The contemporary economic system of concern to political ecology is late global capitalism, characterized by (a) a tiny but super‐rich elite that controls most of the wealth; (b) a myopic capitalist focus on the ever‐expanding treadmill of pro- duction and ceaseless profit making; (c) a governance structure that serves to enhance the wealth of the elite while controlling popular unrest using both stick and carrot mechanisms; (d) discursive and hegemonic cultural production that embeds ideologies and stereotypes into the dominant cultural logic; (e) the spatial segregation of socially subordinate groups that serves to warehouse or isolate surplus labor; and (f) the drive to externalize real production costs, according to which the burden of pollution and waste are primarily experienced by governments and by powerless communities (Baer, Singer, and Susser 2013). Thus, contemporary capitalism requires aggressive and often reckless and under- regulated resource extraction, which in turn produces a constantly growing volume of toxic waste; this then requires the identification of dumping grounds for convenient waste product disposal, and media disinterest in identifying capi- talist wealth and power as the actual source of much ill health.
Ecobiopolitics and Native American Reservation Health Inequities by Merrill Singer and G. Derrick Hodge (compiled in A Companion to the Anthropology of Enviornmental Health as Chapter 10, pg. 195)
