Environmental Anthropology– Pasts and Futures

Participant Observation (Conference Report), History of Anthropology Review

Yale University, March 31-April 1, 2025

In the face of palpable climate change, contemporary anthropologists increasingly explore how social forms, subsistence technologies, and administrative logics respond to—and may also drive— ecological transformations. Contemporary ethnographers detail sites of nonhuman agency, Indigenous knowledge, extractive destruction, and climate-related migration.

The terms and emphases have changed, but such questions are far from new. Anthropology has studied human-environment relations since its inception. Some of its neglected or rejected approaches—such as early studies of diffusion, adaptation, and cultural ecology—are marred by association with colonialism and racial determinism. Yet they may also hold overlooked insights relevant to today’s crises. The conference, “Environmental Anthropologies: Pasts, Presents, Futures,” held at Yale March 31^st and April 1^st 2025, invited a reassessment of those and other past frameworks. What can they offer current thinking, and how do we confront toxic aspects of their legacies?

The event was organized by editors and advisors from the History of Anthropology Review (HAR): Michael Edwards, Adrianna Link, Ramah McKay, Sarah Pickman, Joanna Radin, and John Tresch. It gathered anthropologists, historians of science, and environmental scientists, to explore how earlier paradigms might illuminate or unsettle contemporary assumptions, and, as Sophie Chao warned, “to challenge the presumed novelty of current concepts.” The participants examined anthropology’s historical engagements with geography, systems theory, and ecological thinking, as well as its evolving relationship to the natural sciences. A key concern was how to reconcile interpretive methods, “I-witnessing,” and solidarity with marginalized groups and individuals with empirical science, international agencies, and various global frameworks.

The invitation proposed three historical frames: (1) Geography, Diffusion, Geopolitics (1870–1935): early anthropological ties to geography and empire, and the tensions between ecological insight and colonial ideology; (2) Culture Areas and World Systems (1935–1975): mid-century frameworks such as cultural ecology, cybernetics, and development theory, and their complex political entanglements; and (3) From Limits to Growth to Anthropocene Awareness (1975–2000): the rise of symbolic anthropology and its reflexive predicaments, new perspectives on world systems, the reemergence of environmental questions and new encounters with nonhuman agency and the natural sciences. A fourth through-line was the question of anthropology’s institutional settings—and notably museums—as sites of knowledge production, collection, and public engagement. For a change of air and pace, after the first day’s panels, conference members visited Yale’s Peabody Museum, where they encountered natural history’s material and pedagogical dimensions: living rocks, coral colonies, and ongoing evolutionary assumptions, both biological and cultural.

At the heart of the conference was a broader question: How can anthropologists today draw from their discipline’s past—its insights as well as its failures—to build more collaborative and responsible approaches to the environmental crises we face? Even more timely pressures were in evidence. For many participants, the conference was the first they attended after the US inauguration, and the Trump government’s attacks on federal science funding, environmental regulations and research, universities, immigrants and foreign students, and campus dissent. Many registered the shock of these measures and sought wider historical perspective. As one audience member noted: “Our students are scared, they want to understand what’s happening. It’s becoming clear that the political crisis and the environmental crisis are the same.”

As the enthusiastic responses to our invitation showed, the topic struck a nerve: anthropology constantly wrestles with its past, while environmental questions have become inevitable. We conceived the event as a double experiment. First was to throw anthropologists, historians of science, and environmental researchers into the same space to see how they might think across disciplinary divides about shared and divergent pasts and hopes for the future. Second and more modestly the event was an experiment in shifting HAR’s project of exploring diverse connections between anthropology and its histories from an online space for specialists to a major public event. In both senses the experiment succeeded.

The event was generously funded by the NOMIS foundation, dedicated to supporting innovation in the natural and social sciences. Additional support was provided by departments at Yale—History of Science and Medicine, Anthropology, Agrarian Studies, and Environmental Studies—as well as the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, with further assistance from Cambridge University’s department of History and Philosophy of Science.

The talks will be published as a collection of short essays later this year. The following “participant observation” touches on key points from the diverse lectures and intense discussions.

