Major Essay - Environmental Issue: Climate Change

Introduction

Climate change is a dilemma that is profoundly significant and still structurally complex. It extends the boundaries of quantifiable truths, and it is rooted in the study of social reality of melting glaciers, burning forests and individuals attempting to flee sea levels. Only in the last year, steadily explicit concerns erupted from different protests, such as the Extinction Revolt, bringing revolutionary strategies and community organizations into focus and placing the idea of a contemporary crisis community in the forefront has still not been discussed. Several scholars and practitioners identify the recent efforts of anthropology to fix this issue, in specific by expanding participation and focusing on a broader variety of viewpoints and considerations than are currently found (Fiske et al., 2018; Schroeder & McDermott, 2014). But that also based on the willingness to broaden one’s personal view of the anthropological issue further than just regionalized perceptions of climate change, to take into account distinct conceptual frameworks in development of knowledge, to highlight the identified measures and principles embodied in personal experience of climate change, and to develop ideas of universalism in the reaction and following legislation (O'Reilly, Isenhour, McElwee & Orlove, 2020).

Anthropologists worldwide are seeking to address the consequences of climate change and to establish workable explanations to one of this time's record important matters. Anthropologists are researching the anthropogenic factors that cause climate change, climate change extenuation and variation management mechanisms, and the human effects and consequences of global climate change. Climate change poses growing concerns affecting all areas of daily life, along with life quality, living spaces, wellbeing and cultural practices, and the physical environment. This degree of challenges impacts resilience; sense of cultural existence, safety and welfare. Anthropology, as a discipline evidently dedicated exclusively to the human experience over space and time, provides valuable information that can help develop feasible measures to solve the consequences of climate change.

Moreover, another key contribution of Anthropologists on different levels is to comprehend environmental and climate change as propelled by political, cultural, economic, and social environments. Climate change impacts the well-being of humans in unforeseen means, for instance across trade, emerging environmental pressures, intergovernmental settlements between parties influencing food security, assistance and the development of governance (Bohle, Downing & Watts, 1994). In fact, climate experts expect rapid global change would intensify the disruptions of severe weather conditions including water shortages, cyclones and hurricanes. Such incidents are likely to experience severe negative implications including starvation, disenfranchisement and improved sectarian violence. Whilst these climate events can become more severe, disaster-induced events are not new. It is crucial to understand how modern communities with widely different living standards and security flaws, both in the old and new testaments, have reacted to and devised alternatives to these situations (Skoggard, 2019). There is a brief historical overview on the role of anthropology in climate change, which illustrates some serious concerns about this global issue.

Historical perspective 

The involvement of anthropologists in social trends and behaviors highlights how humans communicate with their surroundings in the Holocene, and has accomplished so. A key constituent of this work derives from the subfield of archaeological known as anthropology. Archeologists are researching historical places, habitats, and territories to learn how previous communities have developed their living standards, interrelated with each other, and adjusted to transition. Given the substantial temperature changes in past climates, by taking a look at this archeological record, crucial lessons can be drawn on how communities react to rising temperatures. 

One of the main contributions of archeologists working in conjunction with palaeoclimatologists is the recording of decadal and century-scale mega-droughts in various regions of the globe that caused the region-wide destruction of civilization, the destruction of sites and the ecosystem monitoring of ecological farming shelters (Kaniewski, Van Campo & Weiss, 2012; Barnes et al., 2013). In comparison, climate changes of limited severity produced various modes of adjustment. For example, in many cases, there were culturally open forums for discussion for catastrophic circumstances, as agricultural production cuts were changeable (Barnes et al., 2013). These research shows how diverse evolutionary pathways can be used in reaction to global climate change (Weiss & Bradley, 2001).

The interaction between cultures and their habitats has long been a subject of research in the sub-discipline of anthropology in terms of environmental, concentrating on more specific time frames. This sub-field illustrated the trusting relationship between heritage and culture, and highlighted the similar junctions between the environment and the social and concepts were developed. In terms of environment, anthropologists have seen how societies view meteorological trends through folklore and painting, and how they adapt to them through their farming and healthcare procedures (Strauss & Orlove, 2003). They also highlighted how diverse groups such as growers, policy leaders, urban citizens and environmental proponents build opposing theoretical frameworks about the connections between climatic conditions and landscape characteristics (Mathews et al., 2009).

Case Studies based on Climate Change and Cultural approach

• Initial Climate and Culture Case Studies

Archaeology as well as anthropology of the environment provide the necessary philosophical underpinning for modern cultural climate and societal research. Archeologists have a strong tradition of researching climate change and its possible connection to cultural dimensions on a profound geological timescale; perseverance and deterioration, absorption characteristics, and social hierarchy (Rosen, 2007; Crate, 2011). Likewise, the well-established sub-fields of anthropology in terms of environment, namely human ecology, political ecology, cultural materialism and cultural ecology, also have a tradition of such work (Crate, 2011). Multiple researchers have contributed in this field.  Among them, Barth (1969) is a significant influence on culture and conservation of ecological boundaries. Several those previous notional models is focused on the philosophies of reason and impartiality in the scientific method. Some instances involve neo-evolutionist White's (1959)"culturology" which established sequential phases of cultural growth centered on measurable energy usage; Harris (1979 ) defined cultural materialism as the product of continuously maximizing human efforts in ecological adaptation; and Steward (1972) introduced cultural ecology theory, concentrating on the interconnectedness and relationship between society and the environment as an impetus for technological progress and cultural transformation.

