Environmental Anthropology

Ensayo que postula la urgencia de definir "otras políticas climáticas",  a partir del "diálogo de saberes" (ciencia objetiva + conocimientos tradicionales). Se plantea que la "crisis de civilización" presiona por una ruptura epistémica, la emergencia (visibilzación) de otros conocimientos, otras cosmovisiones para enfrentar la complejidad de un fenómeno no lineal como el trastorno climático global.

Análisis de las políticas públicas para la gestión del cambio global y su incidencia en los sistemas territoriales de la Amazonía andina, desde el "enfoque prospectivo". La investigación aporta una sistematización de artículos sobre experiencias de adaptación climática, en base a la gestión del conocimiento local andino amazónico.   

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of social and ecological interaction in coastal fishing communities of Hokkaido, Japan, from 2011 to 2012. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), I examine the development of herring stock enhancement programs as a case study to identify how science and technology influence actors' discourses of cultured fish as related to seafood production, distribution, and consumption, and how heterogeneous actors in coastal seascapes form a web of interactions in defining the success of natural fisheries resource management. I conclude that techno-science based stock enhancement programs play important roles in the cultural continuity and social relations in these coastal fishing communities. However, overreliance on technological fixing of coastal environments leads to inefficient fishery regulation for restoring herring stock while blurring the responsibilities each actor has for local coastal fishery, and black-boxing the effectiveness and rationality of the stock enhancement project. This dissertation research ultimately discusses how ANT's 'assemblage' approach is a useful methodology to examine the hybridity of nature and culture, and the relationship between the coastal environment and the way Japan's fishing communities negotiate courses of actions, plans, and visions for the future of their coastal resources.

In this thesis I compare the social history of movements against hydropower projects in two states of India, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, from 1921 to 2004 in three phases. The specific aim of this project is to demonstrate the shifting notion of subaltern political subjectivity and `state-formation' in postcolonial India. Here I argue that the subalterns played significant causal and constitutive roles in transforming the structure of postcolonial Indian state in a more democratic direction and in that process considerably changed their political discourses, practices and strategies. The two extended historical cases of movement against large dams illustrated in this thesis mark the different types of subaltern politics that emerged in postcolonial India.

On January 24, 2014 a conference commemorating my father, Nikolai Kopnin, a theoretical physicist and a lover of wilderness, was held at the Aalto University where he worked in Espoo, Finland. While the conference combined scientific presentations from physicists and informal recollections of family members, my own presentation was something in-between. I described to the audience of natural scientists how my work in environmental anthropology and environmental education has been inspired by my father and his work.

My conference paper, “Environmental Education through Science and Experience,” distinguished between two notions of science that inform environmental education. The first approach fosters understanding and appreciation of the natural world through learning about and experiencing nature, while the second approach perpetuates an industrialist technocratic world-view. The former is associated with outdoor, experiential, conservation education, as well as indigenous and other culturally informed ways of learning and learning from nature. The latter is associated with ‘scientism’ in education for sustainable development (ESD) and environmental management courses. According to environmental education scholar Michael Bonnett[1], “scientism” refers to the presumption that the methods of the natural sciences should be applied to investigating all areas of the human condition (see Retrieving Nature. Education for a post-humanist age, 2004 and  Environmental Concern, Moral Education, and Our Place in Nature, 2012).  In this view, science becomes the arbiter for human management of the environment, identifying the fundamental questions of human endeavor and wellbeing.

In recognition of humanity’s increased capacity to alter the Earth’s climate and bio-physical environment, the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen has declared that we now live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Ironically, Crutzen’s declaration occurs at a time when many environmental social scientists have grown concerned about the latent anthropocentrism that dominates much of modern thought. This presentation, which draws from ethnographic and ethnobiological research in Central Amazonia, discusses how rural Amazonian views of human-environmental relations can offer important counterpoints to modern anthropocentrism. Specifically, it examines the ways that rural Amazonian folklore grants agency to plants and animals, and thus undescores the importance of situating human lives within broad networks of relations with other beings and forces. To conclude, this presentation considers the ways that ethnobiological research can cultivate a more inclusive vision of ecology during this time of environmental crisis. 

