Disturbance, Complexity, Scale: New Approaches to the Study of Human-Environment Interactions

• Published in: Annual review of anthropology Vol. 44; no. 1; pp. 241 - 257
• Main Author: Bird, Rebecca Bliege
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Palo Alto Annual Reviews 01.01.2015; Annual Reviews, Inc
• Subjects: Anthropology; Behavior modification; complex adaptive systems; Decision making; ecosystem engineering; Environment; Grasslands; Group decision making; human behavioral ecology; Landscape ecology; niche construction; Ownership; Social factors; Space and time; sustainability; Australia
• ISSN: 0084-6570; 1545-4290
• DOI: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013946

New approaches to human-environment interactions are beginning to move beyond a narrow focus on individuals and simple (patch-level) predatory or competitive interactions. These approaches link nonequilibrium theory from community and landscape ecology with theories of individual decision making from behavioral ecology to explore new ways of approaching complex issues of diachronic change in behavior, subsistence, and social institutions. I provide an overview of two such approaches, one to understand long-term hunting sustainability among mixed forager-horticulturalists in the wet tropics and the other to understand how foragers act as ecosystem engineers in a dry perennial grassland in Australia. I conclude by describing the implications of new approaches that incorporate anthropogenic "intermediate" disturbance (an emergent property of human-environment interaction) as a force shaping environments through time and space, and in so doing patterning the sustainability of subsistence, ways of sharing, ownership norms, and even structures of gendered production.