ABSTRACT
‘Environmental anthropology’ has come to the fore in recent years, but this is not really a new focus for the discipline. The localized ‘grassroots’ approach that generally characterizes anthropology has always involved paying close attention to the relationships between human groups and the places that they inhabit, and to the ways that people think about, make use of and manage resources. One of the most important things that anthropology brings to the environmental arena is an appreciation that resource management emerges not just from specific cultural ideas about ‘what resources are for’ but from whole belief systems and the structural arrangements of a society. In what may seem to be a time of disorder in our world today, an understanding of anthropology provides hope and optimism: it enables us to open up dialogue with other cultural groups while respecting their particular worldviews. Environmental anthropology therefore examines many different aspects of human-environmental relationships, bringing the social and cultural aspects.
