The Center for Political Ecology is an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit based in Santa Cruz, California. Incorporated in 1989 with an endowment from its founder, economist and social theorist James O’Connor, the Center produced newsletters, discussion papers, books and the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (CNS) with input from an international editorial board; editorial groups in Toronto, New York, Boston and Santa Cruz; and collaboration with sister journals in Italy, Spain and France. In 2004, we turned over responsibility for the journal and other publications to the New York editorial group.

Today, our continuing fiscal sponsorship of CNS is one element in a larger mission. We support political ecology scholarship, education, advocacy, and transformative change by serving as the fiscal sponsor for:

• environmental action, agroecology, and sustainability groups in the Monterey and San Francisco Bay area; and, 
• the CPE action-research collective: a transdiscplinary, international group of researchers whose science and human rights action-research focuses on environment, health and human rights. Working in alliance with diverse partners and communities, our action-research documents the conditions that structure human environmental crises and their consequential damages in ways that define, and ideally, secure meaningful remedy.