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Associate Professor
Ph.D. (1999), M.A. (1994), Geography, University of California Berkeley
B.A. (1987) English/Environmental Studies, Dartmouth College
Address: 302 Walker Building,
Pennsylvania State University
University Park PA 16802
Phone: 814-863-1782
E-mail: jpm23@psu.edu
My research interests center on environmental politics, the political economy of capitalist societies, and the relationships between those two domains. On the environmental front, I am interested in how people lay claim to and struggle over their environments, and in how human societies regulate their relationships with their environments and with what consequences: for instance, are those relationships just, are they sustainable, and how do they transform individuals, societies, and environments over time? On the political economy front, I am interested in the full spectrum of relationships involved in the historical and geographical development of capitalism, and in the same set of fundamental questions: are those relationships just, are they sustainable, and how do they transform individuals, societies, and environments over time? I am most interested in projects where these two sets of interests come together. My research has thus looked at the interplay between legal and illegal claims to landscapes and resources; the role of environmental social movements in the development of economic and national regulatory systems; the relationships between multilateral environmental governance and globalization; symmetries and asymmetries between scales of environmental, economic, and political governance; and the relationships between environmental and economic goals, metrics, and frameworks with respect to the governance of rural landscapes. While my primary commitment is to scholarly analysis, I also maintain a strong interest in contemporary policy and politics in these realms, and my theoretical work often deals directly with current and applied questions.
My research and teaching focus on the following areas in particular:
My research projects and publications, described below, illustrate how I explore these topics through theoretically informed empirical research.
Environmental politics. I am interested in the history of environmentalism; the role of environmental social movements as actors in civil society capable of placing pressure on states and market actors; the relationships between environmental constraints and demands and other forms of politics; and in how people lay claim to environments and resources. Property theory is a major resource and interest for me in this realm.
Political economy. I am interested in the historical geographies of capitalist development and the many theoretical questions involved in trying to understand those trajectories. My own interests center on the relationships between physical environments and processes and capitalist development - e.g., the role of privatizing land or other resources in the development of capitalism; or whether there are contradictions between finite physical environments and infinite economic growth. Some of my previous research has examined the creation of what amount to private property rights for corporations to pollute common environments, and the role of environmental considerations in the evolution of multilateral trade and governance regimes. However, not all of my students interested in political economy work on 'environmental' topics.
Neoliberalism and environmental governance. Neoliberalism and environmental governance. The relationships between neoliberalism and environmental governance have been a major focus of my research and writing over the past several years, one that has brought together the interests above. This line of work culminated in the 2007 volume, Neoliberal Environments, edited by Nik Heynen, Scott Prudham, Paul Robbins, and myself.
Political ecology. Much of my research has been shaped by an effort to bring the tools and theories of political ecology-an approach predominantly associated with research in 'Third World' locales-to bear on environmental conflicts in industrialized countries. My earlier research the 'Wise Use' movement, for instance, focused on how claims to public lands and resources in the rural West were intertwined with particular forms of nationalism and racialized and gendered identities. However, many of my students interested in political ecology work elsewhere, including research on community forestry in Nepal, environmental governance in Bhutan, and land reform in Zimbabwe.
Community forestry. I have conducted extensive comparative research on the rapid growth of community forestry in the United States and Canada over the past decade, including the extent to which community forestry has succeeded in its attempts to reconcile competing land management goals by devolving management to the local level. My conclusions emphasize the congruencies between community forestry and neoliberal policy reforms in other domains. In this research, I am particularly interested in how environmental policies and models move and change as they travel through international networks.
Ecoterrorism. One of my current research projects is an analysis of the explosive growth of 'ecoterrorism' as a legal and discursive category, and the relations between it and broader discourses of terrorism. While I am interested in the actions that take place under this label, my primary focus is the creation and proliferation of the juridical category itself, and on how environmental organizations have responded.
Boston's 'Big Dig.' I am in the midst of a long-term research project on the social and environmental geographies of Boston's 'Big Dig,' one of the largest and most complex urban redevelopment projects in the history of the country. The heart of the project was the relocation of an elevated interstate highway, which had cut the city in half since the 1950s, into a new underground tunnel. But it came to include many other elements: new tunnels and highways under the harbor to better connect the city to its airport; new mass transit routes and connections; significant pollution mitigation measures; a landmark new bridge; waterfront access and new parks and open spaces in one of the oldest and most congested downtowns in North America; and a highly polluted island in the city's harbor remade into the centerpiece of a new national park. These transformations of built and natural environments in the city were shaped at least as much by political contestation as by the more visible technological capacities and constraints and considerations of technical efficiency involved in the project; my research on these processes focuses on their implications for understandings of the historical geographies of social movements, the dynamics of contemporary urban growth and competition, and debates over the evolving nature and purposes of open and public spaces in American cities.
My overarching goals as a teacher are to help students acquire and develop the knowledge and skills they need to participate fully as citizens throughout their lives, and to mentor graduate students as they define and pursue their own research trajectories. My teaching spans the human geography and nature-society areas of the department, and the undergraduate and graduate programs.
My undergraduate teaching encourages students to take absolutely nothing about human geographies or human use of the environment for granted, and to look for the underlying structures, processes, or contingencies that produce particular observable geographies. In Geog 20, Introduction to Human Geography, I use case studies to reveal the often invisible processes and relationships that produce visible geographies, whether they be how the Cold War helped produce suburban sprawl, how legacies of colonialism linger in 'natural' landscapes produced for tourists, why Americans love lawns so much, or the ways in which the geographies of gold mining in California in the 1850s are related to the location and functioning of Silicon Valley today; students intrigued by such questions can follow up in any of the upper-level human geography courses. In Geog 130, Environment, Power, and, Justice, Dr. Petra Tschakert and I introduce students to current approaches to the integrated analysis of the relationships between social and ecological change, with a strong focus on issues of justice in those relationships. The course builds on Geog 30 and leads into the suite of 300- and 400-level nature-society courses in the department. At the 400 level, I teach Geog 434, Politics of the Environment, which examines the development of approaches to environmental governance and protection, with an emphasis on social movements, and Geog 439, Property and the Global Environment, which examines differing forms of property as social institutions and their implications for environmental management and quality. The latter two courses afford undergraduate students opportunities to take seminar-style courses with graduate students; many previous students have found the courses to be pivotal in their decisions to go to graduate school in a related field.
