Assistant Professor of Afro-American and African Studies and Assistant Professor of Program in the Environment
Spotlight on ENVIRON 209: Nature and Power: An Introduction to Political Ecology
Guided by his curiosity and a passion for experiential learning, Brian Klein charted a unique path to the University of Michigan. Born and raised in Hawai‘i, Klein recalls that environment-society relations were “front and center in [his] daily life” from a young age. When he attended Notre Dame for his undergraduate degree in political science, he was drawn to the field of peace studies, and he ended up in two very influential courses during his senior year: an environmental politics course and a peace studies capstone. During his capstone, he read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild and learned about the genocide that occurred under King Leopold in the Congo Basin. He recalls that he “perceived this confluence of issues that [he] felt very strongly about and was motivated to better understand: human rights, politics, development, the environment, and exploitation and resistance to exploitation.” Increasingly interested in studying these issues, particularly in Africa, Klein did much of his Scoville Fellowship work on environment, development, and conflict. However, he still lacked the experience of living and working in the places he studied, so he applied for the Peace Corps and was assigned to work in Madagascar’s environment program. Working with the World Wide Fund for Nature, he “noticed a lot of artisanal and small-scale mining happening in the region and got very interested in better understanding that world.” Klein returned to the US after completing his Peace Corps project, worked at Peace Corps headquarters for several years, and then joined UC Berkeley’s PhD program in environmental science, policy, and management. With a research focus on the politics and governance of artisanal mining, he continued to do fieldwork in Madagascar throughout his degree. Many of his mentors and colleagues worked in political ecology, rural sociology, and critical human geography, which increasingly drew Klein towards those fields. He now situates himself as a political ecologist and critical human geographer as a faculty member here at the University of Michigan.
When asked to define political ecology, Klein describes it as “an interdisciplinary field trying to understand the roots of present environmental problems, crises, conflicts, and so on.” He shares that political ecologists “take seriously the role that history plays and the way that these issues often cross scales. [They] work to understand how these systems shape local contexts and vice versa because often very situated struggles and developments end up having effects far beyond those local contexts.” The field is also guided by its commitment to critique and provide ideas. Klein cites a metaphor created by Dr. Paul Robbins, a political ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, who describes political ecology as “being both hatchet and seed.” The “hatchet of critique” represents the frameworks, tools, and concepts that political ecologists and their peers use to understand and critique the world we live in. While the hatchet is necessary, it must be paired with the seeds of ideas and alternatives, for political ecologists view their scholarship as being in service of the ideas they are studying. “We need to be producing ideas. That’s part of our jobs, in this context, as scholars, to be producing ideas and having students interrogate them and improve them,” Klein remarks. When he was at UC Berkeley and learning from some of the pioneering scholars in political ecology, he was motivated to follow their example of making connections and doing research with the goal of “actually making things better in some way.”
Klein knew that he wanted to develop an introductory class on political ecology once he joined the University of Michigan, drawing inspiration from the work of his mentor at UC Berkeley, Dr. Nancy Peluso. A leader in the field of political ecology, Dr. Peluso taught a course at UC Berkeley that would serve as a model for ENVIRON 209. However, Klein didn’t develop his course alone – he collaborated with other colleagues who had studied under Dr. Peluso and wanted to create courses at their respective universities. Throughout 2020 and 2021, this group used Dr. Peluso’s syllabus as a guide, tailoring each new class to their interests. Klein shares that “it’s a lot of work to design a class, especially because you always second guess yourself: am I assigning the right thing? Is there a better way of getting this across? So this collaborative syllabus creation effort helped us develop a base to work from.” Additionally, he makes an effort to update his syllabi to respond to student feedback – after teaching ENVIRON 209 for three semesters, the syllabus “evolved each time, based on how students responded to the material or if [he] encountered something that would be a more effective teaching tool.” Given that ENVIRON 209 is the only course that Klein teaches with a GSI, he also underscores the key role that his GSIs have taken in the course’s evolution since they interact one-on-one with students in discussion sections and “receive deeper insight into how students were receiving different materials, what they were struggling with, what resonated, and so on,” as opposed to conversations that happen in the context of the lecture.
As Klein reflects upon the student feedback he has received both directly and through his GSIs, he shares that students have received the course well, displaying an appetite for “having very thorough conversations around the concepts of sustainability and other social and environmental issues that folks intuitively understand to be intertwined.” In particular, he feels that ENVIRON 209 offers his students the tools and frameworks for understanding the roots and complexities of these issues, exploring the links between them, and creating productive conversations. Some students even shared that “working through these materials has changed the way they view the world…and their role in potential solutions.” Klein is “committed to finding ways to make [209] as accessible as possible,” so when students expressed frustration with the amount of reading in the course, he revised the workload to be more manageable in subsequent semesters. Even so, he is adamant that the texts he does assign are key to grappling with the key topics discussed in class, and students have rated the class very highly regardless.
One reading is a chapter from Timothy Mitchell’s book Rule of Experts, which Klein assigns early in the semester. The chapter, “Can the Mosquito Speak?”, focuses on a particular period of Egyptian history during the Second World War and the building of the Aswan High Dam. The diversion of phosphate to munitions during the war put fertilizer in short supply, which led to a transformation in the landscape, causing an influx of malaria-carrying mosquitoes into the region. “While he doesn’t use the term ‘political ecology’ in the chapter, he is conducting a kind of political ecological analysis…and providing a rereading of history to think beyond an oversimplified story of cause and effect,” Klein shares. He likes to assign this piece early because it is both compellingly written and forces students to contend with the complexity of the issues he describes. “We can sit with the messiness, sure, but what does that tell us about what should have happened differently? What policies might have made a difference?” This method of analysis carries forward throughout the semester in ENVIRON 209 as students explore the facets of political ecology.
Although the field of political ecology has existed since the 1970s and its theoretical roots go back much further, Klein notes that many students who sign up for the course are unfamiliar with the topic. Given that ENVIRON 209 is also cross-listed in the Afro-American and African Studies and International Studies departments, students in the class have a variety of majors and academic backgrounds, often united by their interest in the environment. He spends the initial lectures establishing the motivations and methodology of the course, getting students excited for the upcoming content. By emphasizing that the class will cover both “what’s going on and what we can do about it,” Klein finds that students are excited to encounter political ecology and “see how they might make use of what it has to offer for enhancing their environmental education.” This belief in his students’ motivation and interest permeates into all of his teaching, and Klein advises other instructors not to underestimate their students, particularly when tackling complex, interdisciplinary topics like sustainability. “We do ourselves and our students a disservice when we’re not honest about how complicated and how deeply rooted many of these challenges and systems are,” he underscores. Classroom settings are “the context where we need to be able to have very challenging and thorough conversations and interrogations of the world that we’ve created and that we inhabit–and that we can change.”
As a part of the Year of Sustainability, we are interested in sharing, uplifting, and highlighting stories about the people who make up LSA and have experience teaching about sustainability. We sat down with a series of LSA faculty to discuss their background and courses and will feature these conversations in our Faculty Spotlight series.
To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu.
