Is there a Santa Cruz School of Political Ecology? An intellectual and political history

The University of California, Santa Cruz has a rich history of critical environmental scholarship and activism, perhaps most visibly institutionalized in the collective founding of Capitalism Nature Socialism by Jim O’Connor and his students in 1988. In addition, the campus’s heterodox political and intellectual climate has made it an unusual and high-profile site of encounter between Marxist ecology and geography and other radical traditions, including Marxist feminism, poststructuralism, and Black radicalism, since the 1970s. Despite this, no intellectual history of what might be called a “Santa Cruz School” (or schools) yet exists. 

Given the importance of environmental critique today, amidst climate crisis and growing inequality, and UCSC’s continued strengths in these areas, it seems well past time to bring this unique history into focus. CUES faculty and graduate students are currently engaged in a project to chart this intellectual history, connect it to the forms of political action that motivated it (and which continue to motivate it), and engage key analytic questions that this “encounter” of radical traditions has produced.

Please see our working documents:

• A pre-history of CUES (a narrative history of critical urban-environmental research and activism in the Social Sciences at UCSC).
• A working bibliography of key primary and secondary sources.
• Some artifacts we love:
  • “Three ways to think about the ecological history of the Monterey Bay region” (1995)
  • “Prospectus” and “Introduction,” Issue 1.1 of Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (1998)

Collaborators on this project include James Sirigotis, Will Parrish, Barbara Laurence, and Miriam Greenberg.