Humanistic Conservation: A Proposed Alliance Between Anthropology and Environmentalists

Abstract

This article is a preliminary attempt to address an imperative. We begin with case materials describing past conservation impacts on local peoples and a review of the literature dealing with Man and the Biosphere (MAB) and other conservation programs worldwide. We conclude our discussion with a suggestion that recent developments in ecological anthropology, particularly, the advent of processual models, can provide the basis for an important rapprochement among the imperatives underlying natural resource policies, the rights of local populations to traditional resources, and the potential for continued voluntary cultural diversity. These approaches along with the anthropological outreach to environmentalists, whether in agencies or among traditional resource users, will benefit local peoples, anthropology, and the continued efforts to protect the world biome.

Conservationscapes: an interdisciplinary framework to link species‐focused conservation to human systems

“…Resolving these data gaps requires interdisciplinary research that addresses the broader ecological and human systems that are interwoven with conservation issues (Christie ). Many approaches have been proposed for human‐inclusive conservation research, marking a departure from a more limited, single‐species focus to a wider systems approach that considers the entire ecosystem (ie ecosystem‐based management), including humans (Crespi and Greenberg ; Folke et al . ; Likens and Lindenmayer ).…”