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Anthropology and the Environment

May 1999

Ed Liebow, Contributing Editor

In the last of this year's series on anthropology's relevance to environmental management, this month's column features two related items. First is a summary of remarks that Section President Carole Crumley made about the relationship of the social sciences to the study of the environment in a presentation to the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation. Second, I have added a post-script, picking up on one of Carole's key themes of trans-disciplinary collaboration, calling to your attention the general issue of "Environmental Security," and a work-in-progress of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change in this policy domain.

The National Science Board, Social Science, and Environmental Research

By Carole Crumley (crumley@unc.edu / UNC-Chapel Hill)

Late one Thursday afternoon in February I received a call from a representative of the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation. I was asked to give a presentation to the Board on the relationship of the social sciences to the study of the environment, a last-minute replacement for an economist with a scheduling conflict. My written remarks (below) were due the next Monday; my presentation was the following Thursday at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. I would have fifteen minutes.

The absurdity of the request matched the enormity of the task, and I apologize in advance for having been forced to pick and choose a few examples from a huge body of research. I researched the composition of the Board: physicist, astronomer, biologist, university chancellors and presidents, a few corporate CEOs; only one person is trained in an environmental discipline, and none in the social sciences. NSF is responding to instructions from Congress to expand the scope of its role in environmental research, education, and assessment. Congressional interest was stimulated by the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment (CNIE), which since 1989 has lobbied for a stand-alone environmental research and education agency. A bill with bipartisan support was introduced to create NIE, and the National Academy of Sciences was instructed to examine the best way to implement the idea. The NAS report acknowledged the need for such an entity, but recommended that NSF's science role be expanded in lieu of a new agency. NSF's Board formed the Task Force on the Environment and hence a hearing in January in Portland OR, the symposium I attended in February, and a Town Hall meeting at NSF in Arlington VA in March. My remarks follow.

Social Science Contribution to Environmental Research. Complex systems research focuses on three key features: the integration (holism) and communication (self-organization) among system components, and the importance of system history to the study of its behavior (chaos theory). The Earth System is the most complex dissipative system known, a pivotal component of which is the human species.

The relationship between our species and the Earth environment has lasted five million years; researchers have traced human physiological and cognitive evolution by identifying modifications caused by human activity on their surroundings. Over ten thousand years ago, humans had already had continental-scale effects (the possible extinction of Pleistocene megafauna in North America, the alteration of vegetation in North America and Australia); a few thousand years later, human settlement and land use had altered coastlines and the courses of rivers on every inhabited continent. By two thousand years ago, ice- and sea-cores, vegetation, and other proxy evidence document the effects of deforestation which, through agricultural and industrial activities, altered key components of the Earth's atmosphere, affected sea level and global average temperatures, and changed regional climate.

Humans were, and are, a keystone species: human behavior affects the evolutionary success of our own as well as other species. Human societies do not, however, always destroy their surroundings; evidence from every inhabited continent demonstrates that, until recently, just the opposite was more common: based on lengthy and astute observation of the world around them (referred to as cultural knowledge), people implement strategies and practices that sustain the productivity of the environment.

Social scientists (especially anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and geographers) and humanists (historians) have documented environmentally sound and organizationally sophisticated solutions to environmental challenges. For example, anthropologist Stephen Lansing demonstrates that the network of water temples, the pre-colonial means used in Bali to irrigate rice terraces, maintained community values as well as the landscape; furthermore, the "most efficient" solution to his computer simulation mirrored the traditional practice. Working in the Amazonian rainforest, human ecologist Emilio Moran finds that local people tend the forest as if it were a garden: people encourage or discourage certain species, and employ the organic soils found at abandoned settlements.

My own work in Burgundy (France) arrives at similar conclusions. The region's position at the juncture of three huge weather systems (Atlantic, Continental, Mediterranean) ensures a variable climatic history. We have amassed two thousand years of data with which to work; in that long period, both sustaining and destructive events and practices are documented. Several times, a suite of landscape features and extractive practices emerged--the result of the co-evolution over centuries of individual and collective experimentation--that were workable solutions to the region's environmental uncertainty. The times when the environmental system was compromised by unwise use, the social and economic price was high and much time passed before the region was again prosperous. Our current research documents contemporary challenges to many of these sound and proven principles as inhabitants respond to international market and regulatory forces. Knowledge of regional environmental history enables us to identify systemic thresholds, but does not alone ensure sustainable practice. Together, the sensitivity of regulatory legislation to local conditions and the opinions, values, and perceptions of affected populations determine compliance and, ultimately, the success of mitigation.

