Chapter 6 Summary

Introduction

The Marshall Islands, the site of US nuclear and missile testing in the 1950s, are at risk of being submerged by the ocean due to the effects of climate change. The situation underscores the complications of global migration and the environmental impacts caused by a globalized world.

This chapter focuses on the question, Why do some societies have sustainable relations with the natural world while others seem to be more destructive of their natural environments, and what socio-cultural factors are driving environmental destruction in the contemporary world?
To address this focal question, the chapter is organized around the following problems:

Do all people see nature the same way?
How do people secure adequate, meaningful, and environmentally sustainable food supply?
How does non-Western knowledge of nature and agriculture relate to science?
How are industrial agriculture and economic globalization linked to increasing environmental and health problems?
Are industrialized Western societies the only ones to conserve nature?

Studying the environmental beliefs, knowledge, and practices of small-scale societies, along with their foodways, has long been a major concern at the heart of cultural anthropology.
In recent years, worldwide environmental challenges and industrializing foodways have prompted anthropologists to attend to the effects of global economic changes on human-nature relations and what sustainability means for different people.

Do All People See Nature in the Same Way?

The short answer is “no.” People conceive of nature and their relation to it very differently, in ways that are reflected in many other aspects of culture. Fundamental ideas about nature are expressed in everything from food to language and from art to religion.

Compare the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico and Central America and the Spanish who arrived in the 1500s. Some natives were able to avoid the invaders by retreating into the tropical lowlands. The Spanish found this environment oppressive and wondered why the trees weren’t simply cleared. Indigenous people let forests grow back after harvesting from fields.
This reflects essentially different worldviews: native peoples believed themselves to be part of nature and the Spanish conquerors believed themselves to be dominant over nature.
Similarly, Itzaj Maya, who live in the tropical lowlands of Guatemala, view people and nature as belonging to the same realm; forest spirits punish those who cut down too many trees or overhunt and reward those who show restraint. Therefore, agricultural practices respect and preserve forests.
Environmental anthropology, the subfield that studies how different societies understand, interact with, and make changes to nature, insists that it’s important to understand people’s ideas about landscapes to understand their behavior in those landscapes.
Human groups exist within cultural landscapes: the culturally specific images, knowledge, and concepts of the physical landscape that help shape human relations with that landscape.

The Itzaj Maya view nature as an extension of the social world (rather than the other way around), including the spirits that regulate ecological choices.
A key to cultural landscapes is the concept that humans perceive their natural environments through the lens of metaphor, and metaphors are connected to actions, thought, and organization.
For example, many hunter gatherers use metaphors of personal relatedness to describe human–nature relations.

Metaphors offer insights into a community’s cultural landscapes and symbolize a society’s environmental values.

Do All People Secure an Adequate, Meaningful, and Environmentally Sustainable Food Supply?

How people think about their landscapes is also intertwined with how they think and get food. Anthropologists call the structured beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food foodways.
Anthropologists call the social relationships and practices necessary for procuring, producing, and distributing food modes of subsistence. There are four major modes:

Foraging: the search for edible things
Horticulture: small-scale subsistence agriculture
Pastoralism: the raising of animal herds
Intensive agriculture: large-scale, often commercial, agriculture

Intensive agriculture has furnished most people with most of their food supplies for several thousand years. But, most societies are not committed to a single mode of subsistence and combine two or more.
Foragers (hunting and gathering) subsist on edible plant and animal foods without domesticating them. Foragers live mobile lives and travel frequently in pursuit of food resources, rather than bringing the food to themselves.

A common misconception about foraging is that it is a brutal struggle for existence. In general, foragers tend to work less to procure their subsistence than horticulturalists and pastoralists.
For example, Richard Lee (1969) observed !Kung San (also known as Ju/’hoansi) foragers of the Kalahari Desert who spent fewer than twenty hours per week hunting and gathering food.
Foragers view their environments as giving, not harsh. But they tend to live in extreme environments where horticulture and pastoralism are not feasible.

Horticulture is the cultivation of gardens or small fields for household provisioning and even small-scale trade but not investment. Horticulturists are sedentary, living in one place to regularly tend to crops. The care of domesticated plants and animals takes time but increases the amount of predictable or reliable food energy that humans can get out of a plot of land. This makes it a better option for densely populated areas not amenable to foraging.