Although anthropologists are rising to the call for increased attention to the environment, there is a fundamental conflict of interest for anthropologists concerned with the environment. This book argues that if social scientists and environmental anthropologists want to remain relevant in the Anthropocene, this era of environmental damage and repair, then we need to scourge the exceptionalism that we attribute to human beings and accept them as part of the natural system.

This volume provides detailed explanations for how anthropologists can prioritize the environment by better integrating it into their ethnographic research and continuing to help and represent the human communities that depend on the well being of natural world. It reintroduces the environment into environmental anthropology and demonstrates how the field’s theories and methodological tools can aid efforts to understand various cultural perspectives and mediate environmental problems. It addresses the types of interdisciplinary, environmentally focused projects that are bringing anthropology to the forefront of community conservation projects and policy initiatives.

It takes into account a range of environmental and social issues around the world and presents various examples of environmental degradation, ethics, and knowledge, as well as, instances of environmental conservation efforts and learning. It provides valuable methods of accessing such knowledge and insightful theoretical frameworks for assessing and synthesizing such information.

This book gives students and researchers in anthropology, conservation, environmental ethics and across the social sciences an invaluable inisght into how innovative and intensive new methodologies, questions, and broader subject pools can close the gap between anthropology as an anthropocentric social science and an informative environmental anthropology that can serve as a policy-tool and applied science.

My book 'Dignity and Power: Energy, Nature, and the State in Rural Spain' aims will contribute to the anthropological comprehension of energy transitions through a historically informed, socially situated study of the development of renewable energy in Spain. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Catalonia, the book analyzes the institutional arrangements, cultural mediations and social relations of production through which the energy from wind is harnessed. My research shows that energy transitions are complex, multilayered processes that open possibilities for new social arrangements, while also highlighting the ways that such new social arrangements rework inherited relationships of power. I analyze the contradictory tensions pervading this process, patent in the fact that wind energy development has created new ecological imbalances between producing and consuming regions, despite marking a clear step forward in environmental terms. The book explores local resistance to wind farm installation, and analyzes the cultural categories that frame these movements, placing special emphasis on the notion of dignity. Deeply rooted in historical peasant struggles, a range of local actors mobilizes the notion of dignity to express criticism against the increasing centralization of the country's energy model, thus providing crucial insights into the relationship between renewables and democratic decision-making.

Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas (IEM) is a major interdisciplinary research initiative examining environmental memory in the medieval Icelandic sagas. The initiative brings together teams of historians, literary scholars, archaeologists and geographers, as well as specialists in environmental sciences and medieval studies, to investigate long-term human ecodynamics and environmental change from the period of Iceland’s settlement in the Viking Age (AD 874-930) through the so-called Saga Age of the early and late medieval periods, and well into the long period of steady cooling in the Northern hemisphere popularly known as the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1850). In her 1994 volume inaugurating the field of historical ecology Carole Crumley argued in favor of a “longitudinal” approach to the study of longue durée human ecodynamics. This approach takes a region as the focus for study and examines changing human-landscape-climate interactions through time in that particular place. IEM involves multiple frames of inquiry that are distinct yet cross-referential. Environmental change in Iceland during the late Iron Age and medieval period is investigated by physical environmental sciences. Just how known processes of environmental change and adaptation may have shaped medieval Icelandic sagas and their socio-environmental preoccupations is of great interest, yet just as interesting are other questions concerning how these sagas may in turn have shaped understandings of the past, cultural foundation narratives, environmental lore, local ecological knowledge etc. Enlisting environmental sciences and humanities scholarship in the common aim of framing and thereby better understanding nature, the IEM initiative excludes nothing as “post- interesting” or “pre-interesting.” Understanding Viking Age first settlement processes informs understanding of 18th century responses to climate change, and 19th century resource use informs understanding of archaeological patterns visible at first settlement a millennium earlier. There is much to gain from looking at pathways (and their divergences) from both ends, and a long millennial scale perspective is one of the key contributions that the study of past “completed experiments in human ecodynamics” can make to attempts to achieve future sustainability. IEM is a case study of the Integrated History and future of People on Earth initiative (IHOPE) led by the international project AIMES (Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme; the initiative is co-sponsored by PAGES (Past Global Changes) and IHDP (The International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change). This talk brings together two of the main coordinators from IEM’s sponsoring organizations, NIES and NABO, to reflect on the particular challenges, innovations and advances anticipated in this unprecedented undertaking of integrated science and scholarship, a new model for the scientific framing of nature.