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Anthropology and the Environment
February 1998
Charles J. Stevens, Contributing Editor
Session Proposal for 1998 Meeting
Last month's newsletter included a list of suggested session topics for the 1998 annual meeting in Philadelphia. Leslie Main Johnson (U Alberta) seeks to organize another session, "Ethnoecology: Perceptions of Land and Kinds of Place." Leslie Johnson and Eugene Anderson (U California, Riverside) welcome papers dealing with ethnoecological knowledge of landscape and kinds of place. They hope to gather papers dealing with the issue from a variety of geographic and cultural areas to get a sense of the range of approaches to the perception of landscape among different peoples. Their long-range plans include organizing the papers for eventual publication into a volume dealing with ethnoecological perceptions of land in different cultural and ecological settings. For further information or to express interest in this session contact Leslie Main Johnson, Dept of Anthropology, 13-15 HM Tory Bldg, U Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6G 2H4; lgottes@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca; or Eugene Anderson, Dept of Anthropology, UC-Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521-0418; gene@ucracl.ucr.edu.
The Biodiversity Conservation Network
The Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN) is administered by the Biodiversity Support Program and is implemented by a consortium of the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy and the World Resources Institute and is funded by USAID through the US-Asia Environmental Partnership. The program in the Asia and Pacific region provides grants for community-based enterprises directly dependent on biodiversity. The idea is to establish economic incentives to maintain biodiversity and encourage local people to conserve local and regional biological diversity as essential for long-term economic well-being.
The goal is to promote enterprise-based approaches to natural conservation. The program was begun in 1990 with the identification of three factors that directly affected biodiversity conservation. These three factors were (1) the observation that many development projects were unlikely to be successful because the economic activities of the project were not associated with ecological conservation; (2) the increased consumer interest in "rainforest products" created a recognized value in maintaining these ecologically based products over the long term, and thus conservation and economic market potentials were inherently linked, and (3) the long-term social, economic and ecological impacts of most development projects on local populations was seldom established. These factors prompted developing an enterprise-based economic development project that enhanced local biodiversity conservation and fostered economic development in the control of local populations.
BCN was established to support site-specific efforts to conserve biodiversity in a number of areas in the Asia/Pacific Region and evaluate the effectiveness of these enterprise-oriented approaches to locally based natural conservation efforts and economic development.
Last year 20 such projects were carried out, and the progress of these projects is presented in the BCN Annual Report for 1997. In addition to promoting conservation of local biological diversity, the projects are beginning to influence national and local policies on improved natural resource management. The annual report also outlines common themes that have emerged from the implementation of the projects. While the information from the projects remains preliminary and not definitive, BCN believes that reasonable observations, successes and failures, can nonetheless be offered at this early stage of project implementation. The annual report outlines common themes that arose during the early implementation of these projects and presents these themes in terms of catalysts for success and obstacles to success encountered in enterprise development, generation of development benefits, establishing a "community of stakeholders" in the project's success, establishing government relations with the project and the local community based enterprise and developing a vision of enterprise and conservation in the local community. The project reports presented in the BCN annual report are ongoing in Nepal, India, Indonesia, Philippines, New Guinea, Fiji and Soloman Islands.
During the annual meeting in November, a meeting between conservationists at BCN and anthropologists was held at the WWF offices. BCN is actively seeking to establish working ties with anthropologists who work in the Pacific area and who have interests in environmental issues. The BCN main office is in the World Wildlife Fund Office, at 1250 24th St., Washington, DC 20037. Their web site address is www.bcnet.org or at bcnet@wwfus.org.
A&E Website and E-Mail Address
Speaking of web sites, the Environment Section's web site is located (still) at http://travel.to/anthenv. Alx Dark, who manages the web site and is sitting as the student representative on the A&E Executive Committee, is in the process of building a list of all the A&E membership's e-mail addresses so that communication within the section can be facilitated. If you have not yet sent your e-mail address to Alx, please take a little time to do so: alxdark@altavista.net.
Anthropologists and Demography Programs
I am in the final year of an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, and I had the occasion to meet a number of other Mellon fellows at the last AAA annual meeting. None of the following discussion is offered as commentary or description of any particular Mellon program and is merely a reflection of these conversations among several Mellon postdoctoral fellows. The Mellon Programs are available to demographers to study in anthropology programs or to anthropologists to study in demography programs. For those programs catering to anthropologists, the goal of the Mellon program is to construct instructional and collaborative environments of mutual professional and educational interests to both anthropologists and demographers. Programs are to foster interdisciplinary effort and promote collaboration between demographers and anthropologists. The programs are administered differently at different universities, however. In some cases, fellows are engaged in collaborative and professional research and mutual instruction where the perspectives of anthropology and highly empirical and mathematical perspective of demography are integrated. In other programs fellows are required to sit in demography classes and, in some cases, take class examinations with undergraduate students in sociology, economics and demography.
There appear to be wide differences in what certain programs expect of their anthropology postdoctoral fellows and in some cases sitting in classes is merely encouraged, while at others sitting in classes and taking examinations is a condition of the fellowship. Conversation with postdocs in the latter type of program, while the instruction in demography was rigorous and detailed, revealed little focus on integration of an anthropological perspective and apparently little interest in approaches straying from rational theory or strict mathematical modeling and empirical approaches in the social sciences. Even the most materialist anthropologists in Mellon programs with whom I spoke were finding the latter Mellon programs difficult and, in the worst cases, uncomfortable environments where alternative perspectives and philosophies of social scholarship were dismissed as "unscientific." Some fellows found some stilted attitudes about anthropology held by demographers. (Anthropology was equated with either strict adversarial interpretivism or dubbed as "postmodernism.") Individuals interested in demography should investigate the particular programs before deciding which may better fit their needs and perspectives.
Since demography is such a fundamental concern for human/resource relations, anthropologists with interests in environmental issues may be increasingly drawn toward gaining some expertise in demographic analysis. There is a web site devoted to the Andrew W. Mellon Program, and most population centers have their own web sites as well. (There are 14 population centers which offer postdoctoral fellowships to anthropologists, including the U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the U of California, Berkeley, the U of Pennsylvania and the U of Washington). Mellon grants are made to the institution, not individuals; so interested individuals should begin the process of seeking Mellon fellowships by contacting an eligible population studies center. Application requires a written proposal outlining the activities to be undertaken during the course of the fellowship, biographical sketches of both the prospective fellow and the demographer with whom collaboration is to take place, budget and expected outcome of instruction and collaboration is to take place, budget and expected outcome of instruction and collaboration. Application may also be made through demography centers. Proposals to the Mellon Foundation must be submitted no later than September 1, but individual demography centers may have deadlines as early as April 1.
New Anthropology and Environment Contributing Editor
This is my last contribution of the A&E news, and Edward Liebow will be taking over with the March AN. Until the e-mail list of the membership is complete (when he will be able to solicit items directly from the membership), please send ideas, research reports, web site addresses, discussion of important issues, annual meeting session ideas and other items for the AN to him as liebow@seanet.com.