Environmental Engagements

Human-Environment Relationships

Understanding human-environment relationships requires moving beyond the nature-culture divide. Through environmental anthropology, we explore how humans don’t simply adapt to environments but actively engage with and shape them. This hub examines environmental challenges through anthropological lenses, offering crucial insights for anthropology climate change discussions and sustainable futures.

Environmental anthropology asks a different question than environmental science does. Not only what is happening to the planet, but who caused it, who is absorbing the consequences, and whose knowledge gets counted as knowledge. Anthropology climate change research keeps running into the same finding: the damage is not evenly distributed, it did not begin with humanity in general, and the peoples most often described as vanishing are frequently the ones still managing their landscapes. The sections below move from where the crisis came from, through the theories anthropology built to explain it, to the alternatives on offer.

Colonial Extractivism and the Anthropocene

The modern world was built on extraction: Andean silver, Caribbean and Brazilian sugar, and the forced labor that produced both. Blaming environmental crisis on human nature, or on agriculture, lets that history off the hook — which is why the date we assign to the Anthropocene matters so much. The evidence for 1610 points at colonialism rather than at our species. See Colonial Extractivism for the full account, and World Before Anthropology for how colonial hierarchy was arranged before the discipline existed.

Challenging Agricultural Narratives

The transition to agriculture represents one of humanity’s most significant environmental engagements. Rather than viewing it as inevitable progress, anthropological perspectives reveal complex trade-offs between food security and social inequality, between population growth and environmental degradation. These insights challenge conventional narratives about human “advancement” and offer critical perspectives on contemporary food systems.

Cultural Ecology: Human Ecology Is Political Ecology

Cultural ecology is among anthropology’s founding concerns, and it has renamed itself repeatedly — environmental determinism, cultural determinism, cultural ecology, ecological anthropology, historical ecology, political ecology. The through-line is that whoever controls access to resources determines the outcome, which makes every human ecology study a political analysis whether it admits it or not. Two course archives develop this: Cultural Ecology 2023, built on Emilio Moran’s Human Adaptability, and Anthropological Optimism, which pairs a cultural ecology textbook with Indigenous science.

Indigenous Science and the Trouble with Conservation

Many Indigenous languages have no word for conservation. What they have are words for taking care of, and for healing — because there is no need to conserve what you are not destroying. Jessica Hernandez’s argument is that conservation is a Western construct, invented as a remedy by the societies that caused the damage, and that Indigenous science differs from traditional ecological knowledge by being written by rather than about. Related: Conservation Is a Western Construct and Pristine Wilderness Myth, on Indigenous fire and landscape management.

Living With Environments: Beyond Nature & Culture

My own approach has been very influenced by Tim Ingold’s understanding of human-environment relationships. Rather than seeing environments as external containers for human activity, this perspective reveals how humans and environments mutually constitute each other through ongoing engagement. Whether we call it dwelling, inhabiting, or simply living with, the key insight remains: humans don’t occupy pre-existing environments but continually shape and are shaped by the worlds they move through. This understanding has profound implications for addressing climate change, as it shifts focus from managing nature to recognizing our entangled relationships with the living world.

The sharpest version of that argument is Globes and Spheres, where Ingold points out that the environmental movement born from seeing Earth from space inherited the problem it set out to solve: “that it is ours to manage, however, remains more or less unquestioned.” The full chapter-by-chapter reading is at The Perception of the Environment.