This essay advances the argument for James C. Scott as a preeminent political ecologist, despite the fact that he has not claimed such a title for himself. While he is variously described as an (errant) political scientist, an (adopted) anthropologist, and a (most of the time) Southeast Asianist, he has not usually been called a card-carrying political ecologist. But in fact, his many works have foreshadowed a number of the topical concerns of political ecologists of Asia, such as his attention to subsistence strategies of peasants, to hegemony and resistance, to state power and simplifications, to anarchism and self-organization, and to ecological transitions and human-nonhuman interactions. The fact that Scott is one of the most-cited theorists in the field of political ecology is further proof of his influence, with authors using Scottian themes to launch critical investigations of how power shapes environmental relations and how politics plays a role in the co-constitution of nature and society.

While Scott's work has been fundamentally important to the field, there has not yet been any organized effort to frame his contributions in a consistent way. Why are there countless articles about Michel Foucault or Bruno Latour and political ecology, but not about James C. Scott?Footnote ¹ I correct the oversight in this essay by highlighting the key themes in Scott's oeuvre that have been of primary importance to political ecologists of Asia, as well as by taking a deeper dive into his most recent published work, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,Footnote ² reading it as a work of political ecology. Overall, I argue that Scott tacks between generating trenchant insights that are then applied by others in political ecology work, while also engaging key concepts from the field to help illuminate the social upheavals and agrarian worlds he writes about. The fruitful benefits of this iterative process—what Scott has called “trespassing” disciplinary lines—can be seen within Asian studies in particular, where scholars have tackled a range of important issues with nods to Scott, from the aesthetics of urban settlements in South Asia to patterns of agrarian transitions in upland Southeast Asia to the emergence of scientific forestry in East Asia.Footnote ³

But first: a reminder for those who do not follow the field of what political ecology is and does. Political ecology is a cross-disciplinary body of work (aligned with geography, anthropology, environmental studies, sociology, and other disciplines) that investigates contextual sources of environmental change, how multiple cascading scales influence such change, and the socioeconomic and political ramifications of these transformations, helpfully categorized into the shorthand of context, conflict, and change.Footnote ⁴ Key topics that have animated the field over the years include the ways in which ideologies shape the governance of the environment—how both material resources and sociocultural meanings of nature influence such contests—and who wins and who loses in struggles over nature, processes that have played out over millennia in Asia.Footnote ⁵ Methodologically, the field has tended to focus on research questions that reveal the contradictions, anachronisms, and inconsistencies of linear narratives, all very familiar hallmarks of the work of James C. Scott.Footnote ⁶

The book that launched Scott into the field of human-environment relations was The Moral Economy of the Peasant, in which he argued that the peasantry ought to be understood in relation to strongly held social and cultural values guaranteeing a right to subsistence, rather than from the rational choice viewpoint that peasants are individualistic and profit-minded economic actors.Footnote ⁷ This assertion foreshadowed by several decades political ecologists’ later critiques of neoliberalism as the proper organizing principle for environmental governance and the deficits and paucities of life organized along rational choice lines.Footnote ⁸ Further, Scott's search in Moral Economy to understand the “creation of social dynamite” has been particularly good to think through when addressing the ways in which indignities, inequities, and exclusions serve to spark environmental activism in Asia. The Chipko movement in India or protests over mining and pollution from the Philippines and elsewhere show the ways in which resource claims and counterclaims reflecting environmental injustices serve as the circumstances for conflict.Footnote ⁹ Later works, particularly Weapons of the Weak, furthered this theme and were particularly useful to political ecologists, who explained how much of what Scott identified as “everyday resistance” was actually environmental resistance—including arson of forests, poaching of game animals, and trespasses on land.Footnote ¹⁰

Seeing Like a State marked the first time that Scott used an environmental vision—or in this case, a nightmare—to provide the opening salvo in his work.Footnote ¹¹ To launch the book's critique of authoritarian high modernism, Scott took aim at scientific forestry in Germany, where planners attempted to produce maximum sustained yields of timber through even-aged and uniform stands, a process mirrored across Asia in the emergence of managerial forest regimes, commodity plantations, and hydroelectric dams.Footnote ¹² Seeing emphasized how these techniques of control and the search for formal order by foresters, brilliantly captured in the idea of “legibility,” were valued over local contextual knowledge of specific places, one of political ecology's favorite themes. The subsequent resistance of nonhuman natures to these human plans has been picked up in works such as Anna Tsing's groundbreaking study of the persistence and immanence of fungi and my own work on ecosystem services that defy measurement and classification.Footnote ¹³ Other authors dealing with Asia have drawn on Seeing's many themes, exploring such topics as state control through infrastructure in South Vietnam by American aid workers; the creation of high modernist visions for “improvement” of Indonesia's rural peasantry by the World Bank; and the pursuit of environmental visibility through tools such as satellite monitoring by NGOs concerned about climate change.Footnote ¹⁴

