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Anthropology and the Environment
November 1997
Charles J. Stevens, Contributing Editor
Carole Crumley (North Carolina, Chapel Hill), the incoming president of the Anthropology and Environment section, begins her tenure as section president at the conclusion of the November annual meeting of the Association, replacing Emilio Moran, who was the inaugural section president. She offers the following message to the membership:
The Mission and Goals of the A&E Section
The A&E Section has come into being at an interesting and crucial time. The largest El Niño in recent history is affecting regions far from its South Pacific origins; pfisteria neurotoxin is killing fish and perhaps sickening people along the East Coast from Maryland to the Gulf; the Australian government, bending to European seed companies' lobbies, has moved to ban the sale of heirloom seeds and will soon introduce similar legislation in the European Parliament.
Some 400 AAA members, representing a remarkable cross-section of subdisciplinary specialties, have joined the A&E Section since early 1996. Many are cross-trained representing several subfields of anthropology, but also with training in earth sciences, journalism, medicine, law; they work in colleges, universities and museums, for the federal or state government, in the private sector.
More than the modest US$15 A&E dues draw new members. We are all aware of the sharp upturn in environmental bad news; many of us have painful firsthand information about conditions in some part of the world where we do research and where live people we care about. Some of us study historical analogues of current conditions, looking for dynamic relationships among key factors; others document complex relations of power and their human and environmental impacts. What joins us together is a willingness to deemphasize subdisciplinary divisions and join forces as anthropologists to explain to other scholars and to the public the complex dialectic between human activity and the planet we all call home.
The A&E Section's membership reflects the diversity of interests and topical foci of anthropology generally, but in the contexts of the A&E, there is a unity of purpose and concern and a lack of contention that has characterized discourse in other arenas in anthropology. We are particularly interested in having graduate students involved in this discourse, and we welcome their participation in the Section's open forum; in a setting where our common interests and concerns override the discordant relations apparent within and between many of anthropology's disciplines.
While factors unrelated to human activity have for centuries been known to effect environmental change, it is only in recent decades that the public, primarily through the work of anthropologists, has been made aware of the inverse: intentionally or not, our species has been modifying its surroundings for several million years. Unique to anthropology is the charge to engage this dialectic. As architects of a bridge between the physical/biotic sciences and the humanities, anthropologists integrate diverse forms of knowledge about the world; however, inasmuch as scholarly activity is itself cultural, we must also critically examine how such knowledge is obtained. Our Section, by adopting a broad definition of environment, encourages exploration of the complex relations among physical/biotic, built and cognitive environments.
Anthropology's persistent claim that both the physical and mental world matter, however difficult at times that assertion has been to maintain, confers on anthropologists a certain authority; we are in an excellent position to propose guidelines, facilitate interaction, and offer examples for the conduct of interdisciplinary research. Anthropologists have the expertise to increase scholarly, public and governmental understanding of the complex and fragile relations between our species and its biotic and built environment.
The mission of the new Anthropology and the Environment Section is to coordinate a discipline-wide collaborative effort that would validate anthropology's pretensions to holism; reach beyond our own field to incorporate scholarly research and practitioners from other disciplines; join forces with indigenous peoples to explain the utility of traditional environmental knowledge; search history for successful and unsuccessful lessons in environmental management; and to make our findings available to local, regional and global policymakers and to the communities their decisions affect.
The Section assures that the diversity of practice and wealth of expertise within anthropology is both advantageous and necessary, if complex environmental issues at every scale are to be addressed, their historical interconnectivity demonstrated, and equitable future courses charted. Anthropologists must enter current debates over environmental issues by as many avenues as possible, on our own behalf as well as that of the indigenous peoples and ways of life we study. We extend a warm invitation to join this new Section to all colleagues who share our goals.
Defining New Objectives
In the scant two years of our existence as a Section, we have accomplished several important objectives. We have drafted bylaws, met membership requirements, begun work on a web page resident at the AAA address but maintained elsewhere (the Society for Political Ecology and the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the U of Arizona), and begun construction of a listserv that would allow more rapid and effective communication among members in the Section. At the 1996 AAA annual meeting our Open Forum and Invited Session were very well attended; the latter, entitled "Human Dimensions of Environmental Change: Anthropology Engages the Issues," filled the room and spilled into the corridor. A book based on the Invited Session is in preparation.
