TY - JOUR
T1 - Disturbance, Complexity, Scale
T2 - New Approaches to the Study of Human-Environment Interactions
AU - Bird, Rebecca Bliege
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright ©2015 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/10/21
Y1 - 2015/10/21
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013946
DO - 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-013946
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84945248904
SN - 0084-6570
VL - 44
SP - 241
EP - 257
JO - Annual Review of Anthropology
JF - Annual Review of Anthropology
IS - 1
ER -