Critique alone without action won’t do anything to mobilize lines of flight or political possibility.

Political ecology is integral to a counter-hegemonic reform agenda because it offers a substantive set of directions for a post-capitalist, ecologically sustainable model of development. Returning to the brief discussion of resource sector workers, above, and to Raymond Williams's insistence that people need to be able to believe that “practical alternatives” are available, it is clear that political ecologists must build coalitions to develop and negotiate transitional plans as well as new institutions. The starting points for such coalitions may be municipal or regional; the ways in which national and global institutions (treaties, trade and investment agreements, WTO rules, jurisdictional division of powers, etc.) constrain, obstruct (or occasionally enable) changes at the local level will become clear soon enough, and will point the way toward the coalitions and reforms needed at other scales. What is important, as Williams observed, is that: “while certain principles can be established, all actual policies have to depend on new and difficult audits of resources, which must by definition be specific. We can look first at the principles, but their full practical bearings cannot be set down except in this place and that, by [END PAGE 109] this enquiry and that, in a sustained and necessarily negotiated process” (1983: 256). This conclusion directs our attention to what are, in my view, the critical tasks of the organic intellectuals of counter-hegemonic politics. There is, of course, the need to root political discourse in shared values and a common agenda of democratic reforms. Research must construct a solid account of the political, economic, cultural and ecological relationships operative within a given frame of action, including the ways in which these relationships cross multiple scales (from the local to the global). This foundation is essential to identifying the agency of change and the resources needed to strengthen civil society, and to develop a program and strategy for change. All of the social movements, including the unions, have important, necessary roles to play in such planning and negotiation.

Williams argued further that criticism of capitalism or enumeration of the many horrors of the times (salient then, the fear of nuclear war) would, alone, do little to mobilize people to undertake collective action for a better world. When he wrote these words, climate change and peak oil were hardly on our radar, nor the risks of genetically modified organisms, nor imminent mass extinctions of other species due to human demands on the planet's carrying capacity. Chernobyl hadn't happened yet. Today, more than ever, counter-hegemonic politics must be about “making hope practical, rather than despair convincing” (Williams, 1983: 240). Political ecology offers many of the tools we need to build a world in which humans and all of nature are no longer treated, as Williams put it, as “raw material for production,” but in which there is a “new orientation of livelihood: of practical, self-managing, self-renewing societies, in which people care first for each other, in a living world” (1983: 262, 266).