• Emergences of Studies in the domain of Anthropology and Climate Change 

If experimental projections are to be trusted, shifts in the climate would be more severe, more rapid, and larger than historically observed in recorded existence. As heavy rains, burning flames, mass starvation and confrontations have already occurred, and there is already a prosperity of anthropological understanding of how people handle these interruptions in their livelihoods. Though these issues may not be recent, the climate change debate and discussion, with its scientific, cultural, social, and moral aspects, is a pretty new emergence on the international arena, and it is shifting how community groups are presented and comprehended. This should be impossible for the anthropologists to ignore (Milton 2008). 

Ethnographic perspective of Climate change

The anthropological insights on climate change are influenced by the approach of field research which determines the field in several ways. Anthropologists generally perform long-term study in a single group or collection of communities, slowly establish confidence relationships with study participants, effectively engage daily activities, connections and discussions among participants, and conduct interviews. Through such types of observations, anthropologists have come to attention how diverse populations, especially indigenous communities in the Arctic (Crate & Nuttall, 2016), coastal inhabitants in Papua New Guinea (Lipset, 2011), and peasants in the Andes (Orlove, Chiang & Cane, 2000), experience and adapt to changes in climate, environment, and biodiversity. This place-based understanding is not idealized by anthropologists. They understand that they are not uniform, confined, fixed or even all-knowing groups. And therefore they assert that regional findings of climate change and regional techniques formed to address those alterations can contribute to contextually relevant comprehension of the implications of climate change and therefore, notify useful guidelines.

Crate (2011) emphasizes the significance of ethnographic approaches for climate analysis in the review article on climate and culture, since through "being there," ethnographers will use this "methodological force to extend social perceptions further than the region to the plurality of actors and in a multitude of scales" (Crate & Nuttall, 2016; Crate, 2011). Furthermore, ethnography is a way of resolving the threat of climate change by investigating cultural trait in the sociocultural settings. Anthropologists scrutinize the integrated links between climate belief systems and cultural identity, individuality, and policy making through ethnography. Ethnographies explain multiple ways in which individuals within a society will adapt to climate change based on income, education, gender and so on (Shaffer, 2017). Owing to these secret linkages, the initial pledge of science-driven regional solutions to rule the environmental resources has proved counterproductive. Rayner (2003) and Crate and Nuttall (2016) showed the value of looking at climate and environment debate whereas Ogilvie and Pálsson (2003) chose Norse sagas to express weather patterns experiences in Iceland. Meltzoff (2012) reveals the significance of "empathic ethnography" in understanding the meaning of the variations of environmental change that she experienced back and forth the South American coast. For instance, changing demographics in Wyoming and Europe during the Holocene or other varied incarnations of human behaviors to a changing environment in various parts of the globe (Fiske et al., 2014). 

• Models and Tools related to anthropological approach

Anthropologists relate mechanisms from personal beliefs to existing cultural involvement and attach them to other categories of consumers at different scales such as temporal and spatial, based on governance. The creation of computational and computer-based frameworks is one way to connect these multi-scalar mechanisms and to truly comprehend the relationships between market, climate and human well-being. Several other model construction takes substantial concerted efforts from both the social and natural approaches of sciences societies. For the most part, even so, the conventional conservative and natural science models for climate change research were ad hoc, with sociologists and philosophers of science working independently to build and comprehend remedies to a particular issue. In such case scenarios (Lahsen, 2005), anthropologists investigated the potential of modeling techniques by physical researchers and showed that the association between the world of the model and the world of scientifically testable truth can be somewhat disentangled. 

Lessons from the past work

Anthropologists have discovered several analogs under exceptional circumstances for the actions of the human race, which offer valuable insights into the current situation of mankind with climate change. While some scholars (Fiske et al., 2014) proposed that the Anthropocene may have created "no parallel" environmental circumstances for the earth, anthropologists have identified several analogs for the actions of human beings under dynamic circumstances in the form of ecological environments that are unparalleled in the history. Human beings and other related species have adapted and changed their habitats for more than two million years, evolved successful and ineffective ways of adaptation, and learned quite a bit regarding their climate. Archeology, biological and biomedical anthropology, and professions beyond anthropology, such as geography , history, environmental engineering, etc., have over an exceptionally long period of time brought together a really interconnected human history and its environmental conditions. 

Conclusion

Combining disciplines characterized by multiple techniques and philosophies is never easy. A substantial chunk of anthropological research is done on timespans that are smaller than the decadal, centennial, millennial and prolonged durations that climate scientists study. Their emphasis on in-depth field studies makes it very hard for them all to function across wide geographical areas, but still these are the measurements upon which most trustable climate model findings are found. In addition, the social and environmental peculiarities of global climate change are intimidating for most, maybe not all, of the living organism populations in the world. There is no "magic bullet" justification or remedy for this intrinsic ambiguity. Only through knowledge integration, from national to international, and through cooperation and collaboration all over geographical, stakeholder, and geostrategic / socio-economic scales will we be possible to attain interpretations and figure out ways ahead. Thus, the pivotal role of Anthropology is in attempt to bring about such a groundbreaking era through its distinctive ability to recognize, track, define, characterize and converse the human dilemma.