Horticulture emerged around 12,000 years ago and gave humans selective control over plants and animals, which increased food reliability.
Horticulturalists use relatively simple technologies (hand tools like knives, axes, and digging sticks) that have low impacts on landscape.
A common form of horticulture in the tropics is swidden agriculture in which the farmer slashes and burns a small area of forest to release plant nutrients into the soil. As soil fertility declines, the farmer allows the plot to regenerate to forest. Slash and burn agriculture works best with low density populations, as a farmer might not return to a fallow field for several decades.

Pastoralists subsist with animal husbandry: the breeding, care, and use of domesticated herding animals such as cattle, camels, goats, horses, llamas, reindeer, and yaks.

Rather than raising animals for butchering as food, pastoralists use “renewable” animal products. They rely on milk, blood, hair, wool, and fur as well as their ability to pull or carry heavy loads.
Pastoralists typically occupy landscapes where agriculture is difficult or impossible.
Because a herd of livestock can decimate to vegetation quickly, pastoralists must constantly move their herds.
Pastoralists have common ownership of land and social institutions, which ensure the protection of land long-term. If successful, pastoralism is a sustainable mode of subsistence.

In contrast to horticulture and pastoralism, the goal of intensive agriculture is not to feed a household but to generate food for a larger community by intensification: the processes that increase agricultural yields. Some varieties of intensification follow:

Preparing the soil (weeding, mulching, mounding, fertilizing)
Technology (draught animals, machinery)
A larger labor force (e.g., Asian rice farming)
Water management (new forms of irrigation)
Modifying plants and soils (selective breeding, crop rotation)
Most forms of intensification have long-term benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand, intensification has fed large populations and spurred the development and spread of large-scale complex societies. On the other, ever-increasing populations require ever more intensive use of the landscape, with negative environmental consequences.

The most intensive form of agriculture is industrial agriculture: the application of industrial principles to farming. These principles include the following:

Specialization, to produce a single crop
Land, labor, seeds, and water obtained as commodities
Increased mechanization and productivity

Food, Culture, and Meaning

Humans have adapted to many different environments, and the human diet is flexible. But, our everyday diets usually consist of a limited range of foods.
Foodways are culturally constructed, and these cultural processes have implications for human sustainability.

For example, supermarkets allow consumers to distance themselves from the production of food and its environment. In contrast, the Hua of Papua New Guinea believe that food is spiritually powerful and consumption unites the eater with the farmers and landscapes that produced the food. Thus, the Hua have strict rules about the production and consumption of food to protect the food’s essences.

Food has symbolic meaning and can be used to contain specific messages such as home, family, or conviviality. But food can also communicate division and unequal power relations.

Some anthropologists suggest that food operates like that of a language. Mary Douglas, for example, observed that a formal English dinner takes on a precise order not unlike a sentence.

Food preferences, etiquette, and taboos mark social boundaries and identities such as class, gender, or ethnicity.
These social markers are closely tied with taste, which possesses the double meaning of taste on the tongue and social distinction and prestige.

For example, Gerd Spittler (1999) observed that the Kel Ewey Tuareg in northern Mali, West Africa, interpret a varied diet, something valued by many people in our culture, as a sign of poverty, people who are forced to eat anything available.

People often assume foodways are stable and some are very persistent. However, foodways change for reasons such as environmental shifts, ideas about health and wellness, or changes in family dynamics.

Nonetheless, the idea of an appropriate diet (proper foods, good taste, nutrition) stays fairly constant.
People integrate new food into their diets all the time, but the logic of foodways, which is intertwined with ideas about nature and sustainability, is unlikely to shift quickly.

How Does Non-Western Knowledge of Nature and Agriculture Relate to Science?

Environmental anthropologists recognize that all systems of knowledge about nature are culturally based. Even science is ultimately a method developed within cultural contexts.
Bronislaw Malinowski described how so-called primitive Trobriand Islanders (1915–1918) were aware of natural laws and processes (what we would call “science”) but understood that all cultures include domains of magic, science, and religion.
It’s become increasingly obvious to anthropologists that most societies have scientific attitudes and practices. A key difference is that many cultures integrate science into spiritual beliefs, social behaviors, and identities, rather than distinguishing it as a special domain of knowledge (i.e., without the strict natural/supernatural boundary Western scientists maintain).
During the 1960s, ethnoscientists aimed to describe and understand the conceptual models and rules with which a society operates. They began by comparing the classification systems used by different people.
Classification systems are reference systems that group things or ideas with similar features, such as plant and animal taxonomies.

