2001 A&E Annual Report

2001 Annual Report
Anthropology and Environment Section
Submitted by Peter Brosius

Membership:

Anthropology and Environment Section membership continued to grow this year, from 428 in November 2000 to 465 in November 2001.

Communications:

The A&E listserv Eanth-l continues to provide a valuable forum for the exchange of information related to ecological and environmental anthropology. It presently has some 667 subscribers, including numerous international subscribers. Items posted there are frequently forwarded to numerous other listservs and distribution lists; the list therefore has a reach that extends far beyond the A&E membership. Eanth-l is administered by UGA anthropology graduate student Josh Lockyer, who also maintains the A&E website. Beginning in 2002, the A&E Executive Board has designated $1000 a year for listserv and website maintenance.

Beyond Eanth-l, reaching A&E members by email continues to be problematic. AAA now does a much better job than in the past of distributing member contact information to sections, but approximately 20% of the email addresses provided by AAA do not work. Thus, when sending out announcements to members, numerous messages (approx. 70-90) are returned as “undeliverable.” This matter needs attention. One potential solution that we are working on is to establish and A&E listserv independent of Eanth-l, to be administered by the president and to be used for occasional official announcements only.

2001 also saw the publication of Carole Crumley’s edited volume New Directions in Anthropology and Environment (Altamira Press), which grew out of the 1996 A&E Inaugural Session Human Dimensions of Environmental Change: Anthropology Engages the Issues.

Rappaport Award:

Our section continues to sponsor the Roy A. Rappaport Prize, awarded annually for the best paper by a graduate student. The winner of this year’s 4^th Annual Rappaport Prize (it should actually be the 3^rd annual, since this is the 4^th year it has been awarded) was Anne Rademacher (Yale University). Her paper was entitled Past, Present, and Future Ecologies: Constructing Degradation and Restoration on the Bagmati and Bishnumati Rivers in Kathmandu. This year the judges were Michael Paolisso (University of Maryland), Anastasia Karakasidou (Wellesley College), Ted Gragson (Univ. of Georgia).

At the 2000 annual executive board meeting in San Francisco, the board voted to initiate two additional annual awards: (1) a book prize to recognize exemplary work in ecological and environmental anthropology, and (2) an award to recognize exemplary work by junior faculty. At the 2001 executive board meeting, the board discussed guidelines and procedures for administering these awards, and decided to initiate yet another award: a “Better Practices” award for contributions in the environmental realm.

Key Initiatives and Activities:

A&E continued to make progress in its efforts to raise our section’s profile in the domain of public policy. Indeed, we are one of the most active sections in this regard. Last year we formed a loosely-knit Public Policy Committee and four public policy working groups: (1) Conservation and Community, (2) Environmental Justice, (3) Consumption and Globalization, and (4) Genetically Modified Organisms. Of these, the Conservation and Community Working Group was the most active. We produced a brief document outlining our goals, and organized a half-day workshop in conjunction with the AAA 2001 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The Conservation and Community Group continues to work on defining its contribution to conservation practice and is planning another workshop at the 2002 Annual Meetings.

The other significant development during 2001 is that, recognizing significant areas of common interest, our section is collaborating with the Culture and Agriculture Section to organize a conference entitled Environment, Resources and Sustainability: Policy Issues for the 21st Century. Co-sponsored by the AAA Public Policy Committee and hosted by the University of Georgia Department of Anthropology, this conference will be held in Athens, Georgia on September 7-8, 2002. The document produced from this conference will become part of a proposal to be produced by the AAA Public Policy Committee which has the goal of establishing a Public Policy Institute. The AAA Public Policy Committee has adopted environmental policy as one of its key focus areas in its efforts to establish such an institute.

Global Ecology Documentary Video Project

As reported last year, since 1999 we have been developing the Global Ecology Documentary Video Project, a non-profit collaboration between the University of Georgia Department of Anthropology and the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. The purpose of the Global Ecology project is to produce a series of documentary videos for broadcast on PBS focused on providing an anthropological perspective on global environmental issues. We have not yet been able to secure significant funding for this project, but continue to pursue this. The first production, Global Ecology, Local Lives, which will focus on the research of four anthropologists, most of whom are members of A&E. Assuming we will be able to attract funding, this production will significantly enhance the public visibility of our section. A&E allocated $1500 as seed money toward this activity in 1999, and another $500 in 2000. We do not anticipate that any additional section funds will be devoted to this project. The Georgia Center has agreed to provide $115,000 in in-kind support, and we are presently seeking approximately $200,000 from NSF and EPA for production funds.

Annual Meeting Panels and Invited Sessions:

The Anthropology and Environment Section continues to have a significant presence at the Annual meetings. At the 2001 AAA Annual Meetings in Washington, D.C. the Anthropology and Environment Section sponsored 21 regular and invited sessions. Kathy Galvin served as Program Chair. However, numerous members of our section expressed strong concerns about the scheduling of panels by AAA. An inordinately large number of A&E sponsored panels were scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, making it impossible for our members to attend sessions they had hoped to attend.

Other:

At the Business meeting on November 30, Pete Brosius stepped down as president of the Section, and Bonnie McCay assumed the presidency.

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