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Paul Robbins Winner of the
2009 James M. Blaut Award Lawn People, by Paul Robbins, represents the very best work one can find in
political ecology today. It is a well-written, engaging, and provocative book
that demonstrates the power of contemporary political ecology to help us
understand human created environments, their persistence as well as their
fragility. Robbins deploys a political economy approach, informed and
reinvigorated by theories of the subject, within a clearly rigorous and
innovative research project meant to address the emergence, growth, and
maintenance of both lawns and ‘lawn people’ in North America. Lawn People breaks new ground at a number of levels: it carefully and confidently
blends a political economic sensibility with post-structural concerns such as
the definition of ‘objects’ and ‘subjects,’ the formation of particular environmental
subjectivities, and the possibility for agency and change; it elevates
technologies, chemicals, and the lawn itself to be not only important objects
of political ecology study but actors and agents in the constitution of
particular environments and people; it ‘mixes methods’ such that descriptive
statistics, ecological inquiry, qualitative interviews, remote sensing, and
discourse analysis work together in convincing and coherent ways; and it
makes clear that political ecology’s recent turn to the ‘First World’ can be
exceedingly productive and insightful. Lawn People clearly follows Blaut’s lead in terms of its
theoretical and methodological creativity combined with analytical rigor,
and, like much of Blaut’s work, it will be looked
upon as seminal insofar as it examines a particular phenomenon in new ways
and simultaneously delivers a brilliant example of the power of critical
thinking to illuminate the nature of political ecology. Kevin St. Martin, April
2009 |
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Page last updated June 24, 2009 |
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