Panel One: A Deferred Synthesis, a Planet of Plantations, Rewilding the Modern

The opening panel set sites and scales for the conversations to come—from big-picture interdisciplinary syntheses and world systems to local reinventions of nature. Environmental anthropologist Eduardo Brondizio (based in Indiana, but frequently working in Brazil) extended his co-authored 2016 overview, “History and Scope of Environmental Anthropology” to address more recent developments. He reflected on his decades of intrinsically interdisciplinary work collaborating with rural and Amazonian communities, developing commodity chain ethnographies and participatory science in a “grounded complex systems perspective.” Considering the numerous specialties claiming the title “environmental anthropology,” he worried about “intellectual deforestation,” a disciplinary fragmentation through endless “turns.” While social-ecological systems (SES) frameworks have proliferated, anthropology has not consistently shaped them. Brondizio invoked Elinor Ostrom’s call for multi-tiered analysis. He urged anthropology to think more seriously about how its concepts can function across scales, warning against superficial bricolage. He called for deeper methodological integration around problems, rather than theories—which divide more than they connect.

Sydney-based anthropologist Sophie Chao considered the plantation as a decisive social and environmental institution, as treated by three historical approaches. In political economists’ comparative typologies—manors, haciendas, farms—plantations appear as semi-sovereign “small states,” both a militarized social form and an engine of globalization. More-than-human and multispecies ethnographies treat plantations—including the West Papuan palm farms Chao has studied— as sites of Indigenous knowledge where “commodities” like palm oil are enmeshed in relations of kinship and the sacred. While invoking cosmological pluralism and the “patchiness” of the Plantationocene, Chao recalled that Black and Indigenous ecologies (Spillers, Wynter) are “always already more-than-human”; her third approach, drawing on critical race theory, reveals the plantation as a race-making institution. Noting that much anthropological conceptualization stands on the shoulders of activists, Chao suggested that these perspectives reinforce each other in both theoretically and practically confronting plantations’ world-making impact.

Anthropologist Josh Sterlin, currently in Montreal, reported on his fieldwork with the Wilderness Awareness School on Canada’s Western coast. There he found key concepts from the anthropological record—subsistence technologies, rites of passage, ceremonies of reciprocity— operationalized as “cultural technologies” to reconnect alienated city dwellers with nature. The school’s cultivation of “rooted” practices can be considered an “experimental anthropology” in which both Indigenous knowledge and anthropology’s history serve a technical and moral pedagogy. As this work is undertaken in Salish territories, and until recently without involvement of First Peoples, its embrace of “Indigenous philosophy” and “traditional ecological knowledge” is complex and fraught, though organizers increasingly seek to involve Salish groups in these “rewilding” projects. Sterlin revealed a curious temporality in which lost skills are “rediscovered” in preparation for post-industrial futures.

Discussion questioned anthropologists’ tendency to narrate the discipline’s history through successive “turns”—which may block cumulative progress and interrupt academic work’s connections with sociohistorical contexts. Calls were made to “ecologize our concepts” by embedding them in history, place, and interdependence. Anthropology is still haunted by its own extractivist tendencies, some noted; we may be merely reproducing salvage ethnographies under new names, or hiding behind our interlocutors, instrumentalizing Indigenous epistemologies to sustain “big-T” theory. While grand narratives and holism have long been critiqued, some advocated situated and problem-focused holisms, in which broader framings are collaboratively produced. Likewise, “salvage” itself might be recuperated not as a colonial impulse, but as a reparative practice: who produces knowledge, and how might it be returned?

Panel Two: Shifting Scales, Commodities, and Modes

The second panel, composed of anthropologists, considered the shifting scales and rhythms of social and ecological systems in the Anthropocene, contrasting local, critical, and modal approaches to excessively broad generalizations about eras and regions.

