Routledge Caring for Place: Ecology, Ideology, and Emotion in Traditional Landscape Management

How can cultural forms motivate people to care about their environment? While important scientific data about ecosystems is mushrooming, E. N. Anderson argues in this powerful new book that putting effective conservation into practice depends primarily on social solidarity and emotional factors. Marshaling decades of research on cultures across several continents, he shows how societies have been more or less successful in sustainably managing their environments based on collective engagements such as religion, art, song, myth, and story. This provocative and deeply felt book by a leading writer and scholar in human ecology and anthropology will be read and debated widely for years to come. Review "Anderson is deeply concerned with inadequate responses to ongoing global environmental degradation. Accordingly, he offers cases of traditional societies that survived over long time periods without destroying their environments. His focus is on ways humans think about plants, animals, and landscapes because of his conviction that stories about them are what make us care about their continued existence, rather than statistics about their plight. The goal is to learn lessons applicable for contemporary problems by observing ways that traditional people developed strategies to sustain environmental services and found ways to motivate others to do the same."― Susan Stevens Hummel, Agric Hum Values About the Author E. N. Anderson is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Riverside. He has done research on ethnobiology, cultural ecology, political ecology and medical anthropology in several areas, especially Hong Kong, British Columbia, California and the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. His books include The Food of China (Yale University Press, 1988), Ecologies of the Heart (Oxford University Press, 1996), Political Ecology of a Yucatec Maya Community (University Press of Arizona Press, 2005) and The Pursuit of Ecotopia (Praeger, 2010). In 2013 he received the Distinguished Ethnobiology Award from the Society for Ethnobiology.