ABSTRACT
I will concern myself here with a possible future for environmental anthropology. Traditional and local people have managed, in most cases, to conserve environments
and manage resources sustainably. These wider systems of consciousness and ideology have, however, been usually ignored as sources of ideas for anthropology and environment-partly because many are founded on beliefs in ‘spirits’ or ‘supernaturals’ that ‘rational’ social scientists do not accept. Yet, quite apart from the highly debatable meanings of the words in scare quotes, most of the actual moral and ethical teachings involved do not necessarily depend on the ‘supernatural’ material. Traditional Chinese, as well as indigenous peoples of Mexico and the Northwest Coast of North America, have developed various worldviews that parallel the New Ecological Paradigm in seeing ‘people in nature’ rather than ‘people vs. nature,’ and thus working with nature rather than trying to destroy the natural and create a purely humanized setting. Traditional views present opportunities for using traditional cultural materials to motivate conservation and sustainable management. They also provide some knotty problems for philosophers. Our universities have quite literal walls between ‘ontology,’ ‘epistemology,’ ‘religion,’ ‘social science,’ and ‘art.’ Indeed, they are often in different buildings. We need an environmental anthropology that takes traditional cultures seriously, including their philosophies of knowledge and emotion. This would extend the New Ecological Paradigm in potentially interesting ways. Such an anthropology could significantly inform policy and advocacy in regard to conservation and environment.
