Livelihoods and Ecosystems: Anthropological Approaches to Human-Environment Interaction

Catalog description

This course provides an anthropological understanding of the relationship between human subsistence and environment. The impacts of environmental change on human societies, and the roles those societies play in ecological modification, have deep roots in human evolution. This class focuses on providing students with tools to understand the foundations and cross-cultural expressions of resource use, environmental transformation, and their ecological interactions. The class has three goals: 1) introduce students to ways of thinking about ecological and social factors that shape variability in how humans define, use, and consume resources, 2) provide students the opportunity to explore archaeological, ethnographic, and ecological evidence of the interaction between human livelihoods and habitats across the entirety of the human experience, 3) utilize those concepts and evidence to investigate variability in contemporary livelihoods, socio-ecological systems, and the dilemmas we all face in natural resource use and sustainability. Regarding the first goal, students are introduced to the natural science of conservation biology and community ecology, along with influential concepts in the social science of decision-making and cultural institutions of resource management. We review key models of ecosystem dynamics and social interaction from evolutionary ecology, disturbance ecology, niche construction, common property theory, and political ecology to approach questions about consumption, complex socio-ecological systems, and the role of humans in food webs and trophic interactions. The course then investigates archaeological and paleo-ecological evidence concerning the evolution of human subsistence systems, global settlement, intensification, and their implications for understanding environmental change over the last two million years. We take the broadest possible anthropological approach: we explore the diversity of ways that humans have made a living in the past, and investigate a wide variety of contemporary systems of resource use. We begin with the emergence of subsistence regimes among the earliest members of our genus and variability in environmental conditions through the Pleistocene. We then discuss the spread of modern humans and arguments concerning the ecological impact of people in the New Worlds as humans first colonized Australia, the Americas, and islands of Pacific and Indian Oceans. Finally, students investigate contemporary Indigenous systems of resource use and food production, exploring interactions between people and culturally constructed environments, commensal relationships between humans and non-human plants and animals, processes of intensification, and ecosystem function. The course incorporates these concepts with studies of inequality into new ways of understanding global issues of conservation, economics, and policy impinging on environmental change.