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Raymond L. Bryant is a British-Canadian geographer and Professor of Political Ecology at King's College London, retiring in September 2020. He is known for his contributions to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology.
Bryant studied politics to receive a BA (Hons) from the University of Victoria, Canada, in 1983 and an MA from Carleton University, Canada, in 1989. He received a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1993 for research on forestry in Burma. [1]
Bryant has been active in the Department of Geography at King's College London since 1993. He has also taught at Cambridge University, Yale University and University College London and has, among other places, been invited to speak at the universities in Oxford, Chicago and Copenhagen. [1]
He serves on the editorial boards of Political Geography, and the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. [1]
Bryant has played a key role in the development of political ecology as an interdisciplinary field, with implications in geography, anthropology, and development studies. With Sinéad Bailey, he published the landmark Third World Political Ecology (Routledge, 1997) arguing that the costs and benefits of environmental change always are distributed unequally. Environmental change also reinforces or alters social and economic inequalities as well as power relations. Bryant and Bailey developed an actor-centred perspective to show how environmental change is shaped by actors on different scales with unequal power resources. [2]
Bryant has continued to synthesize research in the field, most recently in the International Handbook of Political Ecology (Edward Elgar, 2015).
A key theme in Bryant's research has been the politics of forestry, particularly in Burma. He has studied how the Burmese state historically has sought to control forests and forest-related activities, but also how other environmental actors including peasants, loggers, and transnational corporations have contested state control. [3]
As part of a wider effort to study ethical consumption, [4] he has contributed to our understanding of the knowledge regimes and violence associated with teak branding for Western markets. [5]
Another theme in Bryant's research has been the role of NGOs in environmental struggles and the way such organizations strategize and empower themselves by generating 'moral capital'. Through in-depth studies of NGOs in the Philippines, he argues that the 'quest for moral capital' is compromised by NGOs' need to work with political and economic elites. [6]
Bryant lives with his wife and two children in London.
Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography that is associated and deals with humans and their relationships with communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across locations. It analyzes patterns of human social interaction, their interactions with the environment, and their spatial interdependencies by application of qualitative and quantitative research methods.
The environmental movement, also including conservation and green politics, is a diverse philosophical, social, and political movement for addressing environmental issues. Environmentalists advocate the just and sustainable management of resources and stewardship of the environment through changes in public policy and individual behaviour. In its recognition of humanity as a participant in ecosystems, the movement is centered on ecology, health, and human rights.
Political ecology is the study of the relationships between political, economic and social factors with environmental issues and changes. Political ecology differs from apolitical ecological studies by politicizing environmental issues and phenomena.
Michael J. Watts is Emeritus "Class of 1963" Professor of Geography and Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He retired in 2016. He is a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left, described as "a fiercely original mind, and a brilliant theorist".
Sir Dietrich Brandis was a German-British botanist and forestry academic and administrator, who worked with the British Imperial Forestry Service in colonial India for nearly 30 years. He joined the British civil service in Burma in 1856, shortly afterwards became head of the British forestry administration in all of Burma, and served as Inspector General of Forests in India from 1864 to 1883. He returned to Europe in 1883, dividing his time between Bonn and Greater London. In retirement he dedicated himself to scholarly work, resulting in the book Indian Trees (1906), his magnum opus. Brandis is considered the father of tropical forestry and has also been described as the father of scientific forestry. In addition to his work in India, he also had a significant influence on forest management in the United States.
Sir Nigel John Thrift is a British academic and geographer. In 2018 he was appointed as Chair of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, a committee that gives independent scientific and technical advice on radioactive waste to the UK government and the devolved administrations. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford and Tsinghua University and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Bristol. In 2016 and 2017 he was the executive director of the Schwarzman Scholars, an international leadership program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick from 2006 to 2016. He is a leading academic in the fields of human geography and the social sciences.
Behavioral geography is an approach to human geography that examines human behavior using a disaggregate approach. Behavioral geographers focus on the cognitive processes underlying spatial reasoning, decision making, and behavior. In addition, behavioral geography is an ideology/approach in human geography that makes use of the methods and assumptions of behaviorism to determine the cognitive processes involved in an individual's perception of or response and reaction to their environment.
