Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia

Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia
Author: Joshua Lockyer
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2013-04-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0857458809

In order to move global society towards a sustainable “ecotopia,” solutions must be engaged in specific places and communities, and the authors here argue for re-orienting environmental anthropology from a problem-oriented towards a solutions-focused endeavor. Using case studies from around the world, the contributors—scholar-activists and activist-practitioners— examine the interrelationships between three prominent environmental social movements: bioregionalism, a worldview and political ecology that grounds environmental action and experience; permaculture, a design science for putting the bioregional vision into action; and ecovillages, the ever-dynamic settings for creating sustainable local cultures.

The Archaeology of Environmental Change

The Archaeology of Environmental Change
Author: Christopher T. Fisher
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-02
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0816514844

In this book, a diverse collection of case studies reveal how archaeology can contribute to a better understanding of humans' relation to the environment. The Archaeology of Environmental Change shows that the environmental challenges facing humanity today can be better approached through an attempt to understand how past societies dealt with similar circumstances.

Culture and Conservation

Culture and Conservation
Author: Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1317937295

Today, there is growing interest in conservation and anthropologists have an important role to play in helping conservation succeed for the sake of humanity and for the sake of other species. Equally important, however, is the fact that we, as the species that causes extinctions, have a moral responsibility to those whose evolutionary unfolding and very future we threaten. This volume is an examination of the relationship between conservation and the social sciences, particularly anthropology. It calls for increased collaboration between anthropologists, conservationists and environmental scientists, and advocates for a shift towards an environmentally focused perspective that embraces not only cultural values and human rights, but also the intrinsic value and rights to life of nonhuman species. This book demonstrates that cultural and biological diversity are intimately interlinked, and equally threatened by the industrialism that endangers the planet's life-giving processes. The consideration of ecological data, as well as an expansion of ethics that embraces more than one species, is essential to a well-rounded understanding of the connections between human behavior and environmental wellbeing. This book gives students and researchers in anthropology, conservation, environmental ethics and across the social sciences an invaluable insight into how innovative and intensive new interdisciplinary approaches, questions, ethics and subject pools can close the gap between culture and conservation.

Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes

Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes
Author: Andrew P. Vayda
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2009-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0759119007

In this selection of essays from the past two decades, Vayda focuses on research and explanation concerned with causes of concrete events, especially human actions and the environmental changes brought about by them.

Against the Grain

Against the Grain
Author: Bradley B. Walters
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2008
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780759111721

Against the Grain gathers scholars from across disciplines to explore the work of ecological anthropologist Andrew P. Vayda and the future of the study of human ecology.

Eating NAFTA

Eating NAFTA
Author: Alyshia Gálvez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520965442

Mexican cuisine has emerged as a paradox of globalization. Food enthusiasts throughout the world celebrate the humble taco at the same time that Mexicans are eating fewer tortillas and more processed food. Today Mexico is experiencing an epidemic of diet-related chronic illness. The precipitous rise of obesity and diabetes—attributed to changes in the Mexican diet—has resulted in a public health emergency. In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico—sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have resulted in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives.

After Nature

After Nature
Author: Jedediah Purdy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674368223

An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s “Dazzling...Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political... For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic

The Ecological Transition

The Ecological Transition
Author: John W. Bennett
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2016-06-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1483136418

The Ecological Transition studies the relationships between humans and the physical environment. It also assesses some converging approaches in cultural anthropology, including cultural ecology, economic anthropology, social exchange, and behavioral adaptation. Comprised of ten chapters, this book focuses on ecological transition, which refers to the process by which humans incorporate nature into society. It discusses how to formulate a policy-oriented cultural ecology and looks at the ecological transition as material evolution and as a problem of equilibrium. The succeeding chapters review some of the contributions of cultural ecology, including its successes and failures. Finally, the book examines the concept of adaptive and maladaptive actions in human ecology. This book is useful for anthropologists who are interested in cultural-ecological research and its implications in public policy.

Indigenous Resurgence

Indigenous Resurgence
Author: Jaskiran Dhillon
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2022-03-31
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1800732465

From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community’s protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.