ABSTRACT

The author saw the themes and sensibilities absorbed during studies with Carolyn Merchant and in her training at Berkeley as a continuous thread through work and academic preoccupations in the decades that followed. These tackled, in ever-widening circles, the political and material formation and influence of environmental (and environmentalist) imagery, with gender pervasively present as one of the key nodes for this co-constitution of imagery and social power. This chapter maps these influences and preoccupations with the intent of contributing to a “Political Ecology of Environmental Discourse.” “Political ecology” had surfaced as a notion in the work of Eric Wolfe and Piers Blaikie, but it was in that period that James O’Conner and others yoked the structural analysis offered by Marxism to the environmental domain. This allowed a principled analysis of how power structures drove environmental destruction by shaping an uneven allocation of access, benefits, and harms involved in processes of extraction and production, and their evolution and expansion.