Historical geography is the branch of geography that studies the ways in which geographic phenomena have changed over time. It is a synthesizing discipline which shares both topical and methodological similarities with history, anthropology, ecology, geology, environmental studies, literary studies, and other fields. Although the majority of work in historical geography is considered human geography, the field also encompasses studies of geographic change which are not primarily anthropogenic. Historical geography is often a major component of school and university curricula in geography and social studies. Current research in historical geography is being performed by scholars in more than forty countries.
The environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over the past several decades, in particular environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication. Environmental humanities employs humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to address pressing environmental problems. The environmental humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it. The field also resists the traditional divide between "nature" and "culture," showing how many "environmental" issues have always been entangled in human questions of justice, labor, and politics. Environmental humanities is also a way of synthesizing methods from different fields to create new ways of thinking through environmental problems.
Animal geography is a subfield of the nature-society/human-environment branch of geography as well as a part of the larger, interdisciplinary umbrella of Human-Animal Studies (HAS). Animal geography is defined as the study of “the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape” or “the study of where, when, why and how nonhuman animals intersect with human societies.” Recent work advances these perspectives to argue about an ecology of relations in which humans and animals are enmeshed, taking seriously the lived spaces of animals themselves and their sentient interactions with not just human but other nonhuman bodies as well. The Animal Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers was founded in 2009 by Monica Ogra and Julie Urbanik. The Animal Geography Research Network was founded in 2011 by Daniel Allen.
Feminist political ecology is a feminist perspective on political ecology, drawing on theories from marxism, post-structuralism, feminist geography, ecofeminism and cultural ecology. Feminist political ecology examines the place of intersectional social relations in the political ecological landscape, exploring them as a factor in ecological and political relations. Specific areas in which feminist political ecology is focused are development, landscape, resource use, agrarian reconstruction and rural-urban transformation. Feminist political ecologists suggest gender is a crucial variable – in relation to class, race and other relevant dimensions of political ecological life – in constituting access to, control over, and knowledge of natural resources.
In its broadest sense, social vulnerability is one dimension of vulnerability to multiple stressors and shocks, including abuse, social exclusion and natural hazards. Social vulnerability refers to the inability of people, organizations, and societies to withstand adverse impacts from multiple stressors to which they are exposed. These impacts are due in part to characteristics inherent in social interactions, institutions, and systems of cultural values.
Andrew P. Vayda was a Hungarian-born American anthropologist and ecologist who was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Ecology at Rutgers University.
Anthony Bebbington is a geographer, International Director for Natural Resources and Climate Change at the Ford Foundation and Higgins Professor of Environment and Society in the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, USA. He was previously ARC Laureate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia (2016-2019).
Piers Macleod Blaikie is a geographer and scholar of international development and natural resources, who worked until 2003 at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia. His contribution to development has been in four areas:
Owain Jones FGS is a Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University (UK). He was previously Reader in Cultural Geography: Place, Nature and Landscape at the Countryside & Community Research Institute and member of staff of the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, Faculty of Environment and Technology, University of the West of England.
J. Richard Peet is a retired professor of human geography at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA. Peet received a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and moved to the USA in the mid-1960s to complete a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching at Clark University shortly after completing his PhD from Berkeley, and has remained there with secondments in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand. He is married to geographer Elaine Hartwick and lives in central Massachusetts.
Harold Chillingworth Brookfield is a British and Australian geographer specialising in the analysis of rural development, small-scale societies, family farming, and the relationship between land use and society in developing countries. He retired from the Australian National University in 1991.
According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Myanmar lost 19%, or 7,445,000 hectares, of forest between 1990 and 2010. With forest covering as much as 70% of Burma at the time of independence, there were only slightly more than 48% forest cover left as of 2014. The deforestation rate of Myanmar has declined from 0.95% per year in the years 1990–2010 to about 0.3% per year and deforestation in Myanmar is now less than other countries of the region such as Indonesia or Vietnam, but still remains an important environmental issue. Three main factors contribute to continued deforestation: unsustainable and illegal logging, unresolved land rights and land disputes and extensive agricultural development.
Teak, tectona grandis, is a hardwood tree native to much of South and Southeast Asia, including Myanmar. Due to its natural water resistance, teak is sought out for a variety of uses including furniture-making and shipbuilding. Teak grows throughout much of Burma, but was first exploited in the Tenasserim region in the southeast of Burma on the Malay Peninsula Though it has long been used by locals, teak has been important to the economy of Myanmar since British Colonization and remains a political issue today.