NSF's Role. Holistic Thinking, Interdisciplinary Communication Earth system history, practiced at every scale (termed historical ecology) employs terms and concepts familiar across many disciplines (e.g., scale, diversity, landscape, boundaries). NSF should foster the construction of this grammar, offering venues for its development and rewarding trans-disciplinary research that builds on shared understandings. At present, proposals of interdisciplinary scholarly partnerships cannot survive the review process; a recent one of my own was sent to 22 reviewers.

As the Committee for the National Institute for the Environment has noted, social science is not simply another disciplinary specialty; it is integral to the history and the future of the Earth system and should not be separately categorized (cf. NSF's proposed "Environment and the Human Dimension"). Gross inequities in the distribution of funds to the biological/physical sciences (in contrast with inadequate funding of the social sciences) must be redressed. NSF must have a "clearinghouse" function, offering information, electronically and in print, to scholars, students, and the public. NSF should foster, through preferential funding, partnerships across the "two cultures" gap and among politically unequal stakeholders.

A Post-Script: Linking Environment and Security

Since I first thought about Carole's remarks to the National Science Board, what has stuck with me was how clearly she has stated the need for trans-disciplinary research and for closing the funding gap. It then occurred to me that as innocuous as they may seem, these are two rather radical proposals for institutional change, and we know that change promises risk and uncertainty. We also know that risk and uncertainty are often effectively mitigated in the adoption of innovations by the use of "demonstration effects," that is, a modest-scale demonstration that shows how benefits of change may outweigh associated harms. If the CNIE effort is not considered a suitable model for organizational change (although it is difficult to see why it won't serve), then just across the inland waters from here, at the University of Victoria (British Columbia) Centre for Global Studies, may be just the sort of demonstration we should look to more closely. And it also happens to have as its substantive focus the last of the "relevant" environmental topics that I had wanted to call to the Section's attention this spring: Environmental Security.

The recent capture of Kurdish guerilla leader Abdullah Ocalan drew worldwide attention back to a 15-year old war between Kurds and the Turkish Army. This war is at the intersection of a complex history of local ethnic tension and geopolitics, but many observers say that behind it all is a battle over water. Indeed, competition for water - and for the power that control of water represents - is not restricted to the Middle East. Such competition is intensifying from Africa and Central Asia to Los Angeles and the Everglades.

And water is only the start of it. Resource conflicts over food, energy, and land use highlight the close relationships between environmental change, vulnerability, and conflict. With an estimated 1.5 billion people living in poverty world-wide, 1.3 billion lacking access to safe water, 500 million being malnourished, and an estimated 2 million environmental refugees, the urgent need for better understanding of these relationships is clear. Based at the U Victoria's Centre for Global Studies is a recent initiative that exemplifies the sort of integrative, trans-disciplinary approach to global problems that Carole referred to in her remarks to the National Science Board, the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project of the International Human Dimensions Programme. The project aims to promote research activities in the area of global environmental change and human security, where "human security" recognizes the essential "integrative" nature of the relationship among individual, community and national vulnerability to environmental change. In addition, the project aims to encourage scholarly collaboration and to facilitate improved communication between the policy research communities.

A draft Science Plan is available for the project at the web site (http://www.gechs.org/). The plan identifies such key research themes as:

Environmental degradation, migration and security;
Water resources and security;
International negotiations, sovereignty and security; and
Environmental change, adaptation and security.

A GECHS Research Report series is published three times a year. The first report is "Environmental Degradation and Population Movement" (April 1998). The second research report, on "Indicators of Human Insecurity," was published in January, 1999. Two more research reports will be published in 1999: one on "Environment and Security Research in Scandinavia," and one on "Food Security". In addition, the project plans to publish a series of policy briefing documents on key issues in environmental security (AVISO), starting in 1999.

Send your Section news items to Ed Liebow (liebow@policycenter.com, 206/675-1002; fax: 206/675-1005). And check the Anthropology/Environment web site regularly.