Continuities Across Domains of Landscapes and

CONFERENCE DRAFT Please do not cite without author’s permission Abstract: This paper investigates the intersection of cultural logics and political economy in defining and attaining human collective interests in nature, without which any political ecology is theoretically impoverished. Public goods and bads in nature are of necessity embedded in normative logics that are culturally anchored but demonstrably fluid, contrary to the practice of economistic interpretations of political economy. Likewise, though “interests ” form a bedrock of explanatory structure in political economy, interests are demonstrably fluid, and, more importantly, necessarily filtered through an ideational screen in order to become meaningful and thus actionable. One interest-deflecting and defining cognitive screen is science. Science continually presents new challenges to the way interests are understood by citizens and political classes that control states; the sea change introduced by the atmospheric science of ozone holes and global warming is archetypal. Transgenic organisms represent a particularly compelling illustration of these dynamics. These dynamics will be suggested by the case of Bt cotton in India. Some suggestions are made as to why some configurations of knowledge claims win politically while others lose. Politics dependent on junk science have a clear advantage as the core characteristics of science-as-method – skeptical agnosticism, tentative conclusions, replicability, validation in epistemic communities – is forgone for the reassuring simplifications of ideology. Science is inevitably a work in progress, and therefore incomplete, uncertain-- a crippling political condition