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ENGAGEMENT BLOG
- Designing Sacred Lands
- O-yama: Mountain Faith and Uncertainty in Late Capitalist Japan
- Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone
- Protecting Cultural Environments in Northern Wisconsin: Anthropology’s Contribution to a Tribal Initiative
- Gathering Divergent Forest Honeys: Collections and Commodity Flows in the Philippines
SECTION NEWS
- AAA 2012 – Anthropology and Environment Society Invited Sessions & Events
- Climate Change Task Force
- 2011 AAA Convention, Montreal
NEW & NOTABLE
- Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, And Ecovillages
- Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution
- How Will New Models Shape Our Research?
- Bring heritage breeds to holiday table
- Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere
ANTHROPOLOGY NEWS
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Tag Archives: NGOs
Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone
Through my ongoing research on the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), I am engaging with broader questions about the “nature” of militarized landscapes and the production of their ecological value. In this piece, I examine how South Korean state and NGO projects configure the DMZ as a unique site of biodiversity that could provide the basis for sustainable development and also peace on the Korean peninsula. Continue reading
Posted in Engagement Blog
Tagged biodiversity, conservation, engagement, militarized ecologies, neoliberal nature, NGOs, South Korea
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Gathering Divergent Forest Honeys: Collections and Commodity Flows in the Philippines
When I began researching honey collecting in the Philippines, I never anticipated that making visual collections of objects and images associated with marketing honey was going to become a powerful way of stimulating discussion about my study. But the clues were there all along. Collections are things brought together, in so many senses of the term. Such assemblages have a capacity for telling stories about how different products make their ways through the world, and into our homes, bodies and lives. Continue reading
Posted in Engagement Blog
Tagged Commodity flows, engagement, food, forestry, indigenous people, NGOs, Non-Timber Forest Products, Philippines, socio-environmental justice
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In the Trenches: Collaborative Conservation in a Contested West
For the last fifteen years, I’ve worked as a volunteer – a citizen anthropologist – in the collaborative conservation movement sweeping across the American West. I co-founded the Arizona Common Ground Roundtable in 1997. For the next five years, we (the Roundtable) sponsored forums across the state to bring ranchers, environmentalists, and sportsmen together to talk about the future of Arizona’s wide-open spaces. We found our common ground by paraphrasing political analyst, James Carville: “It’s land fragmentation, stupid!” Then I chaired the Ranch Conservation Task Force of Pima County’s visionary Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan (SDCP), which seeks to conserve both biodiversity and working ranches around the Tucson metropolitan area. For the last decade, I have served on Pima County’s Conservation Acquisition Commission (CAC). The CAC provides recommendations to the Pima County Board of Supervisors on how to spend the $170 million in Open Space Bonds that voters approved in 2004 to support the SDCP. Continue reading
Posted in Engagement Blog
Tagged agriculture, conservation, engagement, NGOs, United States, US West
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From Conservation to Eco-Toilets to Organic Markets: The Evolution of a Chinese Environmental NGO
The story of Wildgrass is one of organizational adaptation to the dynamism of present-day China’s politics and its rapidly changing social and environmental needs. After four years of working with the organization, I consider my roll in Wildgrass as more of an “exchange” than an “engagement” because of our reciprocal relations. We’ve shared knowledge and influenced one another on multiple levels, providing me a unique perspective to view changes in the organization over time. Continue reading
Posted in Engagement Blog
Tagged agriculture, china, conservation, development, engagement, NGOs
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Getting Goats—From skepticism to optimism in Northern Kenya
In the 1990s, before I became an academic anthropologist and researcher, I worked for about seven years in community development in Northern Kenya. The bulk of my work involved facilitating participatory development processes among communities of pastoralists in Samburu district. We tried to engage a broad swath of the community in self-analysis, identification of priority issues, planning and the implementation of interventions to improve their situation. The guiding principle was that local knowledge should be prioritized. We believed that the herding communities knew best about their own context and that their ideas should be used as the basis for community-led development projects. Continue reading
Posted in Engagement Blog
Tagged africa, agriculture, development, engagement, kenya, NGOs, pastoralism
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