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Anthropology and the Environment
April 1996
C J Stevens, Contributing Editor
The most important issue at hand for the A&E section is recruitment of membership so that we may retain our section status in the association. We must have 250 members by the November meetings in San Francisco. Membership dues are $15.00 payable by any number of convenient forms of monetary compensation to the AAA membership services.
Of interest to scholars with an interest in studies of human/environment interaction is the Journal of Political Ecology: Case Studies in History and Society, a peer reviewed electronic journal of the Political Ecology Society (PESO) begun in 1994. The journal welcomes submissions of case studies in English, French, and Spanish from a broad range of specialists in agriculture, land tenure, health , development, international law, history, and both the physical and social sciences. Although committed to a broad interdisciplinary focus, the major theoretical drive of the emergent discipline of political ecology and this journal and has been from political economy and ecological analysis.
The Journal of Political Ecology (JPE) is produced at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and is available through and archived at the University of Arizona Library, Tucson, Arizona. JPE has no arbitrary length guidelines for submissions but longer articles are expected to be of greater significance to the field than shorter ones. Submissions should be made on IBM or Mac 3 1/2 (720 or 1.44) diskettes, using WP 5.0, extended ASCII or another agreed upon format. These submissions should be accompanied by a paper copy and a letter requesting review in JPE. The letter should note that the submitted work is an original paper not submitted for review elsewhere and should include a $10.00 peer review fee (made out to PESO/BARA, a non-profit university account). The fee is refunded if the submitted paper is deemed inappropriate for peer review.
Subscribers may join PESO for an annual fee of $25.00 and will receive annual diskettes containing the Journal of Political Ecology and the JPE forum's academic discussions, a directory of members and members' expertise, free peer reviewing of one submission per year, as well as news bulletins and notifications of grant opportunities. For additional information, contact the editors, Thomas Park, tpark@ccit.arizona.edu, or James Greenberg, jgreenber@ccit.arizona.edu . Access to JPE is available through Internet: telnet sabio.arizona.edu .
The A&E has a web page! Thanks to the aforementioned folks at PESO, the web page for A&E can be accessed at:
The web page should be up and running by the time this AN appears in your mailbox.
The Political Ecology Society (PESO) also announces an annual $500 award for the best article published in the JPL. The award is designated the Robert McC. Netting Prize in Political Ecology. For the first round of this competition, all papers published in the 1994-95 volumes will be eligible. Henceforth awards will be made to articles published in the preceding year's volume and award announcements will be made on April 20th of each year. All PESO members will be eligible to cast votes for the article the believe to have been the most informative of the previous year's volumes. In case of a tie, the award prize will be split. Members will have three weeks to cast ballots after the preceding year's volume is closed.
A reminder to folks that the Annual Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property is to be held in beautiful downtown Berkeley, California on June 5-9. The deadline for paper abstracts was last September. An e-mail copy of the conference registration form may be requested from commons@globetrotter.berkeley.edu .
Paige West, a graduate student at Rutgers University has organized a session of the AAA annual meeting in San Francisco entitled Intersections:Place, Space, Nature, Culture, Science, the participants of which are current graduate students in environmental anthropology. The session was organized specifically to illustrate the diversity of approaches utilized in anthropological research in the understanding of human/natural resource interaction. Paige can be contacted at cpwest@eden.rutgers.edu for more information.
A research project under the auspices of the International Conservation of Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) is currently in its third of five years at the University of Arizona. The project is entitled Bioactive Agents of Medicinal Plants from Drylands of Latin America and financed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), this project involves collaborators from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chili, the National University of Patagonia and the Institute of Biological Resources (INTA) in Argentina. In the US, the cooperating institutions include the University of Arizona, GWL Hansen's Disease Center, Purdue University, and the Medical and Agricultural Research Divisions of Wyeth Ayerst (previously American Cyanmid).
The University of Arizona has the overall purpose of prospecting for medicinal plants in the arid and semi-arid zones of Chili, Argentine, and Mexico. Teams of botanists and taxonomists coordinated by collaborators from the host country, collect and classify plants, grind them for shipment or process them as extracts and send them to the University of Arizona where they are chemically analyzed and tested for bioactive agents. The viable samples are then sent to processing laboratories and to Wyeth Ayerst for testing for potential uses as pharmaceutical or crop protection agents.