At the graduate level, I teach seminars in both human geography and nature-society; a list of previous topics is below. I also teach the first half of Geog 500, a two-semester introduction to the field of geography required of all incoming graduate students. Much of my graduate teaching is through advising and independent studies; please see the section on advising below.
Previous graduate seminars:
I am interested in advising graduate students whose interests overlap with any of the broad research domains above. Your research agenda does not have to fit neatly within or precisely parallel mine; so long as we overlap enough for me to supervise the work, what is most important to me is that my students do the best possible job on research to which they have a deep commitment. Students working with me have explored the development of the grid system in American cities; relationships between public health programs and neoliberal policies; the postcolonial politics of land reform, race, and violence in Zimbabwe and their representations in the UK media; the rapid growth of space tourism; struggles over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the larger issues of the relationships between environmental security and US hegemony; new forms of surveillance and protest; community forestry and biogas programs in Nepal; edible schoolyard programs; contemporary forms of primitive accumulation in cities in India and Pakistan; and the relationships between urban redevelopment and neoliberalism.
Current graduate students
Previous graduate students
PhD
MS
Forthcoming. "Manufacturing Consent for Engineering Earth: Social Dynamics in Boston's Big Dig." (with Kate Driscoll Derickson, Departments of Geography and Women's Studies, Penn State University). In Brunn, S. and A. Wood, eds., Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Mega-Engineering Projects. Springer.
Forthcoming. "Wise Use Movement." Invited contribution to the Warf, B., ed., Encyclopedia of Geography Sage.
2009. "Commons." In N. Castree, D. Demeritt, D. Liverman, and B. Rhoads, eds., A Companion to Environmental Geography, Blackwell. 498-514.
2009. "Marxist geography," "Uneven development," "Social movement," "Common pool resources," "Limits to growth," "Carrying capacity," and "Crisis." In Gregory, D., R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. Watts, and S. Whatmore, eds., The Dictionary of Human Geography (Fifth Edition). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
2008. The geographies of Global Shadows. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29: 262-265.
2008. The annual meeting of the AAG is out of control. Environment and Planning A 40: 2544-2548.
2008. "Rural geography: globalizing the countryside." Progress in Human Geography 32 (1): 129-137.
2007. Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences. Co-edited with Nik Heyen, Paul Robbins, and Scott Prudham. Routledge.
2007. "States of nature: theorizing the state in environmental governance." Review of International Political Economy 14 (1): 176-194.
2007. "Territoriality." In M. Bevir, ed., Encyclopedia of Governance. London: Sage. Vol. II: 958-959.
2006. "Rural geography: Alternative rural economies the search for alternatives in forests, fisheries, food, and fair trade." Progress in Human Geography 30 (6): 803-811.
2006. "Neoliberalism and the politics of alternatives: community forestry in British Columbia and the United States." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 96 (1): 84-104.
2005. "Hurricane Katrina and state abandonment." Editorial (with Bruce Braun, Department of Geography, University of Minnesota). Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 802-809.
2005. "Multifunctional rural geographies: reactionary or radical?" Progress in Human Geography 29 (6): 773-782.
2005. "Scale, sovereignty, and strategy in environmental governance." Antipode 37 (4): 731-753.
2005. "Devolution in the woods: Community-based forestry as hybrid neoliberalism." Environment and Planning A 37 (6): 995-1014.
2005. "Commons as counterhegemonic projects." Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 16 (1): 9-24.
2005. "First World political ecology: directions and challenges." Environment and Planning A 37 (6): 953-958.
2004. "Race, nation, and nature: the cultural politics of 'Celtic' identification in the American West" (with Euan Hague, Department of Geography, DePaul University). Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (2): 387-408.
2004. "Privatizing conditions of production: trade agreements and environmental governance." Geoforum 35 (3): 327-341.
2004. "Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism." (with W. Scott Prudham, Department of Geography, University of Toronto). Introduction to special issue on "Neoliberalism and environmental governance. Geoforum 35 (3): 275-283.
2002. "First World political ecology: lessons from the Wise Use movement." Environment and Planning A 34 (7): 1281-1302
2001. "Environmental Enclosures and the State of Nature in the American West," In Peluso, N. and M. Watts, eds., Violent Environments. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2000. "Social Movement," In Johnston, R., Gregory, D. and Smith, D., eds. The Dictionary of Human Geography (Fourth Edition). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
1998. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Environmentalism, Wise Use, and the Nature of Accumulation in the Rural West," In Braun, B. and N. Castree, eds., Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London: Routledge.
1998. "Nature and Capital in the American West." (with Julie Guthman) Antipode 30 (2), Spring. Introduction to special issue on the theme of nature and capitalism in the American West.
1997. "Nature as artifice, nature as artefact: development, environment and modernity in the late twentieth century," (with Michael Watts), In Lee, R. and J. Wills, eds., Geographies of Economies. London: Edward Arnold.
View Dr. McCarthy's curriculum vitae for a full list of publications, courses taught, fellowships, prizes, grants, presentations, guest lectures, and professional services and affiliations.
Web page last updated Nov. 16, 2009