ENVIRONMENTALISM

Ecology could no more have existed as a science in the early nineteenth century than could biology one hundred years earlier (Foucault 1970: 125–65). Although both had precursors (geography on the one hand, and natural history on the other), the material and intellectual conditions just did not exist. While the ideas associated with this shift (those we associate with Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel) have been very important in shaping the development of ecological studies in anthropology, the investigation of man–environment relations in general has a far longer history. It has been subject to a wide spectrum of influences, principally emanating from the philosophies of evolutionism (in its widest sense), materialism and environmentalism. Although these labels are by no means mutually exclusive, I am here principally concerned with the last of them.

The term ‘environmentalism’ is generally applied to explanatory schemes which maintain that human social and cultural behaviour is to a large extent determined, in a mechanistic fashion, by the natural habitat.