In “History and Scope of Environmental Anthropology,” published in the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Anthropology (2016), we provided a historical chronology of the development of environmental anthropology and raised a question: Were the diverse approaches and foci within environmental anthropology moving the field toward a new synthesis, commensurate with the complexity of human–environment interactions in a world of accelerated and interconnected changes (Brondizio, Adams, Fiorini 2016)? Under the umbrella of environmental anthropology, our historical review situated the co-existence of various approaches apparent in the mid-1990s with overlapping but distinct orientations: ecosystem-oriented, political economy-oriented, historical landscape-oriented, and cognitive and symbolic-oriented. From there, we observed a potential movement toward a synthesis that would reflect the new types of questions emerging from increasingly complex environmental and climate change problems. This was a period where the larger interdisciplinary field of environmental research was expanding fast in search of more holistic and integrated approaches, as expressed in the emergence of fields such as environmental social sciences, social-ecological systems, human dimensions of global environmental change, and sustainability sciences, among others.

With “synthesis” we are referring to conceptualizations that recognize the multiple and interrelated facets of human–nature interactions and reflect an effort towards generative and cumulative knowledge through collaborations across fields. The emergence of environmental anthropology itself indicated that such a synthesis was sought since the mid-1990s, when the term began to be used, alongside the establishment of the American Anthropological Association’s section Anthropology and Environment. The creation of this section in 1992 reflected another effort to bring together a spectrum of foci that had arisen and often engaged in fraught debates since the mid-twentieth century, particularly around ecological anthropology.

Following decades of contentious debates and intellectual “turns” in anthropology—which Eric Wolf described in a 1989 AAA presidential address (like others before and after him) as a project of continuous reinvention and intellectual deforestation instead of cumulative knowledge—by the late 1990s the environmental anthropology community found relative balance in considering cultural, biological, political-economic, and historical factors in explaining diverse human–environmental phenomena without resorting to determinism. Yet, how far the richly diverse orientations in anthropology could collectively move the field forward remained a challenge—then and now.

At the same time, there was a convergence from various fields, often based in the natural sciences, which studied the complexity of human-environmental issues and profound global environmental change. Two trends illustrate that convergence: the articulation of global change research programs and the development of coupled social-ecological systems frameworks.

The first trend went back to the early 1980s, when international research programs emerged to address concerns about the global effects of human activities on the environment. These programs developed along distinct lines of inquiry: climate, Earth systems, ecology and biodiversity, and human dimensions of environmental change. By the early 1990s, these programs began to converge around socio-biophysical-ecological themes such as land use, urbanization, health, climate adaptation, carbon, environmental values and valuation, among others. Efforts to create bridges among the epistemic communities dedicated to these themes led to the development of conceptual frameworks (see Ostrom 2010 for an example and for a distinction between frameworks, theories, and models) to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. Such shared conceptual frameworks provide the intellectual conditions for diverse theoretical, methodological, and rhetorical approaches, which underlie collaborative efforts such as those organized around environmental and climate assessments. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), for instance, has a common conceptual framework focusing on processes driving human-nature relationships, which also recognizes different worldviews and terminologies about such relationships (Diaz et al. 2015). Approved by the plenary of countries, this conceptual framework represented a synthesis bringing together diverse disciplinary knowledge and has been the main guiding tool for all assessments carried out by the platform and its widely-used analysis from local to global scales (e.g., IPBES 2019).

The second, and overlapping, trend which took shape in the 1990s was the multiple efforts to conceptualize social-ecological systems as coupled and intertwined, and thus analytically inseparable. These efforts have spread and are now applied by existing and emerging international networks of scholars, practitioners, and funding programs.

Anthropologists laid a good deal of the groundwork for these two trends. The core ideas of social-ecological systems, for instance, have roots in efforts to integrate culture, population, and environment in cultural ecology, ecological anthropology, ethnobiology, and historical and political ecology.  Environmental anthropology had, and continues to have,  all the necessary pieces—the cultural, ecological, biological, political, historical, cognitive, phenomenological, ontological and symbolic dimensions—of human–environment puzzles. The inclusive scope of its research related to the environment should have positioned anthropology at the forefront of efforts to address increasingly complex questions about human–environment interactions and climate change, from local to global scales. However, the strength of environmental anthropology’s diverse approaches and questions is also a limitation when it comes to articulating its contributions beyond anthropological circles and within the broader interdisciplinary landscape of human–environment studies and politics.

Our hope is that the field will expand its efforts to engage with, and demonstrate the relevance of, anthropological research to the complex and intertwined crises of social inequities, climate change, and biodiversity loss. This will require more attention to questions that resonate beyond anthropology and to ways of communicating anthropological research that engage larger audiences. Anthropologists should be both confident and humble in playing a larger role in these conversations.