Alyssa Paredes, an anthropologist of agricultural production in the Philippines and Japan, revisited Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work, looking beyond his well-known “Savage Slot” essay to find important contributions to the anthropology of commodities. Recalling Trouillot’s dictum that “any historical narrative is a bundle of silences,” she contrasted Trouillot’s perspective in his writings on Caribbean banana production with his contemporary Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things. Where Appadurai held that value derives from exchange, Trouillot insisted on the centrality of labor. The apparent “liberalism” of the “free economic exchange” between Dominican banana farmers and US fruit corporations masked the outsourcing of labor’s reproductive cost: farmers were paid for bananas, but not the price needed to live. Appadurai’s fascination with the “social life of things,” Paredes suggested, might be another name for commodity fetishism—and the same may be true for more recent “new materialist” and multispecies approaches. She called for wider engagement with Trouillot’s work and his lifelong insistence on the politics of labor, ownership, and structural silencing.

Looking at the numerous actors and agencies enmeshed in the changing geographies of the Bengal delta, London-based anthropologist Megnaa Mehtta considered how discourses of global climate change allow local deferrals of responsibility—an all-purpose excuse for decades of poor governance and neglect. Centering Kolkata and its surrounding river systems, Mehtta described a complex interplay between multiple actors—fishers, port authorities, NGOs, a merry-go-round of government ministries, the river as sovereign deity. A dam rebuilt in 1969 to protect Kolkata now accelerates sediment accumulation with accompanying rising waters elsewhere. Under the technocratic policy of “managed retreat,” human habitations are abandoned as necessary sacrifices, while conservationists defend the mangrove habitats of Bengal tigers. Mehtta showed how climate justice often demands a regional scapegoat, while responsibility fractures across diffuse infrastructures of blame.

Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s work on the Inuit, anthropologist Michael Degani from Cambridge, UK, considered seasons as modes: bundles of elements, frameworks of possibility that set what may or must be done at given times. He highlighted Mauss’s challenge to deterministic accounts of environment, echoed in Graeber and Wengrow’s work on the malleability of political forms, and in Amazonian ethnographies showing how dry and rainy periods modulate labor, celebration, and rest. Modal framings point beyond “entanglement” or “hybridity”—figures of a unitary, if “patchily” realized globalization— by emphasizing distinct yet flexible worlds, bounded temporal blocks with distinctive affordances, somatic codes, and collective sensibilities. But what happens when seasons unravel, as in the Anthropocene? Degani reflected on shifting temporalities: the earth as hothouse, climate disturbance as a “long season,” Catholic sisterhoods in Tanzania organizing their work around altered seasonal rhythms. Modalities, he suggested, allow worlds to be understood in their own temporal textures, not merely in relation the empty time of global modernity.

Panel 3: Condemnations and Complicities

In the previous panel, anthropologists wrestled with the scalar and temporal effects of global economic and environmental processes. The next panel featured historians of science and Indigenous knowledge concerned with the histories of anthropology, traditional ecological knowledge, ethnobotany, and climatology—and their silences.

The MIT-based historian of Native science Eli Nelson offered a critical account of longstanding and dismissive tropes in historical treatments of North American Indigenous peoples’ subsistence practices. For Lewis Henry Morgan, those who favored hunting were cast as “savage” and unproductive, while those who practiced agriculture were elevated to “barbarian” (if not “civilized”). Yet both were accused of recklessly overhunting megafauna and beaver populations. Such double binds—too industrious or not industrious enough—structure what Nelson called a “governance of the prior,” in which anthropology and ecology continue to rehearse accusations of Indigenous environmental “maladdress.” Citing Shepard Krech’s The Ecological Indian and Calvin Martin’s Keepers of the Game, Nelson showed how Native presence is repeatedly framed through moralized narratives of a broken contract with nature. Even for Indigenous scholars like Vine Deloria Jr. and Laura Harjo who foreground Native science, the tone remains mournful; Nelson cited Harjo’s lament: “we may never mend our relationship with the beaver and the deer.”

