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The purpose of this chapter is to adopt and demonstrate the value of a political ecology approach in examining sport stadia, particularly stadia in the United States. We attempt to highlight how in the development of stadia key decision-makers sometimes overlook questions of community and environmental health and security.

We took an ontological approach in considering what it means for the stadium to exist in the current political ideological time period. For us, this meant raising questions about how we understand the varying human and nonhuman components of the stadium, and how they connect and influence one another. From there, we outline why political ecology is a useful framework for examining the environmental costs of stadia and their development. We utilize the city of Detroit's decision to provide funding for Little Caesars Arena – home to professional basketball and hockey competitions – to argue that investment in sport stadia creates environmental opportunity costs to the “host” community.

In the case of Detroit, we argue that private economic gain took precedence over community and environmental health and security when decisions were made on infrastructure. Specifically, despite the city going through bankruptcy and locking citizens out of water, the decision was made to provide millions of dollars for the construction of Little Caesars Arena and the development of the land immediately surrounding the arena. Through this, we suggest the need to produce informed case studies surrounding the environmental consideration.

The focus on community and environmental health and security is lacking from the discourse of stadia development in the United States. This chapter seeks to bring this consideration to the forefront by offering a way to examine these issues from a political ecological standpoint, and we urge researchers to conduct case studies using a political ecological framework with a community focus.

On November 4, 2015, the Fundão Dam in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais suffered a catastrophic failure and released 60 million cubic meters of toxic, iron-laden mud into the Rio Doce – a major river system that serves 3.6 million people in the Southeast. Owned by Samarco, a joint venture between Brazil’s Companhia do Vale do Rio Doce (CRVD) and Australia’s BHP Billiton Industries, the Fundão Dam was one of the largest mining-oriented water reservoirs in the country. This disaster was identified by IBAMA, the country’s environmental protection agency, as the worst environmental event in Brazil’s industrial history. The disaster’s ramifications continue to unfold, affecting people, wildlife, and ecosystems along the river’s 530-kilometer route through Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo to the Atlantic Ocean. This paper contextualizes the Samarco disaster and its socioecological consequences in a political ecology framework. Specifically, this theoretical research is poised within a politics of scale paradigm. Theory is used to explain the long-standing contradictions between capital and nature through an examination of the Samarco disaster. Specifically, scalar theory explains how capital–nature contradictions facilitated the disaster and Brazil’s on-going struggle to respond to environmental justice at local scales.

This study tested the hypothesis that the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on concrete phenomena will, on the average, have fewer synonyms per concept than will the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on abstract phenomena. Subject terms from each of two concrete disciplines and two abstract disciplines were analysed. Results showed that there was a significant difference at the ·05 level between concrete and abstract disciplines but that the significant difference was attributable to only one of the abstract disciplines. The other abstract discipline was not significantly different from the two concrete disciplines. It was concluded that although there is some support for the hypothesis, at least one other factor has a stronger influence on terminological consistency than the phonomena with which a subject deals.

In this chapter, the authors use emerging works on geopolitical ecologies to analyze the relations between tourism and the transboundary haze disaster in northern Thailand. The region’s ‘smoky season’, which occurs between February and April of each year, has become a recurring seasonal haze disaster that is reported to be the combined result of biomass burning and urban air pollution. Drawing on ethnographic research among urban tourism practitioners, as well as a critical discourse analysis of popular and social media reports and commentaries, the authors argue that geopolitical discourses of transboundary haze production are shaped by tourists and the tourism industry in ways that perpetuate inequitably distributed disaster risk. Transboundary haze, the authors further contend, has become an ecological actor that co-produces discourses of escape among mobile tourists and residents. This research contributes to emerging work that conceptualises the geopolitical ecologies of transboundary environmental disasters in relation to tourism mobilities in southeast Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse and problematize the relations between international forestry companies and wood energy in the context of climate change in Chile and Sweden.

