I found this article from the Sustainable Development Update (http://albaeco.com/sdu/31/school.htm) interesting, and thought I would share it here....

Political Ecology can be seen as an umbrella term for all the interdisciplinary work that deals with the politics of the environment and seeks “to explore the connections between poverty and wealth, environmental degradation and the political process” (Bryant and Bailey, 1997).
So far, a lot of the work has dealt with conflicts over the environment between: North and South, TNCs (Trans-National Corporations) and grassroots, and rich and poor.
When Vanity Fair releases “carbon neutral” issues and the Swedish prime minister Reinfeldt flies off to “sustainababble” with president Bush about the climate change, it could be a seen as a sign of hope. That there is a capacity in our societies to cope with the challenges of sustainability. The scientific discipline political ecology does not think so. According to them there can be little improvements in the world, before the capitalist system has radically changed or disappeared.
Sustainababble is a word that Alf Hornborg, one of the most well-known Swedish Political Ecologists, uses when he talks about the international community that are so good at “talking the talk, without walking the walk”. How else could you explain that the economic inequality in the world is growing when the visions of fighting poverty and ending world hunger have been around since the 1970s? He, as all political ecologists, is fiercely critical to the idea that capitalism is of benefit to everyone, rather than to a few.
Despite – or because of – its controversial content political ecology has grown rapidly during the ten years that it has existed. Today you find the expression in scientific journals as well as in policy documents, like the recent SIDA report “Of Global Concern – Rural Livelihood Dynamics and Natural Resource Governance” (SIDA Studies No.16).
Criticism and appraisal
It is hard to generalize about an interdisciplinary, broad and quite radical discipline, because there will always be many exceptions. Having said this, two criticisms that have come up in regard to political ecology are firstly, that even though it claims to be concerned with the environment it tends to treat it as a commodity, a black box – ignoring the core challenge of sustainability, namely that whoever has power of it (be it grassroots or a corporation) needs to find a good way to manage it successfully. Secondly, political ecology has been accused of always criticizing, without offering any solutions, but “radical change”.
Alf Hornborg rejects this criticism saying that “this is tragic, as it should be quite feasible to arrive at a correct analysis of a problem without (yet) having developed a good solution.” Whether one shares the political ecology world-view or not, an important point is made. Namely that it is high time to walk the talk.


/Jacob von Heland

References:
Alf Hornborg: “Cornucopia or zero-sum game: The epistemology of sustainability”. 2003
http://en.scientificcommons.org/20697662

Bryant, RL, and Bailey, S. 1997. Third World Political Ecology. Routledge London.