Environmental Anthropology
Summary
Environmental anthropology investigates the complex ways in which human societies perceive, interact with and transform their surroundings. Emerging from the study of cultural ecology, which explored how communities adapt their subsistence strategies to local conditions, the field has expanded to encompass political ecology, which foregrounds power, inequality and economic forces in shaping resource access and environmental change. Contemporary research addresses socio-environmental transformations associated with climate variability, large-scale extractive industries, pollution and the contested legacies of colonialism and globalisation. Scholars employ ethnography, participatory methods and interdisciplinary collaboration to reveal how diverse communities negotiate risk, construct resilience and imagine more equitable futures. Recent emphases include the dynamics of toxicity and slow violence, the disruption of temporal frameworks by industrialisation and climate change, and the forging of multispecies and more-than-human relations that challenge entrenched nature–culture dualisms. Against the backdrop of the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch defined by human-driven alterations to planetary systems—environmental anthropology seeks both to deepen theoretical understanding and to inform policy, advocacy and grassroots efforts aimed at sustaining ecological and social well-being.
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Environmental Anthropology publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in environmental anthropology across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Anthropocene: A proposed geological epoch in which human activities have become the dominant force shaping climate, biogeochemical cycles and the Earth’s strata.
Political ecology: An interdisciplinary approach that examines how power relations, economic systems and social inequalities drive environmental change and resource conflicts.
Adaptive capacity: The range of cultural, institutional and technological strategies through which a society can moderate potential damages and cope with environmental variation.
Extractivism: An economic and political model centred on large-scale removal of natural resources, often linked to social exclusion, ecological degradation and global inequality.
More-than-human relations: Frameworks recognising the agency and mutual interdependence of human and nonhuman beings in co-constituting shared environments.
References
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