Environmental Anthropology: From Pigs to Policies

Opening with a vivid description of an early anthropological life as a "child" in a new place with no dictionaries nor etiquette books, Patricia Townsend provides readers with a global view of environmental anthropological issues. This relatively new field, defined in the 1950s with Julian Steward's term cultural ecology, has expanded through an exciting time during which the world has grown smaller and consumers more numerous and demanding.Trade has boomed internationally, and resources have been used greedily.

Money has become a part of previously cashless societies; international media have romanticized primitive cultures while making them TV staples seen nightly in Western living rooms. Industrial risk has been introduced into remote, resource-rich areas. The role of the environmental anthropologist has been to organize the realities of interdependent plants, animals, and human beings, to advocate for the neediest among them, and to try passionately to save what is of value and importance to the survival of a diverse world.