Overview

By examining how small communities have dealt with forces of change and have sought to maintain themselves over time, this book offers pointers and lessons for conservation practices at all levels of society. ""Sustainability"" has become an increasingly popular term as a signal of concerns with long-term environmental consequences of human actions. Sustainability as a goal has started to replace ""development"" as a way of describing policies that go beyond the concept of increasing commercial production or making monetary profits from enterprises. By focusing on topical case histories on agricultural activity, stock-keeping, cash cropping, mining, and renewable energy, the authors highlight how ethnographic studies can and should inform policy decisions at both local and global levels. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of applied anthropology, sociology, and development studies.

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9781138315433

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Stewart and Strathern are giants in their field. In this engaging work, they bring a much-needed anthropological approach to the modern sustainability movement, drawing on case studies from places as diverse as Papua New Guinea and Scotland to argue that ecosystem health and human wellbeing are intrinsically connected. - Jeremy L. Caradonna, University of Victoria, Canada Slightly more than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas and 68% is projected to live in cities by 2050. Increasingly we become isolated from the natural environments that provide our food and energy and we struggle to understand how to sustain the natural systems that support us. This book by two anthropologists with extensive fieldwork experience in Melanesia, examines how small scale pre-capitalist societies relate to their natural environments through ritual and an appreciation of ecosystem relationships, in order to seek possible solutions to our own pressing problems of environmental sustainability and global warming. - Bryant Allen, Honorary Associate Professor, Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Author Information

Pamela J. Stewart (Strathern) is Co-Director of the Cromie Burn Research Unit and Senior Research Associate at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University Andrew J. Strathern is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University

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