives, colonizing lands like Assam, Sri Lanka, and Kenya through tea plantations.  The British colonial state's interest in tea production in India, particularly in Assam, transformed landscapes, labor systems, and indigenous livelihoods.  Tea as an Imperial commodity: British demand for tea led to its large-scale cultivation of tea plantations in Assam, which required large tracts of land that were taken from indigenous communities . Their traditional land use systems, like shifti...

 Tragedy—conflict Common- Collective Coined by Garrett Hardin in 1968. When individuals act on their own self-interest without thinking about shared common resources, it leads to overexploitation and degradation of those resources.  Some of the characteristics of common resources are: Non-excludable: No one can be excluded from using the resources. Rivalrous: Whoever has more power may claim to be the leader of the resources. : Whoever is near the source may claim ownership and have greater access, leading to conflict with others.  Example: Community grazing land in highland regions like Laya: all villagers graze their yaks and cattle in the same area, which may lead to overgrazing, disrupting natural biodiversity.  

 This article tries to study environmental degradation using political ecology using various case studies from the Middle East, Israel, and Palestine.  Environmental degradation cannot be understood only through science and technology; politics also plays a crucial role in analyzing complex relationships between ecology and social change.  Ecology of politics vs. Politics of ecology Ecology of politics: Natural resources shape political power relations. When resources become the center of concern, decisions have to be made on how to distribute them, to whom they belong, and what portions should be distributed. This nature of resources influences government and power structures to act upon. Politics of ecology: Resource management reflects social hierarchies. This refers to how states shape environmental resources. The state provides people with the right to access resources through implementing a rule and making decisions to mitigate environmental problems.  Col...