The methodologies of the plant collection teams include random, ethnobotanical, and anthropological approaches. Random collection is necessary for finding plants with medicinal uses in treating diseases for which there is no history of ethnobotanical knowledge. The ethnobotanical and anthropological approaches identify shamans, curanderos, and other plant experts in the communities who possess knowledge developed and refined through centuries of experience in "natural laboratory" settings. Despite the presence of modern medical facilities throughout these countries, medicinal plants and native curers have an important health function. Curing activities are more prevalent in the countryside, but there is a large network which produces, distributes, and uses medicinal plants and curers in urban areas as noted, for example, in the work of Eduardo Cardenas Medina (1993) Unidad de Medicina Tradicional (unpublished manuscript).
The associate program is called the Conservation Biodiversity and Sustainable Economic Development and has the goal of evaluating alternative strategies for minimizing the negative impacts on biological and cultural diversity resulting from the exploitation of newly discovered biological resources and identifying alternative strategies for ensuring that economic and social benefits accrue to local and national economies as a consequence of the exploitation of pharmaceutically useful medicinal plants.
Reports will be produced on biodiversity by describing the biological communities, identifying rare or sensitive wild species or communities of plants and animals, uncovering impediments to protecting and managing newly discovered biological resources, describing land tenure and resource management practices in target areas, and identifying national and regional institutions that pertain to conservation and natural resources. The reports on sustainable development will describe the local population of humans, their subsistence systems, traditional relationships with natural resources in the target areas, and identify aspects of the national economy and culture that pertain to sustainable development. These reports will also be important for the protection of biodiversity since the treatment of sensitive of=r endangered plants today is not accomplished in a vacuum. There is a local and national history of the uses of natural resources which have an impact on the current problems of this nature.
As originally conceived, the Associate Program would bring together a combination of social science and biological teams to research each of the regions from which plants are gathered in Argentina and Chili. For each target area, these teams would 1) summarize secondary sources on biodiversity and subsistence economies; 2) conduct group, household, and key informant interviews to obtain information about subsistence lifestyles and on traditional uses of lands and biological resources; and 3) prepare assessment reports that describe the social and biological attributes for each target area and evaluate alternative strategies to insure that as new biological resources are developed in the region, impacts on cultural and biological diversity are minimized and benefits to local and national economies are maximized. These techniques provide valuable on-the-ground information for the development of appropriate strategies for meeting the biodiversity and sustainable development objectives of the Associate Program. and the ICGB project.
The project conducted field trips to Buenos Aires and the Patagonia region of Argentina in the summers of 1993-1995. Contacts were made with researchers at the Instituto National de Recursos Biologicos at INTA and the National University of Patagonia, Centro National Patagonico, and field trips have been made to the Patagonia region where botanists are making collections. Meetings with government agencies and nongovernmental environmental groups were held in the province of Chubut as well as in Buenos Aires. Field work has also been conducted in Chili during the summer months of 1994 and 1995. Interviews were conducted with botanists, social scientists, representatives of government agencies, and rural medical specialists in the collection zones of the Norte Chicos and Norte Grande. Valuable discussions have been held with the World Resources Institute and Conservation International and arrangements were made for continued collaboration with these groups. Arrangements are being made with social scientists in Chili and Argentina for the provision of collaborative reports which will become part of the overall project.William Alexander, a graduate student at Arizona, recently departed to study the local and historical context of biodiversity in a valley in Chili which is one of the collection sites for the project. It is clear that the treatment of the conservation of the biodiversity of a particular plant is not only related to the whole ecosystem involving other plants and animals, but also to the history of conservation efforts in the region and how they relate to human activity including mining, farming, urban development, water resources, pollution, pastoralism, and similar factors. This is a unique approach to the study of biodiversity and sustainable economic development from a historical and holistic perspective.
Towards the end of the project, in 1997 or 1998, an international workshop with special focus on problems and issues common to both Argentina and Chili is proposed. The workshop should produce a critical review of the ICBG and specific strategies for addressing biodiversity, sustainable development, and indigenous rights. By fostering open discussions and by insuring the open participation of local peoples, and local and national interest groups, the project hopes to provide new models and insights for preserving the earth's genetic richness and for distributing the benefits of this diversity equitably.
(adapted from "Issues in Bio-Prospecting for Medicinal Plants in Chili and Argentina, Thomas Weaver (Arizona), William Alexander (Arizona), and William Shaw (Arizona) in a report in the Proceedings of the Second Congress of Chilean Anthropologists, November 1995. For more information contact Thomas Weaver, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721).
In the subsequent newsletters, I hope to provide reviews of programs in environmental anthropology (there aren't many) as well as continuing to provide members with information on research projects, articles, and environmental news. Note, for example, that the April/May edition of the UTNE Reader has a review of the issues of indigenous peoples rights to patents and returns on their ethnobiological and medico-botanical knowledge. Please send any information for inclusion in the section newsletter submission to cstevens@anthro.arizona.edu or call (520)621-2846.