Yale historian of science and collecting Elaine Ayers presented a history of ethnobotany as a colonial science deeply embedded in primitivist imaginaries and extractive logics through intellectual genealogies of Richard Spruce (1817–1893) and Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001). Ethnobotany emerged through expeditions to catalogue “useful” plants in primitive societies. Its founders appropriated biological specimens and symbolic authority, with little return; Kew Gardens overflows with mosses collected by Schultes, while photos of the shirtless Schultes smoking hallucinogens with Indigenous hosts gild their mythologies as “fathers of ethnobotany.” The field still romanticizes Indigenous “naturalness” and heroic fieldwork while retaining its extractive and primitivizing attitude. As a student of Schultes’ students, Ayers acknowledged that she is part of the story: her call was not to deconstruct these “great men of science,” but to recognize the conditions of complicity under which knowledge is produced and transmitted.

Also from Yale, the historian of science and empire Deborah Coen presented climatology as a site of encounter between the natural and social sciences, highlighting flexible terms such as atmosphere and influence as ways of tracing broadly distributed effects of both humans and nonhumans. Coen spoke from her study of WHO-sponsored attempts to create a universal and objective index for notions such as “resilience” and “vulnerability.” These technocratic procedures, she argued, render “vulnerability” as a one-dimensional variable, reducing communities to actuarial categories. In contrast, drawing on Elinor Ostrom and others, she proposed a treatment of atmosphere as a commons, a shared good serving as both a literal and an affective medium. A science of atmosphere thus conceived does not merely study the environment; it exists within it, shaped by flows of influence that challenge subject/object distinctions.

Discussion brought out the inherent “stickiness” of environmental research, the tendency for the observer to fuse with the object—as in Schultes’ fumigations and Spruce’s daydreams of becoming moss. Science might be porous and entangled, others noted, but still unequally structured, still a prop for the hierarchies and exclusions of settler colonialism. Could there be, discussants asked, a participatory, redemptive science of the atmosphere, of consubstantial alliance across species and settings? Could it exist in the bureaucratic forms of the WHO and international climate bodies?

Panel Four: Affective Environments, the More-than-Natural, and an Unexpected Beacon

In the final panel, held on the second morning, the focused intensity of the previous day’s discussions modulated into collective introspection about the relation between researchers and their subjects, between field and home, between the academy as a site of critical engagement and the wider worlds which give shape to “abstract” thought. Several talks noted the cyclical temporalities that define ecological successions and seasons; similar recurrences appear with concepts and historical epochs. How do we live in a moment that echoes the rise of authoritarianism in the 1930s, with hostility to universities, suspension of law, curtailment of civil liberties, and repression of dissent? As the panelists grappled with these layered crises, a shared mood of both grief and urgency emerged.

Anthropologist Anand Pandian from Johns Hopkins set the key by offering up personal experience of displacement—not just geographic or disciplinary, but emotional. Overnight, he learned that a friend from his fieldwork in rural South Asia had died. He recalled his months of writing as PhD student in Oakland, bifurcated between settings, none of which held still. The fragility of living between conjoined and de-phased lifeworlds unsettles anthropologists’ hopes for objectivity or detachment. Seeking to register the phenomenology of both immediate givens and distant encroachments, he proposed that we consider anthropology not as the mere description of settings but a properly environmental method: a mode of atmospheric attunement oscillating between abstraction and situated affect. Pandian’s notion of “mythical realism” suggested ways of acknowledging how we are transported and inhabited—by settings, subjects, histories, teachers, institutions.

This theme of possession—literal, intellectual, spiritual—was taken up by anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando of UC Santa Cruz, who reflected on secularism’s limits in grappling not just with the more-than-human but the more-than-natural dimensions of environments in crisis. Considering South Asian contexts where leopards are seen as devotees, and critiquing what she calls “anthroposecularism,” she argued that while multispecies anthropology undoes the human/nature split, it often reinforces the nature/supernature divide that secularism imposes. In contrast, communities most affected by ecological crisis do not see such divisions. Anthropologists now recognize mushrooms, tigers, and microbes—but what about gods? Or even more pressingly, what about God, and the monotheistic convictions and institutions that still loom large in the Western academy? Despite secular discomfort, she urged anthropologists to consider the hermeneutics of presence for humans, animals, and gods—not metaphorically, but as a lived ethical relation involving care, obligation, and even submission. 