The richness of political ecology topics engaged in The Art of Not Being Governed include the ways in which borderlands serve as liminal spaces and contact zones and the importance of the enclosure of commons as a tool for state control (Southeast Asia's mountainous zone known as Zomia is described as being “the last great enclosure”).Footnote ¹⁵ Such enclosures were one way to render legible the wild riot of chaotic, anarchic, and nearly impossible to manage cultural and environmental practices that took place in nonstate spaces like forests. Key concepts in the book, such as “lootable resources” and “resource frontiers,” were taken up with gusto by political ecologists, who have used the book to generate their own interpretations and invented terms, with “liquid area studies,” “survival ecologies,” and “subversive logistics” coming from authors drawing on Art.Footnote ¹⁶ The seamless progression of Scott's works has meant that many authors working on Southeast Asian political ecology in particular have found themselves drawing on Seeing Like a State to explain high modernist plans such as the Belt and Road Initiative, on Weapons to explain resistance to such interventions, and on Art to understand the sociocultural impacts of innovative “state-evading” strategies.Footnote ¹⁷

Scott's most recent book, Against the Grain (AtG), is in some ways a return to the antecedents of political ecology, namely, human and cultural ecology. Yet, despite dealing with historical events and archeological evidence from millennia ago, and focused on Mesopotamia rather than his usual backyard of Asia, AtG is very much a work of political ecology, providing a useful framing of issues we now recognize as the advance of the Anthropocene.Footnote ¹⁸ In the book, Scott's long-standing interest in the role of the state and the lives of those it dominates comes to rest on the question of how the physical and human environments of early Mesopotamia afforded opportunities for the emergence of centralized states. While sharing interest with human ecologists in how the environment shapes us—how drought forces particular types of adaptation strategies, how wetlands can provide a kind of freedom—Scott remains a humanist in his focus on how power emerges and shapes lives. His questions revolve around why settled agriculture, a rather unfavorable enterprise in many ways, eventually became the norm, and he uses the time lag between plant domestication and sedentism and the rise of states to argue against the linear idea of human progress. The book's thesis is the inverse of the quote often attributed to Gandhi, that Western civilization “would be a good idea” if it existed; AtG finds that life under the state was a bad idea indeed, resulting in poorer health and higher mortality amid the general drudgery of settled agriculture.

The question is why people acquiesced to this decline in living standards. Scott argues that, prior to what we now recognize as states, the peoples of Mesopotamia began coalescing into settled “domus” complexes, where people, animals, and plants in fields first came together. The much later emergence of state forms was particularly dependent on—although not driven by—domestication and production of staple grains, primarily barley and wheat, while in Asia, rice would have fit the bill. The absence of alternative states, such as those built on lentils, cassava, or taro, is attributed to their more complex ecological niches (namely, indeterminate ripening, invisibility when tubers can be “hidden” underground, or the difficulties of storage and transport). When one cannot find fields or foods to assess and levy, it is difficult to raise funds for statecraft, raising the question: which came first, the state or the taxman? Yet from the domestication of humble grasses arise “population-and-grain modules,” which become the building blocks of concentrations of people in urban-ish settlements. It is only later that we see the emergence of the state and all the ideologies and patterns of oppression, hierarchy, and control that accompany it. These early patterns profoundly shaped the subsequent historical spread of states, subjects, and sources of agriculture, lending support to Donna Haraway's recent suggestion of an alternative name for the Anthropocene: the plantationocene, with all the ecological homogenization, capitalist extraction, and unequal labor control that such a term evokes.Footnote ¹⁹

AtG reads extant evidence against the grain as well, not letting the state narrate its own subsequent history with laurels of civilizational progress. For Scott, the state “parasitized” people and landscapes, developing tools to extract resources from its hosts to survive. In ancient Sumer, archeologists have speculated that writing emerged as a form of legibility: ancient cuneiform tablets enumerate barley production tallies and numbers of war captives, among other obsessions. Forms of writing, the emergence of bureaucracies: all the vestiges of “stateness” appear first in Mesopotamia, but the echoes with ancient China are also clear, as minute details about taxes, landholdings, and population were recorded there through standardized measures far earlier than the rest of Asia.Footnote ²⁰ One of the main aims of the emergent state was to avoid “friction”—a nod to Anna Tsing's contemporary phrase—that might result in collapse or difficulties in trade.Footnote ²¹ Hence the need for walls to keep invaders and disrupters out (and keep unwilling citizens in); for tax collectors to keep the operation humming along; and for officials to supervise it all.

