Geopolitical ecologies

As political geographers increasingly tackle environmental problems, they can benefit from political ecology's insights into nature, society, and power. This chapter provides a brief genealogy of political ecology - a heterogenous field committed to critical theory, grounded methodologies, and social justice - before reviewing work at the interface of political ecology and political geography. We argue that scholarship in these overlapping fields must look beyond the state to understand how resource frontiers are both constituted through global circuits of investment and value and embedded in local histories of extraction and control. We bring a geopolitical ecology perspective to critical minerals, a growing arena of contestation that shares similarities with previous forms of extraction, while giving rise to new problems in an era of climate crisis. Applying these insights to copper in Jordan and rare earth elements in Myanmar, we demonstrate how new forms of value and authority emerge beyond the state.