A final historical reconstruction by geographer Federico Ferretti of Bologna appeared as an unexpected beacon, recovering the international networks of 19th-century anarchist geographers including Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin. Rather than idealizing the “noble savage,” these activist scientists documented solidarity across human and non-human communities, rooting mutual aid in observation of animals and corrections to Darwin. They proposed naturalistic evolutionary frameworks grounded not in competition but mutual aid, rejecting racial hierarchies and claims of European civilizational superiority. Ferretti stressed that this tradition wasn’t anti-institutional per se; the authors promoted horizontally organized forms of collective life while rejecting state-sponsored and authoritarian forms. Appearing within and against an era of imperial conquest and naturalized hierarchies, their model offered today’s anthropologists and environmentalists examples of engaged research aiming at fairer, more livable futures.

The potential discord between Ferretti’s presentation of  19^th century anarchists’ resolute “laïcité” (or secularism) and Fernando’s “post-secular” openness to ethnographies of the more-than-natural was reduced by discussions of the many ways in which the invisible acts on the visible. Many of the conference speakers had passed through Yale’s Anthropology and Agrarian Studies program and there were many scenes of warm reunion; participants recognized the ways they are possessed by their field sites, their teachers, their institutions.

In-Conclusions

In an aside after the last panel, a speaker observed: “It’s like we’re on the cusp of a manifesto.” In a day and a half, conversations had covered surprisingly wide ground, sustaining deep collaborative thought and feeling. Another speaker expressed joking frustration: “I’ve got a love-hate relationship with the academy, and I sometimes think about giving it up. But events like this remind me of everything I love in this line of work, which makes it harder to leave.” The conference began by asking about environmental anthropology, but as Yale historian of biology and anthropology Joanna Radin suggested in her closing thoughts, by the end, the environment toward much of our concern was directed was the academy.

Features of life that once felt like stable ground—the administrative state, liberalism, academic freedom—are clearly under threat. In their previous scholarship, many speakers had written of the hypocrisies and illusions of liberalism: its claims to defend equality, freedom, and universal rights while resting on systems of economic exclusion; civil protections were systematically denied to migrants and citizens on the basis of religion, race, and sex. But with a new government explicitly rejecting liberal aspirations, dismantling legal protections, and attacking universities, research funding, ethnic and racial diversity, and dissent, for some the promises of liberalism provoked considerable nostalgia.

How do we live inside the institutions we’re part of, transformed by climate breakdown, political pressures, and the threat of surveillance and sanction? Even as participants criticized the limiting structures of the university, they also expressed deep care for it as a space of shared learning and growth, and for the lifelong relationships it fosters, characterized by mutual aid, obligation, respect, exchange, and even love—none of which rule out simultaneous feelings of resentment, compromise, even violence.

Across richly varied case studies—touching on sediments, soils, and oils, beavers and botanists, gods, modes, and measures—the question kept arising: what kind of environments do our scientific practices depend on and create? There was a persistent push to think about anthropology’s literal spaces—not just its theories—and the way its changing paradigms map onto changing social orders and regimes of subsistence and energy: from settler colonies and industrial plantations, to steam-powered industry, electric and electronic communications, to off-shored production and global supply chains, where intensely local and spatially extended forms of governance and accounting intersect. How does ecological thinking affect our daily acts and commitments as teachers, researchers, and citizens? How do we stay open to history—not just remembering it, but critically engaging it and its power to shape how we live and think? The closing discussion didn’t produce neat conclusions, but a shared mood and reassertion of values: of vulnerability, care, and mutual responsibility. 

Environmental anthropology appeared as an unfinished project, difficult but necessary. Plantations, inequalities, and imperial legacies still shape our world; colonial logics adapt and survive, at work even in proposals for climate justice. But we also live with traces of resistance, survival, and alternative ways of knowing. Possibilities remain for tactical holisms, partial syntheses, and novel alignments across scientific and cultural worlds. At stake is the authority to define the environment and its histories. And with that, a broader invitation: to think with modalities, atmospheres, and uneven textures of influence—not only to critique past errors, but to imagine alternative futures. Rather than fixing or resolving these tensions, the invitation was to stay with them, asking what kinds of knowledge, care, and connection emerge in the process.