Piers Blaikie
| Piers Macleod Blaikie | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 29, 1942 Helensburgh, Scotland |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | Political Ecology |
Piers Macleod Blaikie (born 29 January 1942) is a geographer and scholar of international development and natural resources, who worked until 2003 at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia. His contribution to development has been in four areas:
Blaikie was born in wartime Scotland, in Helensburgh. He was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read the Geography Tripos (1964) and completed a PhD (1971). He lectured in geography at the University of Reading from 1968 to 1972, before spending 33 years at the University of East Anglia, in the School of Development Studies, where he eventually became Professor. He retired in 2003 but has remained professionally active.
Of all his work his best known is the small volume published in 1985 Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries. In this book, and elsewhere, he argues that soil erosion should not only, or even mainly, be thought of as being the result of mismanagement, overpopulation or for environmental reasons but can often be due to the effects of political economy on poor farmers. His earliest work was based on the case of Nepal, where the marginalisation of peasant farmers onto steep slopes has resulted in erosion. Blaikie writes "A principal conclusion of this book is that soil erosion in lesser developed countries will not be substantially reduced unless it seriously threatens the accumulation possibilities of the dominant classes" (p147).
Blaikie's legacy from this book was the beginnings of regional political ecology, a particular approach to understanding the economic and political drivers of resource degradation and particularly the lack of access to natural resources suffered by poor or marginalised people. In Land Degradation and Society (1987) the approach received further development. Blaikie regards an environmental problem as rooted in processes operating at different nested scales, moving from the local to the international political economy. The job of the political ecologist is to work out how these scaled factors interrelate. In AIDS in Africa Blaikie and UEA colleague Tony Barnett applied the approach to understanding the contemporary AIDS crisis in Africa, based on substantial fieldwork in East Africa.
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