ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the interrelationships of human subsistence needs and means and environmental stability within a local system. It discusses how forces generated from larger and more complex social and economic systems have changed, disrupted, and are destroying the ecological and social stability of the Miskito system. In Oceania, Africa, and Latin America, geographers and anthropologists especially have been focusing on ecological relationships between subsistence-based people and their environments. By studying the ecology of subsistence within an ecological matrix, some of the functional relationships which couple and regulate man-environment interchanges may be identified and measured. If either the environment experiences major ecological changes, or the human population size changes, or energy and materials are diverted to extraneous systems, there should be concomitant changes in the subsistence system, adjusting the population to the new situation. A variety of subsistence systems characterize diverse indigenous groups.