How is the work in AtG reflective of political ecology? Early cultural ecologists were interested in such things as energy flows and population densities, positing a seemingly one-way relationship between culture and the environment, particularly with regard to questions in Asia, ranging from Karl Wittfogel's ideas about how irrigation systems lead to centralized forms of state control, or Marvin Harris's interest in how population dynamics explain prohibitions on eating cows in Hinduism.Footnote ²² AtG nods to how the environment can shape paths and outcomes by noting that climate change is part of the state development story: the decline in water levels in the Euphrates from 3500 to 2500 BCE may have driven populations to become more concentrated around irrigation canals. Scott also notes that soils themselves, such as the rich alluvium of Mesopotamia or loess soils of central China, “maximized the possibilities of appropriation, stratification, and inequality.”Footnote ²³ Yet Scott does not take these environmental factors as sole drivers of change, and throughout, AtG remains deeply humanistic and historical. The environment is imbricated in human decision-making in a mutual push and pull, but AtG is never overly driven by environmental determinism; key themes of power, scale, governance, and history larded through the narrative keep us well aware of the complications of progress.

It is also apropos, given what happened in 2020, that one chapter of AtG focuses on epidemics and zoonoses. Scott notes that sedentism created conditions for crowding, meaning that the rapid spread of infectious diseases was “a civilizational effect.”Footnote ²⁴ Health researchers have identified three major epidemiological eras—the Neolithic infectious diseases found in AtG; the later chronic diseases of industrialization; and the emergent and resistant pathogens that have resulted from globalization.Footnote ²⁵ The “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps,” as Scott terms the pre-state world, were thus primed for the passage of disease from herd animals to humans.Footnote ²⁶ In the more recent era, the ways in which animal-human intimacies can foster or thwart viral emergence has been at the forefront of recent studies from Asia.Footnote ²⁷ Political ecologists have emphasized that epidemics can only be understood through a multifaceted lens of entangled humans, animals and ecosystems, in which trade, politics, genetics, socioeconomic conditions, and psychology also play a role. In other words, “Who gets sick and where are not simply ecological or demographic outcomes,” a finding we saw all too much evidence of in 2020.Footnote ²⁸ The inequalities first fostered by the emergence and later performances of states revealed by Scott's works have clearly shaped pandemic health outcomes to this day.

Yet there is a kind of optimism in AtG as well. Scott critiques how we have traditionally seen the sudden disappearance of states as a kind of regression or collapse—when in fact, humans may have been retreating to nonstate spaces with higher quality of life in interregnum periods. As he notes, these so-called dark ages “were more common than consolidated, effective rule,” and they did not necessary lead to a decline in quality of life.Footnote ²⁹ Interrogating why the center falling apart is such a terrifying prospect is an interest shared with political ecologists, with discussions around the discourses of tipping points, ecological catastrophe, and civilizational chaos that mark some of the more frightening climate forecasts.Footnote ³⁰ As the state continues to fail us in dealing with both climate change and COVID-19, perhaps there are indeed spaces for the emergence of new forms of nonstate organization and anarchic possibilities embedded in forms of social resistance. For example, the current Black Lives Matter movement combines environmental and health justice with a vision of authority-less spaces in a way that Scott would no doubt approve.

The apotheosis of Scott's influence on the field of political ecology, and the clearest indication of his own incorporation of the field, may be the book we have not yet seen—his forthcoming work on rivers, particularly the Ayeyarwady in Burma, in which his longue durée approach and analysis of the emergence of power is applied to the coursing and channeling of water from a river's-eye view. In this, I presume we will once again see an unwavering attention to attempts at human control of landscapes, and the unpredictability and unruliness of responses from nature. He could never be accused, as some have leveled at political ecologists, of being about politics without ecology.Footnote ³¹ Ecology is always omnipresent in his work, in the ways that nature both resists and conforms to human demands at different places and times and, simultaneously, how human progress can be supported yet confounded by environmental change. On this basis alone, clearly James C. Scott should be given the mantel of honorary political ecologist emeritus.