Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 People, numbers, and natural resources: demography in environmental research
- 3 Production decisions and time allocation: a guide to data collection
- 4 Analyzing the politics of natural resources: from theories of property rights to institutional analysis and beyond
- 5 Extreme events, tipping points, and vulnerability: methods in the political economy of environment
- 6 Local communities and natural resources: ethnobiology in practice
- 7 Mapping histories: cultural landscapes and walkabout methods
- 8 Metaphors and myths in news reports of an Amazonian “Lost Tribe”: society, environment and literary analysis
- 9 Water decision-makers in a desert city: text analysis and environmental social science
- 10 Linking human and natural systems: social networks, environment, and ecology
- 11 Khat commodity chains in Madagascar: multi-sited ethnography at multiple scales
- 12 Spatiotemporal methodologies in environmental anthropology: geographic information systems, remote sensing, landscape changes, and local knowledge
- 13 Deep time, diachronic change, and the integration of multi-scalar data: archaeological methods for exploring human–environment dynamics
- 14 Comparing trajectories of climate, class, and production: an historical ecology of American yeomen
- 15 Socioecological methods for designing marine conservation programs: a Solomon Islands example
- Index
- References
Foreword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 People, numbers, and natural resources: demography in environmental research
- 3 Production decisions and time allocation: a guide to data collection
- 4 Analyzing the politics of natural resources: from theories of property rights to institutional analysis and beyond
- 5 Extreme events, tipping points, and vulnerability: methods in the political economy of environment
- 6 Local communities and natural resources: ethnobiology in practice
- 7 Mapping histories: cultural landscapes and walkabout methods
- 8 Metaphors and myths in news reports of an Amazonian “Lost Tribe”: society, environment and literary analysis
- 9 Water decision-makers in a desert city: text analysis and environmental social science
- 10 Linking human and natural systems: social networks, environment, and ecology
- 11 Khat commodity chains in Madagascar: multi-sited ethnography at multiple scales
- 12 Spatiotemporal methodologies in environmental anthropology: geographic information systems, remote sensing, landscape changes, and local knowledge
- 13 Deep time, diachronic change, and the integration of multi-scalar data: archaeological methods for exploring human–environment dynamics
- 14 Comparing trajectories of climate, class, and production: an historical ecology of American yeomen
- 15 Socioecological methods for designing marine conservation programs: a Solomon Islands example
- Index
- References
Summary
This book, Environmental Social Sciences, represents the best of what’s happening in social science right now: (1) it exemplifies the movement toward interdisciplinary research; (2) it rejects the pernicious distinction between qualitative and quantitative in the conduct of social research; and (3) it makes clear the value for all social scientists of training in a wide range of methods of collecting and analyzing data. I treat these in turn.
1. Interdisciplinary social science. Environmental science has always been an interdisciplinary effort. The Science Citation Index lists 163 journals in the category of environmental science. Look through the top 10 journals (the ones with an impact factor of 4.0 or more) and the range of disciplines is clear: biologists, chemists, meteorologists, paleontologists, geologists … Increasingly, it is common to see articles – like one by Clougherty (2010) on gender analysis in the distribution of the effects of air pollution, or one by Knoke et al. (2009) on reconciling the subsistence needs of farmers in Ecuador with the need for conserving forests, or one by Rosas-Rosas and Valdez (2010) on the impact of fees from deer hunts on the willingness of landowners in Mexico to suspend killing of pumas and jaguars – articles that can only be described as social science. (We see this as well in medical science, where the very best journals now also routinely publish articles that also can only be described as 100% social science.)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Environmental Social SciencesMethods and Research Design, pp. x - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010