Scientific measurements confirm that the causes of global warming are mainly anthropogenic—caused by humans and their activities.
Because our planet's climate is always changing, the key question becomes: How much global warming is due to human activities versus natural climate variability?
The role of carbon dioxide in warming the Earth's surface has been known for over a century.
Although for hundreds of thousands of years world temperatures have varied depending on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the recent rise in both CO2 and the Earth's temperature is one of the proofs that humans are fueling global warming.
The greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon that keeps the Earth's surface warm.
Today, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases has reached its highest level in 400,000 years. It will continue to rise—as will global temperatures—without actions to show it down.
Scientists prefer the term climate change to global warming. The former points out that, beyond rising temperatures, there have been changes in sea levels, precipitation, storms, and ecosystems effects.
The precise effects of climate change on regional weather patterns have yet to be determined.
While global warming may benefit those living in higher latitudes, many more people worldwide probably will be harmed.
Coastal communities can anticipate increased flooding and more severe storms and surges.
At risk are people, animals, plants, freshwater supplies, and such industries as tourism and farming.
Given the political will, developed countries might use science and technology to anticipate and deal with climate impacts and to help less developed countries adapt to climate change.
Meeting energy needs is the single greatest obstacle to slowing climate change.
Worldwide, energy use continues to grow with economic and population expansion.
Greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by using renewable resources and other alternative sources of energy (as opposed to fossil fuels).
Environmental Anthropology
Anthropology always has been concerned with how environmental forces influence humans and how human activities affect the biosphere and the Earth itself.
The 1950s-1970s witnessed the emergence of ecological anthropology, which focused on how cultural beliefs and practices helped human populations adapt to their environments, and how people used elements of their culture to maintain their ecosystems.
Early ecological anthropologists showed that many indigenous groups did a reasonable job of managing their resources and preserving their ecosystems.
An ethnoecology is any society's set of environmental practices and perceptions—that is, its cultural model of the environment and its relation to people and society.
Indigenous ethnoecologies increasingly are being challenged, as migration, media, and commerce spread people, institutions, information, and technology.
Today's ecological anthropology, a.k.a. environmental anthropology, attempts not only to understand but also to find solution to environmental problems.
Global Assaults on Local Autonomy
A clash of cultures related to environmental change may occur when development threatens indigenous peoples and their environments.
A second clash of cultures related to environmental change may occur when external regulation aimed at conservation confronts indigenous peoples and their ethnoecologies.
Well-intentioned conservation plans can be as insensitive as development schemes that promote radical changes without involving local people in planning and carrying out the policies that affect them.
When people are asked to give up the basis of their livelihood, they usually resist.
The spread of environmentalism may expose radically different notions about the "rights" and value of plants and animals versus humans.
The challenge for applied ecological anthropology is to devise culturally appropriate strategies for achieving biodiversity conservation in the face of unrelenting population growth and commercial expansion.
The most effective conservation strategies pay attention to the needs and wishes of the local people.
Deforestation
Deforestation is a global concern. It can lead to increased greenhouse gas production and a loss of global biodiversity.
The global scenarios of deforestation include demographic pressure (from births or immigration) on subsistence economies, commercial logging, road building, cash cropping, fuel wood needs associated with urban expansion, and clearing and burning associated with livestock and grazing.
The traditional approach to cope with deforestation has been to restrict access to forested areas. Modern strategies are more likely to consider the needs, wishes, and abilities of the people (often impoverished) living in and near the forest.
A challenge for the environmentally oriented applied anthropologist is to find ways to make forest preservation attractive to local people and ensure their cooperation.
Applied anthropologists must work to make "good for the globe" good for the people.
Interethnic Contact
Acculturation refers to changes that result when groups come into continuous firsthand contact—changes in the cultural patterns of either or both groups.
Although acculturation can be applied to any case of cultural contact and change, the term most often has described westernization—the influence of Western expansion on indigenous peoples and their cultures.
Acculturation may be voluntary or forced.
Different degrees of destruction, domination, resistance, survival, adaptation, and modification of local cultures may follow interethnic contact.
An initial encounter between an indigenous society and more powerful outsiders often is followed by a "shock phase," during which the indigenous population may be attacked, exploited, and repressed.
As a result, the indigenous group may suffer cultural collapse (ethnocide) or even physical extinction (genocide).
Religious Change
Religious proselytizing can promote ethnocide, as native beliefs and practices are replaced by Western ones (e.g., the Handsome Lake religion and associated changes in Iroquois society).
