The essays in this Fieldsights dossier approach the contemporary climate crisis and the conceptions of humanity it evokes through focused histories of environmental anthropology itself. Though some of the current terminology might be new—multispecies ethnography, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), geo-ontologies, climate migration—anthropology has studied human-environment relations since its inception, while closely entangled with earth sciences and natural history, as well as imperial formations. As Anand Pandian puts it in his essay, “our field has long insisted that there is no way to understand anything about people anywhere without paying close attention to their actual circumstances,” taking in “an infinity of details about all the other human and nonhuman elements, living and non-living.” These essays further ask how past paradigms deployed by “environmental anthropology”—under that name or others—might condition the present state of the discipline, as well as shed new light on contemporary techno-socioeconomic-biological-geological conjunctures.

The essays are distilled from a conference at Yale University convoked by the History of Anthropology Review in late March 2025. It brought together anthropologists, environmental scientists, and historians of natural and Native science to consider the overlooked insights and toxic legacies of past paradigms. The disciplinary heterogeneity was deliberate. As anthropology constantly wrestles with its past, perspectives from outside the discipline can bring unexpected views to the past 150 years of environmental anthropology, throwing new relief on a world order eroding and reconfiguring itself.¹

The talks, ten of which are condensed and published here, ranged across a broad chronological sweep. They address three rough temporal blocks—overlapping historical strata in jagged array. A first period between 1870 and 1935 included academic anthropology’s emergence and its early concerns with geography, diffusionism, and geopolitics, and the tensions between ecological insight, the theorization of “culture,” and colonial ideologies and practices. A second period, roughly from 1935 to 1975, embraces the complex political entanglements (post-colonial as well as neo-colonial) of mid-century frameworks such as cultural ecology, cybernetics, and development theory. And a third layer, from roughly 1975 to now, embeds shifts in approach from the rise of symbolic and structuralist anthropology to their reflexive transformations.

Many neglected or rejected approaches—such as studies of diffusion, adaptation, and cultural ecology—are marred by their association with colonialism and racial determinism. Some authors explore these shadowy legacies. Elaine Ayers confronts the romantic image set by ethnobotany’s founding fathers with its extractive, imperialist underpinnings. Josh Sterlin muses upon the ambivalent re-appropriation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), some of it provided by canonical ethnographical works, in wilderness training offered to U.S. city-dwellers.

Other essays refocus earlier moments for contemporary contexts. Rediscovering the anthropological themes of nineteenth-century anarchist geographers, Federico Ferretti proposes a continuity of critical concerns from these radical thinkers to today. Mike Degani takes Mauss’s reflections on seasonal variation among the Inuit as a springboard for a wider anthropology of modes, fitted to the mutated seasons of a warming planet. Sophie Chao shows how the histories lived by local activists illuminate the layers of history at work in the study of plantations.

Other essays examine the relationship between the social and natural sciences—vexed but necessary for taking on the complexities of human-caused environmental change: Eduardo Brondizio, writing here with Ryan Adams and Stefano Fiorini, updates their historical overview (Brondizio et al. 2016), noting both promising initiatives and missed opportunities for connecting environmental sciences to anthropologies of human motivations and action. Deborah Coen asks whether a science of “influence” might allow for better access to the combined human-and-natural processes shaping climate than “adaptation.” Reporting from her work with geomorphologists and others in the Bengal Delta, Megnaa Mehtta observes how past projects of environmental improvement wreak muted havoc on contemporary politics and scramble or defer accountability.

We might think our interdisciplinary and cross-historical encounters as a version of what Marisol de la Cadena has called an “uncommons”: a way of conceptualizing the co-presence of divergent modes of encountering the universe, a world of many worlds (de la Cadena 2020, de la Cadena and Blaser 2018). In this case the “worlds” include multiple disciplinary and historical approaches to the earth, humans, and natures-cultures, overlapping in a dissonant “ecotone,” a space of tense encounter between living communities (Clements 1904). Individually, and taken together, these essays ask how such not-quite-meetings can co-inhabit and thrive in academic spaces—whose secular convictions were highlighted and challenged in Mayanthi Fernando’s reflections here on the “more-than-natural” theological or sacred conceptions which inform natural relations for most of the planet’s inhabitants.

During the conference, such questions took on a reflexive intensity. While we discussed histories of soils and oils, beavers and botanists, gods and measures, we asked about the kinds of environments our own research, writing, and teaching depend on and create. What would an environmental history of anthropology itself look like, mapping changing paradigms onto changing global orders and evolving regimes of subsistence and energy?

And what about the environment of the university? How might our dependencies and actions upon this nutritive milieu be changing under intensified political and financial pressures? This was the first conference many of us attended after Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, amidst rising governmental attacks on immigrants and foreign students, on campus dissent and DEI, on federal science and health funding and on environmental regulations. Participants sought wider perspective on these shocks, one audience member noting in discussion: “Our students are scared, they want to understand what’s happening: It’s becoming clear that the political crisis and the environmental crisis are the same.” This fusion of political and ecological destruction, however, has long been part of Indigenous experience: As Kyle Whyte argues, “anthropogenic climate change is an intensified repetition of anthropogenic environmental change inflicted on Indigenous peoples via colonial practices that facilitated capitalist industrial expansion” (Whyte 2017, 156).

Much recent anthropology, in a decolonizing vein, has challenged the illusions of liberalism: its claims to defend equality, freedom, and universal rights while resting on systems of race, class, and gender exclusion. Yet with the American importation of Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy,” liberalism’s hopes, however compromised, receive renewed appreciation, even nostalgia. As participants criticized the limiting structures of the university, they also expressed deep care for its ideals, its environments of shared learning, and the lifelong relationships and “mutual aid” it can foster.

Environmental anthropology appears in these essays as a deeply sedimented, protean, and unfinished project, as difficult as it is necessary. Plantations, inequalities, reckless “modernization” and imperial legacies still shape our worlds, in our patterns of habitation and consumption and in the institutions that employ us (Jensen 2026). But we also hear living histories of survival, resistance, and alignments of seemingly opposed, dissonant ways of knowing. Possibilities remain for partial syntheses, tactical holisms, and novel alliances across scientific and more-than-human, more-than-natural worlds. These essays are offered as a wider invitation to critique past errors and imagine more livable futures.