Anthropology Of Environmental Education

This book aims to substantiate the growing body of research of socio-cultural contexts in which environmental education, formal or informal, take place. Innovation in environmental education that takes local contexts into account is necessary, in terms of both recognising global and historical forces that lead to environmental degradation and social and technological changes that could potentially provide solutions to environmental problems. Today, we face some of the greatest environmental challenges in global history, including climate change, deforestation, desertification and the rapid extinction of species of plants and animals. As with many social concerns and issues, the education system is widely seen as the appropriate vehicle for wide scale social reform. Environmental education is becoming increasingly important due to a number of changes in society.

This collection offers a wide ranging consideration of the field which illustrates how environmental anthropology can increase our understanding and help find solutions to environmental problems.

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.

Environmental anthropologists organize the realities of interdependent lands, plants, animals, and human beings; advocate for the neediest among them; and provide understandings that preserve what is needed for the survival of a diverse world. Can the things that anthropologists have learned in their studies of small-scale systems have any relevance for developing policies to address global problems? Townsend explores this dilemma in her captivating, concise exploration of environmental anthropology and its place among the disciplines subfields. Maintaining the structure and clarity of the previous edition, the second edition has been revised throughout to include new research, expanded discussions of climate change, and a chapter devoted to spiritual ecology. In the historical overview of the field, Townsend shows how ideas and approaches developed earlier are relevant to understanding how todays local populations adapt to their physical and biological environments. She next presents a closer look at global environmental issuesrapid expansion of the world economic system, disease and poverty, the loss of biodiversity and its implications for human healthto demonstrate the effects of interactions between local and global communities. As a capstone, she gives thoughtful consideration to how, as professionals and as individuals, we can move toward personal engagement with environmental problems.

Environmental Anthropology studies historic and present human-environment interactions. This volume illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human-environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. This volume enables scholars and students quick access to both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology and practice.

This volume presents new theoretical approaches, methodologies, subject pools, and topics in the field of environmental anthropology. Environmental anthropologists are increasingly focusing on self-reflection - not just on themselves and their impacts on environmental research, but also on the reflexive qualities of their subjects, and the extent to which these individuals are questioning their own environmental behavior. Here, contributors confront the very notion of "natural resources" in granting non-human species their subjectivity and arguing for deeper understanding of "nature," and "wilderness" beyond the label of "ecosystem services." By engaging in interdisciplinary efforts, these anthropologists present new ways for their colleagues, subjects, peers and communities to understand the causes of, and alternatives to environmental destruction. This book demonstrates that environmental anthropology has moved beyond the construction of rural, small group theory, entering into a mode of solution-based methodologies and interdisciplinary theories for understanding human-environmental interactions. It is focused on post-rural existence, health and environmental risk assessment, on the realm of alternative actions, and emphasizes the necessary steps towards preventing environmental crisis.

A new title from Routledge, this is a four-volume collection of cutting-edge and foundational research.

Environmental Anthropology studies historic and present human-environment interactions. This volume illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, and the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this Handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human-environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioural and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology; and a broad new range of subjects, such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. This volume enables scholars and students quick access to both established and trending environmental anthropological explorations into theory, methodology and practice.