The discipline of biology uses the Linnaen classification system to classify all living organisms into species.
Brent Berlin (1973) used the ethnobiology (indigenous ways of naming and codifying living things) of the Tzeltal Maya to argue that all human classification systems basically categorize organisms in ways comparable to Linnaean taxonomy (based on shared morphological characteristics). His conclusions have been challenged by some societies that use nonmorphological characteristics to classify plants and animals.

These days, ethnoscience focuses on understanding traditional ecological knowledge: indigenous ecological knowledge and its relationship with resource management strategies.

Indigenous peoples have been shown to possess knowledge of ecological relations unknown to Western science. Such knowledge often resides in local languages, songs, or specialized rituals—places outside researchers might not think to look.

In recent years, controversies have emerged because pharmaceutical companies have been trying to exploit traditional ecological knowledge for the development of new commercial drugs.

Traditional ecological knowledge is ideal for managing resources because it is customized specifically for particular local environments. For example, Zapotec farmers of Oaxaca plant specific crops together, build soil mounds to plant maize, let plots lie fallow for designated periods of time, and base crop scheduling on the phases of the moon.

Western scientists have only recently learned what a highly productive and sustainable agricultural system this is.
Unlike Western science, which attempts to understand nature, Zapotec knowledge of nature is not a distinct sphere of knowledge but is integrated into daily life.
These knowledges and practices are facing new challenges from industrial agriculture and economic globalization, which affect communities’ environment and health.

How are Industrial Agriculture and Economic Globalization Linked to Increasing Environmental and Health Problems?

Environmental anthropologists can attest that environmental challenges are a result of the complex interplay of social, cultural, natural, and political–economic factors. At the heart of this complexity are two questions: How do people consume natural resources? And who pays the costs of that consumption?
Population growth is a popular explanation for environmental degradation, although it is not necessarily a good one. In the 1700s Thomas Malthus argued that human populations grow exponentially, rapidly overexploiting available resources and “crashing” the environment. There are several problems with this view.

Social scientists have yet to identify any confirmed case of environmental and social collapse because of mass consumption.
Humans have tended to adapt to a landscape’s carrying capacity: the population an area can support by developing new technologies and intensifying agriculture.
Sustainable social systems are resilient and able to absorb change by changing social practices.
During the 1985 Ethiopian famine, relief programs failed because they oversimplified the causes of famine, blaming it on land degradation while ignoring social factors like Ethiopia’s civil war and a corrupt government that disrupted food distribution. Overpopulation alone was not the cause of the famine.

Also, “overpopulation” does not account for global variation in consumption patterns and different-sized ecological footprints: a quantitative tool that measures what people consume and the waste they produce. It also calculates the biologically productive land and water area needed to support those people.

In general, people in industrialized countries have much bigger ecological footprints.
The consumer capitalism of the United States, and many other nations, promotes the norm that people must continually buy more and more things in the pursuit of happiness. This cultural ideal has alarming ecological consequences: while Americans make up only 5 percent of the world’s population, they consume 25 percent of its resources. Obviously, such a ratio is not sustainable.

Industrial agriculture has had strong impacts on most of the world’s landscapes. The Green Revolution, the transformation in agriculture in the Third World through agricultural research, technology transfer, and infrastructure development, has pressured rural communities to adopt industrial agriculture, enhancing profitability and generating foreign revenue.

For example, Honduran farmers face intense pressure to produce high yields. They have little alternative but to deforest hillsides and abandon soil conservation measures for short-term survival.
Communities that have shifted from small-scale farming to producing cash crops also face lack of food security, or access to sufficient nutritious food to sustain an active and healthy lifestyle.

See “Anthropologist as Problem Solver: Teresa Mares and Migrant Farmworkers’ Food Security in Vermont”

Analyses that focus on the links between political-economic power, social inequality, and ecological destruction are typical of political ecology. Many environmental anthropologists align themselves with this perspective because it rejects single factor explanations (overpopulation, ignorance, etc.) and focuses on the socio-environmental impacts of industrial economies.

