Human Adaptability

An Introduction to Ecological Anthropology

Emilio F. Moran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000565935
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Designed to help students understand the multiple levels at which human populations respond to their surroundings, this essential text offers the most complete discussion of environmental, physiological, behavioral, and cultural adaptive strategies available. Among the unique features that make Human Adaptability outstanding as both a textbook for students and a reference book for professionals are a complete discussion of the development of ecological anthropology and relevant research methods; the use of an ecosystem approach with emphasis on arctic, high altitude, arid land, grassland, tropical rain forest, and urban environments; an extensive and updated bibliography on ecological anthropology; and a comprehensive glossary of technical terms.

- There is enhanced emphasis throughout on the role of gender in human adaptability research and on global environmental change as it affects particular ecosystems.

- Students are guided to websites that provide access to relevant material, complement the text's coverage of biomes, and suggest ways to become active in environmental issues.

- The fourth edition includes updated material on climate change and environmental policy.

This book is essential reading for students undertaking courses in environmental anthropology and human ecology.

Part IEnvironmental AnthropologyHistory, Theory, and Method

1People in Ecosystems

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175575-2

Source: iStock Photo.

Introduction

The study of human adaptability focuses on functional and structural features of human populations that facilitate coping with and transforming the physical environment, particularly under conditions of environmental change. All around us we see evidence of global-scale environmental change and its local and regional manifestations. Global climate change, exacerbated by emissions of earth-warming gases, has been associated with the growing severity and frequency of extreme events such as storms, drought cycles, and flooding associated with El Niño and La Niña events. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting much faster than anyone would have predicted a decade ago (Hassol 2004; Slater et al. 2020). Climate change and the loss of biodiversity worldwide due to deforestation, fragmentation of forests, and economic development not only threaten us with the loss of this accumulated genetic bank but constitute a globally scaled experiment with the structure and function of the biosphere (Walker et al. 1999; NRC 1999a; Steffen et al. 2004). The challenge is all the greater given the difficulties in distinguishing between human-induced changes and, for example, natural decadal climatic variability (Hulme et al. 1999). Demand is growing for a refined understanding of the environmental changes we are experiencing, of the consequences to human populations, and of the scale and magnitude of the adaptations different populations must make in order to adapt to or mitigate these changes. International environmental agreements have been a mechanism to get countries to begin to address these challenges but few of the targets defined have been met, despite the urgency of the crisis. This chapter and Chapters 3 and 4 present major theoretical and methodological concepts relevant to the study of human adaptability. Chapter 2 outlines the historical development of environmental anthropology and related environmental social science fields.¹

Contemporary studies of human adaptability reflect a growing interaction between the social and the biological sciences (Harrison and Morphy 1998; Gutman et al. 2004; Goodchild and Janelle 2004; Moran and Ostrom 2005; Moran 2006; Preiser et al. 2018). Cultural ecology and ethnoecology were earlier forms of this research, in which the concepts and methods of the biological sciences played a less central role. Most of the research in human ecology in the disciplines of anthropology, geography, and sociology was of this kind until the early 1970s. These social and cultural approaches to the study of human adaptability have enriched our understanding of coping behaviors. Nevertheless, a full explanation of human adaptability must integrate the physiological aspects of our responses with a solid understanding of the physical environment in which our behavior takes place. This is particularly true today given the growing practice of team-based multidisciplinary research required by the study of environmental change at scales from local to regional to global (NRC 1999a; Turner 2005; Moran and Ostrom 2005).

The integration of social and biological approaches to the study of adaptability was facilitated by acceptance of the ecosystem concept (see review of this history in Moran 1990; Golley 1993). This concept, derived from the study of biological ecology, views all organisms as part of ecological systems and subject to the same physical laws. Within this framework, human beings can be seen as third-order consumers in a food chain, or the interaction between two human populations can be considered mutualistic. The ecosystem approach makes it possible to apply a greater body of data to explanatory models of human behavior than is possible from a strictly social or cultural approach.

In this chapter, we will consider the ecosystem concept and the distinction between adaptation and adjustment. While the concept of evolutionary adaptation is relevant to the understanding of human adaptability, most research with human populations has found that nongenetic forms of adaptability are more common. Humans are highly adaptable due to behavioral plasticity, including their many forms of social organization, which makes them capable of adaptation to environmental change (Leatherman and Goodman 2020). Genetic adaptation involves changes in gene frequencies that confer a reproductive advantage to the population in a particular environment. It is a response to prevailing environmental circumstances and may lower the population’s capacity to adjust to future changes in its environment. It also tends to restrict the population to types of habitat in which it has a reproductive advantage. The human species is characterized by a marked degree of phenotypic plasticity. As a result, the interaction between environment and genotype brings about variations (adjustments) in behavior and morphology to adjust the organism to those conditions. These adjustments occur at the individual level, although they may be shared by the whole population living in a given habitat. In other words, the human species adjusts itself to new circumstances by physiological as well as social and/or cultural means, and in so doing transforms the environment. Few corners of the earth have escaped being transformed by humans, and even some “pristine” places are the product of millennia-old changes brought on by our ancestors (Redman 1999; Redman et al. 2004b; Diamond 2005).

