ABSTRACT
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, CULTURE AND SUSTAINABILITY Environmental management can be defined as ‘the art that seeks to balance human demands upon the Earth’s natural resource base, with the natural environment’s ability to meet those demands on a sustainable basis’ (Colby, 1990). One can draw upon this definition to show that the practice of environmental management is necessarily a part of the overall human-nature relationship in any culture at any moment of its history. This is certainly the case with the very broad anthropological definition of culture, which includes everything that is transmitted from one generation to the next through teaching and imitation (Boyd and Richerson, 1985; Boyden, 1990; Pinxten, 1994). In this way anthropologists include in the cultural realm much more than the so-called ‘high Culture’, with a capital ‘C’, which is restricted mainly to the fine arts, religion, philosophy and science. Their definition includes beliefs and values, institutions, artefacts (material
culture) and practices, as well as other factors which affect human behaviour (Figure 3.1).
