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Stoekl, Allan. 2021. The Three Sustainabilities: Energy, Economy, Time. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 307 pp. ISBN 978-1517908188.Carrasco, Anita. 2020. Embracing the Anaconda: A Chronicle of Atacameño Life and Mining in the Andes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 182 pp. ISBN 978-1498575157.Sullivan, Kathleen M., and James H. McDonald, eds. 2020. Public Lands in the Western US: Place and Politics in the Clash between Public and Private. 226 pp. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. ISBN 978-1793637062.Hirsch, Shana Lee. 2020. Anticipating Future Environments: Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0295747293.O’Gorman, Emily. 2021. Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human-Histories of the Murray–Darling Basin. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-295-74915-0.Styles, Megan. 2019. Roses from Kenya: Labor, Environment, and the Global Trade in Cut Flowers. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-295-74650-0.Boyce, James K. 2019. The Case for Carbon Dividends. Medford, MA: Polity Press. 140 pp. ISBN 978-1-5095-2655-0.Rahder, Micha. 2020. An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Conservation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 316 pp. ISBN 978-1-4780-0691-6.Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. 2018. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 496 pp. ISBN 978-0-241-28088-1.Braverman, Irus, and Elizabeth R. Johnson, eds. 2020. Blue Legalities: The Life & Laws of the Sea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 342 pp. ISBN 978-1-4780-0654-1.Chaney, Robert. 2020. The Grizzly in the Driveway: The Return of Bears to a Crowded American West. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-295-74793-4.

In September 1996, President Clinton proclaimed the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in southern Utah in order to protect its scientific and historic resources. In December 2017,...

Livestock grazing is an extensive and long-standing natural resource use on U.S. public lands that has become extremely controversial in recent decades. In this article, we approach the controversy...

We report on anthropological research conducted in three mountain communities (in the USA, Italy and Peru), which have been directly affected by glacier retreat for over 40 years. Our mixed methods include ethnographic research, analysis of transcripts of interviews, focus groups and community meetings, and case studies of adaptation projects. Our findings indicate that local people are acute observers of change. They draw on two frames (climate change and community) in their discussions and projects but rely much more heavily on the latter frame. This pattern of drawing on the community frame, characteristic of all discussions, is most marked in the community meetings. The effectiveness of the community frame in supporting projects calls into question some widely shared notions about the role of belief in climate change as a crucial precondition for adaptation and challenges the “perceive–predict–act” model of climate change response.

There is an increasing demand for climate science that decision-makers can readily use to address issues created by climate variability and climate change. To be usable, the science must be relevant to their context and the complex management challenges they face and credible and legitimate in their eyes. The literature on usable science provides guiding principles for its development, which indicate that climate scientists who want to participate in the process need skills in addition to their traditional disciplinary training to facilitate communicating, interacting, and developing and sustaining relationships with stakeholders outside their disciplines. However, the literature does not address questions about what specific skills are needed and how to provide climate scientists with these skills. To address these questions, this article presents insights from interviews with highly experienced and respected "first generation” climate science integrators from across the United States. The term “climate science integrator” is used to refer to climate scientists who specialize in helping decision-makers to integrate the best available climate science into their decision-making processes. The cadre of scientists who participated in the research has largely developed their methods for working successfully with stakeholders without formal training but often with the guidance of a mentor. Their collective wisdom illuminates the kinds of skills needed to be a successful science integrator and provides mentoring for aspiring science integrators. It also suggests the types of training that would cultivate these skills and indicates ways to change academic training and institutions to better encourage the next generation and to support this kind of work.

In light of global climate change, adaptation will be necessary at all levels of social organization. However, the adaptation literature emphasizes that because the impacts of climate change and vulnerability are locally specific, adaptation is inevitably local. In this paper, in order to inform the design of institutions that can encourage and support effective local-level adaptation, the authors derive principles for their design theoretically and use a case study to explore how these principles could be practically implemented. Ten design principles are synthesized from principles derived from reviews of the literatures on local-level adaptation, usable science, and boundary organizations. Bringing these three literatures together highlights the characteristics of boundary organizations that make them particularly valuable for addressing the challenges of local-level adaptation. The case study then illustrates how an existing boundary organization, The University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, of the U.S. Cooperative Extension System (CES), implements these principles in its organizational structure and in the daily practice of Extension professionals. It also highlights the significance of the CES’s existing social networks and social capital for facilitating their implementation. From the case study it is concluded that the CES is uniquely positioned to serve an important role in a national adaptation strategy for the United States in supporting local-level adaptation in urban and rural communities across the country.

