Environmental social science

Environmental social science has its roots in several disciplines and research traditions, ranging from anthropology to zoology Disciplinary identities and frameworks continue to play a significant role: environmental anthropology, political ecology (centered in geography), environmental social science, and similar named entities in several other disciplines have their own associations, scholarly journals, and sets of issues. But increasingly there is convergence, transdisciplinary interaction, and the forging of a coherent if loosely bounded research community, with scholars and practitioners from many different disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and applied fields engaged in fruitful dialogue and collaboration. This volume aims to foster this emerging field by presenting authoritative summaries of central research methods in a manner accessible to all. In the next section, we summarize the organization of the volume and the content of each chapter; but first, in the present section, we wish to situate this emerging field in a broader intellectual and historical context.

There are many factors that helped generate environmental social science, but two are prominent. The first was the realization that landscapes and the multitude of components they contain cannot be understood without serious consideration of past and present human communities. It is now widely understood that most terrestrial and near-shore environments are profoundly shaped by human actions – they are “socionatural” systems (Balée 2006; Denevan 1992; Smith and Wishnie 2000). These anthropogenic impacts are not limited to large-scale societies, but extend back to the initial dispersal of Homo ­sapiens some 60 000 years ago, and include effects that both enhanced and diminished biodiversity and ecosystem functions.