The other central concept examined in this chapter, the ecological system or ecosystem, describes the interaction between living and nonliving components of a given habitat. While it is possible to view the whole biosphere as an ecosystem for some purposes, scientists have found it useful to divide the biosphere into smaller and more homogeneous biogeographical regions, or biomes. Such biomes represent a given set of climatic, floral, and faunal characteristics. While species may differ between continents, the type of biota across biomes will manifest commonalities resulting from the adaptation and adjustment to similar ecological conditions. Terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems respond to stress in similar ways: reduced biodiversity, altered primary and secondary productivity, increased disease prevalence, reduced efficiency of nutrient cycling, increased dominance of exotic species, and increased presence of smaller, shorter-lived opportunistic species (Rapport and Whitford 1999).

Although the interdependence of biological organisms was recognized during the nineteenth century, the ecosystem concept was not articulated until 1935, when A. G. Tansley proposed it to explain the dynamic aspects of populations and communities. An ecosystem includes “all the organisms in a given area, interacting with the physical environment, so that a flow of energy leads to a clearly defined trophic structure, biotic diversity and material cycles” (E. Odum 1971:8).

Ecosystems are said to be self-maintained and self-regulating, an assumption that has affected ecosystem studies but has been questioned recently by biologists and anthropologists. The concept of homeostasis, once defined as the tendency for biological systems to resist change and to remain in a state of equilibrium (E. Odum 1971:34), led to an overemphasis on static considerations and to an evaluation of man’s role as basically disruptive. Later, Vayda (1974), Slobodkin (1968, 1974), and Bateson (1963) defined homeostasis as the maintenance of system properties (while others, e.g., emphasize resilience [Holling 1973]). More recent ecosystem studies have emphasized, instead, the emergent properties of complex systems as characteristic of ecosystems (Levin 1998; Paperin et al. 2011).

Systems theory provides a broad framework for analyzing empirical reality and for cutting across disciplinary boundaries. Nonetheless, system approaches rely on other theories and develop measurements based on criteria other than those suggested by the system itself. Essentially, systems theory is a perspective that resembles anthropological holism: a system is an integral whole and no part can be understood apart from the entire system. Early studies focused on closed systems, understood through the negative feedbacks that maintain functional equilibrium. Later system analyses dealt with open systems reflecting positive feedback, nonlinear oscillating phenomena, and the purposive behavior of human actors. Such purposiveness is unevenly and differentially distributed, leading to conflict over goals and to system behavior reflecting the internal distribution of power. More recent stochastic approaches use dynamic modeling such as STELLA (Constanza et al. 1993) and intelligent agent-based models such as SWARM and SUGARSCAPE (Epstein and Axtell 1996; Grimm et al. 2006; Walker et al. 2006; Parker et al. 2003). The former is an ecosystem-type model, whereas the latter simulates “intelligent agent’s behavior” based on principles of artificial intelligence (Deadman 1999; LeBars et al. 2005; Macy and Willer 2002). The study of complex adaptive systems recognizes the nonlinear nature of systems and assumes that the complexity associated with a system is simply an emergent phenomenon of the local interactions of the parts of the system (Openshaw 1994, 1995; Epstein and Axtell 1996; Langton 1997; DeAngelis and Gross 1992).

Clifford Geertz, influenced by his reading of Dice (1955), Marston Bates (1953), and Eugene Odum (1971), was perhaps the first anthropologist to argue for the ecosystem as a viable unit of analysis in cultural anthropology. In his Agricultural Involution (1963), Geertz used the ecosystem concept to stress that a historical perspective helps explain Indonesia’s economic stagnation as largely a result of the economic patterns established during the era of Dutch colonialism. This is an important legacy of anthropology to the whole discussion that includes attention to poverty and the legacy of colonialism in understanding observed human-environment interactions within an environment experiencing change (Pisor and Jones 2020).

For purposes of this volume, the ecosystem can be subdivided into the three components that structure it: energy, matter, and information. Energy flows into ecosystems and is converted into vegetal biomass, which in turn sustains animals and humans. Chemical energy makes possible the conversion of matter from organic to inorganic forms and the cycle of essential nutrients in ecosystems. Information makes possible control over rates of flow, changes in ecosystem structure and function, and overall adaptability to both internal and external conditions. In studying adaptability, it is most convenient to begin with humans’ response to constraints imposed by their habitat.

Human Adaptability as a Response to Constraints

The study of human adaptability tends to emphasize the plasticity of human responses to any environment. Its use of a broad database that includes physiological, behavioral, and cultural adjustments to environmental change circumvents sterile debates over whether cultural or biological studies provide the most useful tools for studying interactions between humans and their environments. The human adaptability approach deals with the specific problems faced by inhabitants of various ecosystems. It focuses on how human populations, as they interact with each other and their environment, attempt to accommodate themselves to specific environmental problems, change the environment to make it more usable, and, in turn, how they ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• About the New Edition
• Part I Environmental Anthropology: History, Theory, and Method
• Part II Studies of Human Adaptability
• Part III Urban Sustainability and New Directions in Human Adaptability
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index