Based on interviews, field observations and analysis of documents, case studies of international forestry companies and wood energy in local areas of Chile and Sweden are examined comparatively. A conceptual framework combining political ecology and environmental communication is developed to approach the cases.

The paper finds that the two international forestry companies studied here have widely incorporated the use of wood energy as a renewable and carbon neutral energy strategy for their forestry business. Second, the paper finds that wood energy is used as a way to reproduce forestry development in the two countries, which is contested by NGOs and activists which are today articulating critical approaches to forestry development in the two countries. Third, related to the former finding, the paper finds that the incorporation of wood energy into the forest sector’s interests in Chile and Sweden takes place in the context of important social-ecological conflicts related to industrial forestry development.

The paper’s analytical framework helps to analyse the social-ecological nature of international business and the way they organise material practices and communicative meaning around renewable energy. The paper’s findings and analysis shed light on important problematic aspects of the material and symbolic struggles around renewable energy in the context of climate change. The comparative dimension of the analysis has the value to offer a cross-border analysis to improve the understanding of some of the most important aspects of international businesses concerning wood energy today.

The two decades of civil war have left Angola plagued with about ten millions landmines, causing destructions to human conditions and communities. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to create awareness of the landmine‐related problems among the business community and propose strategies to tackle them.

Using the theory of political ecology – an approach that represents an ever‐changing dynamic tension between ecology and human change, and between diverse communities within society – this paper analyzes the political environment that led to the plantation of landmines and examines how the collective action of governments, nongovernmental organizations and businesses communities can create awareness, rehabilitate victims and support new technologies.

The findings suggest the following strategies to business communities to alleviate the problem of landmines: create landmine awareness in society and the business community; provide economic assistance to landmine victims for rehabilitation; and donate landmine excavators.

The practical implications for managers are that they can implement the strategies to improve the prevailing human conditions of the communities in Angola.

This study originally contributes in that it highlights the problems associated with landmines and brings them to the attention of international business community and proposes a three‐pronged strategy to deal with them.

This paper aims to explore the potential agency of university-based social entrepreneurship ecosystems (U-BSEEs) from a political ecology perspective. It addresses how higher education institutions can leverage their embedded role within a community to foster social entrepreneurship, by leveraging adult learning theories of andragogy and heutagogy in (social) entrepreneurship education.

This empirical study interviewed ten senior-level academics in the USA, the UK, Ireland and Australia with practical experience in the (social) entrepreneurship and social innovation space. Qualitative methods of structured interviews, coding and analysis were used as an appropriate procedure to examine the political ecology of U-BSEEs and the interconnectedness of its actors.

Key findings included criticisms of higher educations’ role in society; financial resources and university impact on stakeholders; the potential of student-based initiatives and programs leveraging andragogy and ideally heutagogy adult learning theories; and changes universities could implement to become key actors of U-BSEEs. Student engagement and cross-disciplinary work is apparently the modus operandi to successful university based ecosystem development.

Research limitations included sample size and lack of junior and mid-level academic perspectives; surveys could be conducted in future research on the topic to generate quantitative data to strengthen findings. Implications of the research suggest that universities possess the necessary resources and personnel to serve as keystone actors of an ecosystem, but currently do not leverage the expertise available to them.

All respondents concurred that focusing on students as change agents, and building social entrepreneurship education programs could foster a trophic cascade of increased collaboration, economic growth, political capital and social good in the local and regional ecosystem.

This study is original in its attempt to build on the entrepreneurship ecosystem literature by considering the agency of U-BSEEs from a political ecology lens.

This chapter will examine ideological debates currently taking place in academics. Anthropologists – and all academic workers – are at a crossroads. They must determine what it means to “green the academy” in an era of permanent war, “green capitalism,” and the neoliberal university (Sullivan, 2010). As Victor Wallis makes clear, “no serious observer now denies the severity of the environmental crisis, but it is still not widely recognized as a capitalist crisis, that is, as a crisis arising from and perpetuated by the rule of capital, and hence incapable of resolution within the capitalist framework.”