Each year, Earth Day—April 22—marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. Earth Day 1970 capitalized on the emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns front and center. The very first Earth Day celebration brought 20 million Americans to the streets to peacefully demonstrate for environmental protection.
Humans are adapted to change. I’ll illustrate this point using feeding and diet as an example.[1] Our nutritional niche is arguably among the broadest on the planet, rivaling most other species in its eclectic omnivory and diverse patterns of food consumption; we are gustatory generalists extraordinaire, flexible, and adapted to shifting landscapes of food availability. Such biological flexibility has been the subject of lively discussion among biological anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. The Variability Selection Hypothesis (Potts 1998), for example, posits that humans (and our hominin forebears) are best adapted not to any particular sort of ecological circumstances but instead to change itself. This makes sense from a climatological and ecological vantage: the most dramatic and frequent climate oscillations in the past 27 million years have occurred recently, in the past 5 to 6 million years—dates corresponding with the evolution of our lineage. We continue to adapt as new foods have been introduced, with continually shifting gut microbiomes and new alleles. The phylogenetic inertia[2] of our biological and ecological flexibility has clearly served us well over evolutionary time: we are a true cosmopolitan species, occupying virtually every habitat type on the planet.
The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Placing Plants in Territory” comes from Volume 7 (2016), a special issue on people and plants edited by Kay E. Lewis-Jones. In their article, Sarah Besky and Jonathan Padwe use plants to think about territory, a concept that is at once a bulwark of social theory and an undertheorized category of social analysis. Through examples of how plants operate in different domains, they illustrate the analytical potential that a more-than-human approach to territories provides.
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I’m a critical environmental anthropologist, which means I make my living by having serious doubts about every term in this aspirational self-description. Writing and teaching under such a sign has always been hard, but it’s gotten even harder lately, for painfully obvious reasons. For example, this semester, for the second time, I am teaching a midlevel course for undergraduates called “Theories of Human Nature.” As with so many anthropology courses at my university, the title is deceptive: instead of theories of human nature, my innocent charges are stuck with a relentless series of stories demonstrating that there is no such thing as human nature and that any effort to appeal to it inevitably entails the denigration of many would-be humans and the degradation of what is left of nature in the name of some dubious onto-political cause or other (see Haraway 2007; Soper 1995). By the end of the semester, I would normally hope my students would have become as suspicious of the word “human” as they are of the word “nature,” and downright outraged to hear them juxtaposed in an argument.
The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “Anthropological Engagement with the Anthropocene: A Critical Review,” comes from Volume 6 (2015), a special issue on the Anthropocene. In their review of anthropology’s evolving engagement with the Anthropocene, HannahGibson and Sita Venkateswar contemplate multifarious approaches to research and discuss critical engagement discussed including anthropology beyond disciplinary borders, queries writing in the Anthropocene, and anthropology of climate change.
Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.
“It is not a concrete state of ‘being’ but a process of becoming. For example, consider that a rider on a horse has to some extent ‘become’ like a horse in order to interact, connect, and think with the horse, just as we can say that an animal may ‘become human’” (Gibson and Venkateswar 2015: 13). Photograph by Pranav Bhasin via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Before you read this article, please take a moment to answer these questions: What is the biggest problem with environmental sustainability? What possibilities exist for environmental sustainability that we have not thought of yet? What did you notice about your feelings or thoughts as you answered these questions? Keep this in mind as you read the rest of this article.
The latest Environment and Society featured article is now available! This month’s article, “The Promise of Solutions from Increasing Diversity in Ways of Knowing: Educational Lessons from Meteorology, Ethnobotany, and Systems Ecology,” comes from Volume 5 (2014). Amy Freitag demonstrates how systems of ecology, ethnobotany, and meteorology increase problem solving by legitimizing different ways of knowing.
Visit the featured article page to download your copy of the article today before it’s gone! A new article is featured every month.
An artisanal net fisherman in a Kiribati lagoon. Australia is supporting several programmes in the Pacific to help protect fast depleting fish stocks.
AMY FREITAGis an independent scholar who works on the human dimensions of ocean conservation. She is interested in how participatory science might help bridge science and conservation action and has worked with citizen science groups in California and small-scale fishermen in North Carolina to explore different models of participatory science. Find out about these research projects and her teaching and outreach at www.amyfreitag.org.
Berghahn Journals is pleased to announce that the latest volume of Environment and Society has recently published and is available online at its new home, www.berghahnjournals.com/environment-and-society.
This volume, guested edited by Kay E. Lewis-Jones, revolves around the theme of “People and Plants,” as “recent research on plants … is now expanding our appreciation both of the fundamental role plants have in the function and health of the living world, and of their own intimate interactions within it.” The guest editor’s introduction is available to all readers for free.
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”
— Gregory Bateson
The quote from Gregory Bateson, from the documentary Ecology of Mind (2011) that Nora Bateson made about her father, captures one of the key themes in his work: the way we perceive and conceive of the world is poor match for how the world really works (Bateson 1972, [1979] 2002). The mismatch between our theoretical models and the world we are studying is a key problem in scientific research. I tell students that “theory world” and the “world out there” are two very different worlds and that theoretical models are simply thinking tools that allow us to get a better handle on the world. Some of these thinking tools are better for some problems than for others, and most problems require multiple tools to get the job done.
Part of a series commissioned in 2009 by NASA for an exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center, the “Farmers Wanted” poster above is only one of many advertising for humanity’s resettlement on Mars. The series, Mars Explorers Wanted, includes other posters with text such as “We Need You”—an astronautical replica of Uncle Sam and the infamous army recruitment poster—and advertisements for Mars teachers, technicians, and explorers. Although depicted as archetypes of Space Western sci-fi, these posters are no longer far from reality. Since the 1960s NASA, the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos State Corporation), and the ESA (European Space Agency) have been developing tools and methods to take humanity’s endeavors deeper into the unknowns of outer space and for longer, possibly permanent, periods of time. An integral part of this increasingly global, or even interplanetary, mission is not only designing equipment able to withstand the speculated conditions of outer space environments but also designing environments and ecologies to sustain those who venture above.