It is my hope that we can build on our accomplishments and define several new objectives for the next two years. First, it is important to ensure the smooth working of our infrastructure, and if you are interested in helping with any aspect of the A&E on-line, please contact me (crumley@unc.edu) or Alx Dark (alxdark@altavista.net).
Second, this year's Open Forum at the annual meeting on November 21 (6:15-7:30 pm, Lincoln East, Concourse Level) will be dedicated to exploring intellectual and practical objectives. Ideally we could form working groups, each of which would shepherd efforts on a particular issue. Some possibilities: choose several key issues (eg environmental justice, the changing job market in the environmental sector, cultural/biological diversity, global climate change, indigenous knowledge, historical analogues to contemporary conditions, raising public awareness) and contact colleagues within A&E and in other Sections (eg NAPA, Culture and Agriculture, Archaeology, Political and Legal Anthropology) to consolidate scarce financial resources and rich anthropological resources.
The A&E Section will also be visible at the annual meeting, with nine sessions. You are urged to attend as many as possible, to underscore to the Association and to the media that cover the meetings our earnestness, our numbers, and the utility of our efforts. The sessions at the Annual Meeting sponsored by the Anthropology and the Environment Section are: [omitted, see the rest of the web site].
New Graduate Program in Environmental Anthropology at U of Washington
Joining the 4 graduate programs in environmental anthropology previously reviewed in the A&E Section News, the U of Georgia, U of Arizona, Rutgers U and Indiana U, U of Washington announces a new graduate program in environmental anthropology. Efforts to construct similar such programs are underway in a number of other institutions as well and reflect a growing concern in academics generally for interdisciplinary approaches to the study of human-environment relations.
Environmental Anthropology (EA) is a new interdisciplinary graduate program based in the Department of Anthropology at the U of Washington (UW). Its purpose is to provide a coherent framework for graduate students wishing to study environmental topics from an anthropological perspective, while building and maintaining strong interdisciplinary connections. The EA program considers human-environmental interactions across the full range of sociocultural variation, and endeavors to understand environmental problems and knowledge not only from a Western scientific standpoint, but also from the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of members of various local or indigenous cultural systems. These goals require familiarity with concepts and methods in various sciences, social, biological and physical; hence EA is inherently interdisciplinary. As with other graduate programs in the department, study in EA will lead to MA and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology. The EA program is primarily geared toward completion of the Ph.D., with the MA degree obtained en route.
The Primary areas of interest within the EA Program include:
- ethnobiology and indigenous environmental knowledge;
- sociocultural causes and consequences of environmental modification;
- environmental conservation and sustainability;
- culturally appropriate environmental economies;
- political ecology of economic/environmental change
Depending on their particular interests or background, students in the EA program may focus on ethnographic or archaeological contexts for the study of human-environmental interaction; and they may work in any region of the world. The present EA core faculty focus their research on Native North America, Mesoamerica, the South Pacific and Paleolithic Europe, but faculty allied with EA in Anthropology and a dozen other fields (including economics, forest resources, quaternary research, zoology, environmental health, engineering, political science, ocean and fisheries sciences, geology, and geography) have expertise in several other regions. Core faculty include Eugene Hunn, Eric A. Smith, Don Grayson, and David Tracer.
The EA Program attracts applicants with a diverse set of interests and backgrounds. The program has competitive admission procedures similar to those in place for other U of Washington anthropology graduate programs, but giving preference to applicants who have previous background in both natural and social sciences relevant to environmental anthropology. Only two or three applicants will be admitted to the program in any given year. Those students who are admitted into the EA Program are supported by a combination of departmental and university funds, competitive federal funding (NSF, EPA), faculty research grants, and personal funds.
Further details of the EA Program can be obtained from visiting the Program web site: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~anthro/environanth.
Research reports, news items of environmental interest, information about relevant web sites and environmental organizations that would be of interest to the membership can be sent to C Stevens, Dept. of Demography, U California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720; stevens@demog.berkeley.edu.