As adaptation has come to the forefront in climate change discourse, research, and policy, it is crucial to consider the effects of how we interpret the concept. This paper draws attention to the need for interpretations that foster policies and institutions with the breadth and flexibility to recognize and support a wide range of locally relevant adaptation strategies. Social scientists have argued that, in practice, the standard definition of adaptation tends to prioritize economic over other values and technical over social responses, draw attention away from underlying causes of vulnerability and from the broader context in which adaptive responses take place, and exclude discussions of inequality, justice, and transformation. In this paper, we discuss an alternate understanding of adaptation, which we label “living with climate change,” that emerged from an ethnographic study of how rural residents of the U.S. Southwest understand, respond to, and plan for weather and climate in their daily lives, and we consider how it might inform efforts to develop a more comprehensive definition. The discussion brings into focus several underlying features of this lay conception of adaptation, which are crucial for understanding how adaptation actually unfolds on the ground: an ontology based on nature–society mutuality; an epistemology based on situated knowledge; practice based on performatively adjusting human activities to a dynamic biophysical and social environment; and a placed-based system of values. We suggest that these features help point the way toward a more comprehensive understanding of climate change adaptation, and one more fully informed by the understanding that we are living in the Anthropocene.

This paper explores the role of emotion in understanding why repeated and increasingly urgent warnings about the effects of global warming have failed to motivate significant actions to address it. It draws on a comparative anthropological study on perceptions of and responses to glacier retreat in communities in three glaciated mountain regions: the Cordillera Blanca in the Peruvian Andes, the South Tirol in the Italian Alps, and the North Cascades in the U.S. The massive retreat of mountain glaciers during the last half-century is one of the most visible and high confidence level indicators of global warming. Although glacier retreat is well documented scientifically in each of these regions, our study found that the level of concern about it varied widely between the three study sites. The paper begins with an explanation of the ecological model of emotion we are using and a consideration of emotions associated with glaciers historically. Next it describes the three study sites and the ways that residents of each site feel about the loss of glaciers and its effects. Finally, it draws on this comparative perspective and recent research from several social science disciplines on the role of emotion in human beliefs and behaviors to suggest ways that emotion can help explain the observed variation. The paper concludes by extending these suggestions to responses to climate change more generally.

Freshwater resources face enormous pressures to meet human and ecosystem needs in a changing climate. These pressures brought concern for rising water insecurity high on global agendas and, renewed interest in improving water security. This review traces the recent evolution of these efforts including the challenges faced in attempts to enhance water security. In addition, this paper adds a new dimension to water security by proposing a theoretical model that jointly considers interdependencies between water security, adaptive capacity, and adaptive water management. Finally, the review illustrates and critically evaluates these interdependencies using three case studies from the US, Mexico and Argentina, and ends with suggestions for future research. Fil: Kirchhoff, Christine. University of Connecticut; Estados Unidos Fil: Lara Valencia, Francisco. Arizona State University; Estados Unidos Fil: Brugger, Julie. University of Arizona; Estados Unidos Fil: Mussetta, Paula Cecilia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales; Argentina Fil: Pineda Pablos, Nicolás. El Colegio de Sonora; México

This paper is a reflection on doing anthropology in the United States, based on my research of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a “protected area” in southern Utah. My research focuses on the meaning and practice of democracy in the United States by examining the impact of conservation policies on rural resource users. I question why social scientists who study conservation are able to see injustices in the protected area model when applied in “the Global South,” but have not aimed critique at similar processes occurring in the U.S. Reflecting on the post fieldwork experiences of scholars Susan Harding, Faye Ginsburg, and James McCarthy, I suggest that, for American anthropologists, some “repugnant others” in the U.S. represent a threatening “enemy,” while in other settings, they may not be perceived in this way. I conclude by suggesting we “write democratically” in order to overcome this limitation and realize the transformative potential of ethnography.

We are four anthropologists who form a research group on perceptions of and responses to glacier retreat. The massive retreat of mountain glaciers during the twentieth century is one of the most visible and high confidence level indicators of global warming. Melting glaciers create a period of greater water availability, followed by a period of greater water scarcity when they have shrunk. The effects of climate change on the seasonal distribution and year-to-year variability in water supply are also of importance. Changing water availability interacts with local water management systems, the integration of local systems in regional and larger systems, and the effects of climate change programs and policies on water management. We draw on a variety of methods (ethnography, survey research, archival work) to understand how people associate glacier retreat with changing water availability. Our work is ongoing and is being carried out in three sites: the North Cascades of Washington State; the Cordillera Blanca in Ancash, Peru; and the South Tirol in the Italian Alps. Each site contains two to four villages or towns, all with populations less than 1,000. In all areas, water is important as an economic resource (supporting agriculture, livestock, hydropower production and tourism); water-related hazards, particularly floods and mudflows, are also significant. In addition, water is a key element in cultural landscapes; its presence in many forms—ice, snow, springs, rivers, lakes—is a crucial element of regional identities.