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Anthropology and the Environment
January 1999
Ed Liebow, Contributing Editor
We've rounded the New Year's bend into the millennial home stretch. The Section's membership is growing, and new publication initiatives discussed in Philadelphia at December's Business Meeting will receive serious consideration in the months ahead. The Section's new communications channel, EANTH-L, is off to an enthusiastic start, judging by the volume of postings in its first several weeks.
Here are a few trend-spotting observations to preview Section News column features in the coming months. With all the expanding bandwidth available, we expect to observe in the new year a lively, substantive information exchange.
Disasters: By their very nature, disasters are disorganization and disruption incarnate. With the initial stages of response and recovery underway, however, come opportunities for reflection on the institutional fabric into which the hazards have been visited. The devastation that Hurricane Mitch visited on Honduras, Nicaragua, and other parts of Central America in October - destruction that many have predicted will set the region's development back decades - call to mind what Piers Blaikie and colleagues so aptly term the "social production of vulnerability" to natural hazards and disasters. We need to hear from the anthropological community on new development trajectories for Central America. Perhaps the coming year will bear witness to those of us who know the local institutions best - and the local/global articulations in which these institutions are enmeshed.
Environmental Security: By year's end, the US economy's investment sector had completed one full circuit on a roller-coaster course, and the European community is optimistically poised to take its next steps in an institutional adventure of unprecedented scale. Elsewhere, however, structural problems are widespread and accompanied by systemic instability. Poverty, disease and environmental degradation remain expected byproducts of this systemic instability, as do ethnic tensions and sometimes-murderous xenophobia. How are we to put the brakes on a death spiral of natural resource degradation resulting directly from the press for hard currency to service mounting debt in Indonesia, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America? Continued constructive engagement with the international investment community is an absolute necessity to help assure a sustainable natural resource endowment and equitable distribution of social benefits and burdens from proposed developments.
Exporting Environmental Justice: The American environmental justice movement is, for the most part, a localized grassroots movement with its historical roots situated more in civil rights than in environmentalism. It attends to a disproportionate exposure to environmental contamination experienced by poor people and people of color, and to the slow pace with which abandoned hazards are cleaned up if they are on the wrong side of the tracks. Building and maintaining a national constituency out of local interest groups is problematic. Yet it is surprising that the rhetoric of environmental justice is rarely evident in discourses outside the US. What is the nature and extent of social movements with similar aims outside North America? What have local groups around the world to learn from one another's experiences? By what means is it possible for them to exchange relevant insights across great distances, languages and cultures?
Historical Ecology: The life sciences and social sciences have much to say to each other, and in this day of over-specialization we need to work vigilantly at maintaining institutional forums where such cross-fertilization can occur. Under the guidance of co-editors William Balée (Tulane) and Carole Crumley (UNC-Chapel Hill), a publication series on Historical Ecology has been launched this past year from Columbia University Press. Balée has edited the inaugural volume, Advances in Historical Ecology. Coming soon will be works featuring fisheries and urbanism in the tropics. The series is a welcome addition, and its co-editors aim to promote a more comprehensive understanding of people and their place in the environment, transcending specialized domains of scholarship among historians, archaeologists, and behavioral scientists. Beyond this series of monographs, however, are there other opportunities to promote this integrative sort of discussion?
Incidentally, if the news has slipped by you, several information exchange channels have recently opened up that will be of particular interest to Section members:
Environmental Anthropology List-Serve: The Anthropology and Environment
Section is pleased to announce the creation of a new anthropology list-serve:
EANTH-L. EANTH-L is a list-serve "mailing list" dedicated to the scholarly
discussion of anything pertaining to the field of ecological/environmental
anthropology. The list is hosted by the U Georgia (USA). It is open to
anyone with an interest in ecological/environmental anthropology. EANTH-L
is intended to be a forum for the discussion of all matters related to
the study and practice of ecological/environmental anthropology. News,
conference announcements, calls for papers, discussion of research and
theory, and other related topics are welcomed and encouraged. To subscribe
to EANTH-L, send a message to: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU. In the body
of the message, type: subscribe Eanth-L
The Surrey (UK) Institute of Art & Design's Centre for Sustainable Design (www.cfsd.org.uk): Intersecting the worlds of work and business, consumer behavior, engineering environmental education, and social marketing, "sustainable design" is a domain of application where anthropologists' contributions should find a welcome home. The Surrey Institute of Art & Design publishes The Journal of Sustainable Product Design, and the Institute's web site has compiled a useful, far-ranging set of resources on: managing eco-design, sustainable product design, and environmental communications and education.
Eldis: Electronic Development and Environment Information System (www.ids.ac.uk/eldis/wnew.html): ELDIS is a gateway to information sources on development and the environment. It is updated almost every day, and a monthly summary of new material is conveniently assembled. In recent months, for example, important documents have been assembled concerning: climate change (materials related to the Buenos Aires meeting on the Framework Convention on Climate Change); participation; gender and development; development cooperation policy; development education / environmental education; food security; sustainable forestry; and links to key development organizations.
US National Park Service - Sustainable Information Directory (www.nps.gov/sustain/): The US National Park Service has also provided an easy way to locate sustainable information on the Internet. Information is grouped into communities, facilities, and products. Within those groups the information is grouped into location (city and country), ecoregion (polar,dry, temperate, and tropical), application (create, use, and reuse), and setting (urban, rural, or wilderness). These groupings can help refine information searches.
Send your news items to Ed Liebow (liebow@policycenter.com, 206/675-1002; fax: 206/675-1005). And check the Anthropology/Environment web site regularly: http://travel.to/anthenv.