ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an approach to researching futures using current ethnographic and anthropological interpretation. This approach has helped the reader immensely in understanding of the pastoral/conservation conflict in the French Pyrenees. Pastoralism has been central to Pyrenean culture for millennia and is still important today, although facing unprecedented pressure from globalization, politically-conditioned European subsidies, and neoliberal requirements for lowest-cost and maximum productivity. Pastoralism is (simplistically) the traditional extensive grazing of herd animals. Pastoralists also deride the environmentalists’ statistics while proclaiming adamantly that no predations are ever acceptable. Today, reflecting Nathalie’s claim that the original Pyrenean brown bear is extinct, the thirty bears who still survive in the Pyrenees are from the reintroduced Slovenian stock, a different sub-species. The author imagine a worldwide public anthropology that profoundly examines its multitude of field sites in order to expand our temporal assessments of local dwelt- and dwelling-in experiences, explicitly considering multispecies and human-nature entanglements.
