Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology (Routledge Environment and Sustainability Handbooks)

This book illustrates the ways in which today's environmental anthropologists are constructing new paradigms for understanding the multiplicity of players, pressures, and ecologies in every environment, as well as the value of cultural knowledge of landscapes. This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary topics in environmental anthropology and thorough discussions on the current state and prospective future of the field in seven key sections. As the contributions to this handbook demonstrate, the subfield of environmental anthropology is responding to cultural adaptations and responses to environmental changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human–environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioral and often cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of topics presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology, as well as a broad new range of subjects such as resilience, nonhuman rights, architectural anthropology, industrialism, and education. The second edition includes greater coverage of topics that have grown increasingly pertinent not only to the field of environmental anthropology but also to peoples, places, and species around the world since the publication of the original volume. To this end, the new edition includes chapters illustrating the role of environmental anthropologists in the struggle for environmental justice and elucidating instances of environmental racism, climate change, the effects of the global pandemic, and much more. This comprehensive, holistically oriented second edition is an ideal resource not only to inform students and scholars about the history and challenges of environmental anthropology today, but also to prepare them to apply the anthropological skill set to address challenges of justice, health, conservation, and wellbeing in a climate-changed world.