Anthropology is traditionally broken into several subfields, physical/biological anthropology, social/cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and sometimes also applied anthropology. Anthropology of the environment, or environmental anthropology, is a specialization within the field of anthropology that studies current and historic human-environment interactions. Although the terms environmental anthropology and ecological anthropology are often used interchangeably, environmental anthropology is considered by some to be the applied dimension of ecological anthropology, which encompasses the broad topics of primate ecology, paleoecology, cultural ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, spiritual ecology, and human behavioral and evolutionary ecology. However, according to Townsend (2009: 104), “ecological anthropology will refer to one particular type of research in environmental anthropology—field studies that describe a single ecosystem including a human population and frequently deal with a small population of only a few hundred people such as a village or neighborhood.” Kottak states that the new ecological anthropology mirrors more general changes in the discipline: the shift from research focusing on a single community or unique culture “to recognizing pervasive linkages and concomitant flows of people, technology, images, and information, and to acknowledging the impact of differential power and status in the postmodern world on local entities. In the new ecological anthropology, everything is on a larger scale” (Kottak 1999:25).
Environmental anthropology, like all other anthropological subdisciplines, addresses both the similarities and differences between human cultures; but unlike other subdisciplines (or more in line with applied anthropology), it has an end goal—it seeks to find solutions to environmental damage. While in our first volume (Shoreman-Ouimet and Kopnina 2011) we criticized Kottak’s anthropocentric bias prioritizing environmental anthropology's role as a supporter of primarily people's (and particularly indigenous) interests rather than ecological evidence. In his newer 2
publication, Kottak (2010:579) states: “Today’s ecological anthropology, aka environmental anthropology, attempts not only to understand but also to find solutions to environmental problems.” And because this is a global cause with all cultures, peoples, creeds, and nationalities at stake, the contributors to this volume demonstrate that the future of environmental anthropology may be more focused on finding the universals that underlie human differences and understanding how these universals can best be put to use to end environmental damage.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "Environmental Anthropology: Future Directions" on 7/18/13 available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203403341

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