Today, much religious change is promoted by missionaries and proselytizers representing the major world religions, especially Christianity and Islam.
While the political ideology of a nation-state may oppose traditional religion (e.g., in the former Soviet empire), governments may also use their power to advance a religion (e.g., Islam in Iran or Sudan).
Cultural Imperialism
Cultural imperialism refers to the spread or advance of one culture at the expense of others, or its imposition on other cultures, which it modifies, replaces, or destroys—usually because of differential economic or political influence.
While modern technologies, particularly the mass media, act as agents of cultural imperialism by erasing cultural differences, they also allow local groups and cultures to express themselves to national and global audiences (e.g., television in Brazil).
Making and Remaking Culture
To understand culture change, it is important to recognize that meaning may be locally manufactured. People assign their own meanings and value to texts, messages, and products they receive.
Indigenized Popular Culture
When forces from world centers enter new societies, they are indigenized—modified to fit the local culture (e.g., Rambo's popularity among Australian aborigines).
A Global System of Images
The electronic mass media can spread, and even help create, national and ethnic identities.
Cross-cultural studies show that locally produced television shows are preferred over foreign imports.
Mass media play an important role in maintaining ethnic and national identities among people who lead transnational lives.
A Global Culture of Consumption
Contemporary global culture is driven by flows of people, technology, finance, information, and ideology.
Business, technology, and the media have increased the craving for commodities and images throughout the world, forcing most nation-states to open to a global culture of consumption.
People in Motion
Today, people are traveling more than ever.
With so much transnational migration and other movement of people, the unit of anthropological study expands from the local community to the diaspora—the offspring of an area who have spread to many lands.
Postmodernity describes today's world, in which traditional standards, contrasts, groups, boundaries, and identities are opening up, reaching out, and breaking down.
In its most general sense, postmodern refers to the blurring and breakdown of established canons (rules or standards), categories, distinctions, and boundaries.
The word postmodern is taken from postmodernism, a style and movement in architecture that, beginning in the 1970s, drew on a diversity of styles from different times and places—including popular, ethnic, and non-Western cultures.
New kinds of political and ethnic units are emerging, such as a growing pan-Indian identity and an international Pantribal movement.
Indigenous Peoples
The term indigenous people entered international law with the creation in 1982 of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP).
The draft of the Declaration of Indigenous Rights, produced by the WGIP in 1989, was accepted by the U.N. for discussion in 1993.
Social movements worldwide now use the term indigenous people as a self-identifying label in their quest for social, cultural, and political rights.
In Spanish-speaking Latin America, social scientists and politicians now favor the term indígena (indigenous person) over indio (Indian).
Indio is a colonial term that the white and mestizo (mixed) elites use to identify a culture that seemed alien to (European) civilization.
Until the mid- to late 1980s, Latin American public policy emphasized assimilation.
The last 30 years have witnessed a dramatic shift, from assimilation—mestizaje—to cultural difference.
The indigenous rights movement exists in the context of globalization, including transnational movements focusing on human rights, women's rights, and environmentalism.
Autochthony refers to the condition of being native to, or formed, in the place where found. The term refers to self and soil. Indigenous literally means born inside. Both notions stress the need to safeguard ancestral lands (patrimony) from strangers. This concept has been central to issues regarding indigenous rights in many parts of the world.
Identity in Indigenous Politics
Essentialism describes the process of viewing an identity as established, real, and frozen, so as to hide the historical processes and politics within which that identity developed.
Identities, emphatically, are not fixed. They must always be seen as:
potentially plural
emerging through a specific process
ways of being someone or something in particular times and places
The Continuance of Diversity
Anthropology has a crucial role to play in promoting a more humanistic vision of social change, one that respects the value of human biological and cultural diversity.
The existence of anthropology is itself a tribute to the continuing need to understand similarities and differences among humans throughout the world.
Anthropology Today: Engulfed by Climate Change, Town Seeks Lifeline
The people described in this story are among the first climate change refugees in the United States.
Residents of Newtok, Alaska, belong to a federally recognized American Indian tribe.
Decades ago, the U.S. government mandated that they and other Alaskan natives abandon a nomadic life.
They now reside in what used to be a winter camp.
Yet, global warming has made Newtok, which is now below sea level, almost unlivable.
This story raises the following question: What obligations does government have to local people whose lives have been disrupted not only by government decree but also by evident global warming?