Industrial agriculture and globalization are fueling major changes in foodways around the world, with important health and environmental consequences.

One dimension of this problem is the role of industrial food in dramatically rising numbers of people who suffer from obesity, having excess body fat to the point of impairing bodily health and function and overweight, or having abnormally high accumulation of body fat.
There are more people in the world who suffer the effects of overnourishment than undernourishment, creating a public health crisis.
Social factors play a role in the rise of obesity and overweight as does global nutrition transition: the combination of changes in diet toward energy-dense foods (high in calories, fat, and sugar) and declines in physical activity.
This transition is compounded by economic competition. Small-scale farms, which produce locally grown and nutrient-rich food, cannot compete with the low-cost foods of transnational agribusinesses. With fewer farms to support rural livelihoods, people migrate to urban areas, where they tend to live more sedentary, less physically active lives.

Environmental anthropologists have turned their attention to the social dimensions of climate change. Using a holistic approach, anthropologists study the scope of climate change and the social complexities surrounding the production of knowledge about climate change. They also have studied how different societies adapt to climate variability through strategies of resilience.

For example, Roderick McIntosh (2015) has shown how the Mande people in West Africa have long dealt with unpredictable precipitation and river patterns. Individuals known as “weather machines” are experts on long-term weather patterns and help shape community responses. The Mande people demonstrate how flexibility and resilience are key in dealing with climate change and help us understand the effects of climate change globally.

Are industrialized Western Societies the Only Ones to Conserve Nature?

Since the founding of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, in 1972, hundreds of acres of wilderness and ocean have been formally protected.

In many cases, these efforts have stopped these areas from being destroyed. On the other hand, this model is based on the separation of human from nature, resulting in the forced eviction of indigenous peoples and increased social conflict.

Anthropologists study cultural approaches to nature’s protection and fight against the stereotype that native peoples are “natural environmentalists.”
To answer this section’s question, we must consider first how indigenous societies have created landscapes that have the effect of protecting and nature and, second, how Western societies approach the same object.
Many landscapes that appear “natural,” or unmodified, to Westerners are actually the result of indigenous manipulation. They are, in fact, anthropogenic landscapes: landscapes that are the product of human shaping. Efforts to “conserve” these areas without people alter that relationship.

Maasai pastoralists of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania have extensively modified their environment to support cattle. They intentionally burn scrub brush to encourage the growth of nutritious pasture grass, an act that helps support wildlife biodiversity. Now, many Maasai are overgrazing. Why?
The Maasai traditionally practiced transhumant pastoralism, in which they range over large territories of commonly held property on regular paths and cycles. During the twentieth century, park administrators disrupted the transhumant system of the Maasai by preventing access to waterholes within parks (“fortress conservation”). Because of this shift in mobility, the Maasai were forced to overgraze areas outside the park during drought periods.
This example demonstrates the colonial imposition of the philosophical divide between people and nature.

Anthropologists recognize that disrupting indigenous people to conserve nature is a counterproductive, but environmentalism can have many expressions.
During the last several decades, there have been experiments in “co-management” between international conservation groups and indigenous people. In places like Alaska, Australia, and Brazil, indigenous people continue to live in protected areas and contribute to park management. Environmental anthropologists have found that these collaborative approaches create new opportunities for dialogue and shared responsibility between conservationists and indigenous communities.

Co-management is not a perfect solution. Conservation groups still have extensive control of funding and operations, despite being outsiders.

The environmental justice movement seeks to address some of the same issues as co-management including the links between racial discrimination and injustice, social equity, and environment quality.

The global environmental justice movement is organized around people’s livelihoods and social justice concerns, including the Marshall Islanders discussed in the beginning of the chapter, who frame their situation in terms of outside control and domination that undermine local communities.

Conclusion

Through anthropological knowledge we can see the many ways communities relate to their environments, including how many nonindustrialized people know and envision nature differently than in the West.
There are multiple approaches to conservation and sustainability and current ecological crises emerge from a variety of factors.
Ecological crises lay bare the uneven distribution of resources and issues of social justice that are linked with global patterns of inequality.