Anthropology, the environment, and environmental crisis

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of anthropological research on the environment and socio-environmental and geosocial transformations which often are associated with crises and the Anthropocene. It presents ways anthropologists and researchers from related disciplines study and write about these transformations and considers their proposals to develop analytical tools, frameworks, and innovative methods that scrutinize and redefine the relations between humans and the environment. The chapter consists of five interlinked thematic discussions that span a long period in the study of human-environmental interrelations, from the early perspectives on cultural ecology to the most recent work on more-thanhuman relations. The thematic discussions consider human adaptation; the political ecology of natural resource extraction; research on toxicity; perspectives on temporalities and more-than-human agency; and finally, recent approaches to the study of life on a damaged planet.