Solving the Environmental Equation: An Engaging Anthropology

Abstract

Anthropologists engaged in environmental work are finding themselves in a challenging new era framed by the internationalization of environmental problems and policies associated with the globalization of economic considerations. Yet, paradoxically, there is an even greater need for national and local autonomy in defining environmental priorities. It has become clear to decision makers that both top-down and bottom-up approaches involving diverse groups of people are required to solve the environmental equation.The disorders of the ecosphere induced by human activity indicate that something is fundamentally wrong with the cultural adaptations of modern society. Our local and global mindset shape our values, lifestyles, and practices, influencing all that we do no matter how we enhance the efficacy of our institutions or how we restructure legal and moral decision making. Without altering our basic values, we have consistently relied upon institutional efforts to solve problems through technical and technological change and behavioral solutions to modify actions of individual responses.Questions arise out of the failures of the two strategies as we continue the search for viable options (Escobar 1991; Gow 1991). Institutional and individual responses are influenced by the historical, cultural, and economic forces that shape our modern worldview. Yet in order to move beyond this state of affairs, we need new cultural forms that conform to ecological realities. To achieve a common ground of understanding, we must incorporate diverse cultural perspectives into our thinking while keeping the ecosphere as an essential point of reference. As anthropologists learn how to confront the contradictions of mutual interdependence and relative autonomy within the context of ecological systems, they are increasingly finding themselves in positions where the utilization of anthropological perspectives has become essential to effective policy making, program development, and project implementation (Colson

Reason and Reenchantment in Cultural Change

“…Yet anyone involved in higher education would have to admit that most student behavior with regard to sustainability is unchanged, most faculty are not engaged, most trustees do not see sustainability as a high priority, and-to choose only one indicator-most campuses remain massive greenhouse gas generators. Although anthropologists have made significant contributions to engagement with sustainability (Puntenney 1995;Wikan 1995;Boyer 1997;McCabe 2003;DeLind and Link 2004;Haenn and Wilk 2006;Crate and Hitchcock 2008), for the most part, awareness and action are at an early stage in most of the institutions of higher education in the United States. 1 Thomas Princen (2005) points out that sustainability requires not only an awareness of the risks and pitfalls of our current path but also a new set of organizing principles as well as mechanisms of restraint by which decisions to live within our biological limits can be encouraged and enforced.…”

“…Some academics express uneasiness about such a focus on individual change (Dryzek 1997;Kovel 2002;Puntenney 1995). Dryzek, who favors an approach that challenges entrenched economic and political structures of capitalism with collective action and a clear political agenda, doubts that an approach to social change that begins with individuals and their worldviews will be effective, even labeling it somewhat dismissively as "green romanticism" (Dryzek 1997, 155).…”