Computers, Society, and Nature

I attended two talks last week, both generally dealing with the same subject matter: mechanisms of cultural adaptation or change. One was Michael Bollig’s exploration of east African the disappearance and reemergence of pastoralism, and the other was presented by geographer Robert McLeman’s presentation, drawing on the use of the 1930’s Dust Bowl as a model for predicting human adaptations to future, more severe and/or extreme climate change.

McLeman is a geographer from the University of Ottawa, whose fieldwork looks at historical migration of farmers from Okalahoma to northern California during the worst drought years of the pre-war 30’s, and an exploration of why some families decided to stay and attempt to eke out a living on the plains, while others left for greener (literally) pastures the first chance they had. McLeman’s examples invoked strong parallels to Jared Diamond’s more pervasive ideas, as espoused in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. McLeman pointed to several other historical and contemporary examples of humans choosing to live in a place of recognized – and at times, incredibly conspicuous – environmental instability, not including an expected reference to Diamond’s outline of the Easter Islands, but rather the more local southern California coast hillsides (prone to erosion and wildfires) and New Orleans, where the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina aptly advertised potential effects of setting up residence below sea level. McLeman underlined the seeming irrationality of humans continually attempting to live in such areas, even after enduring disastrous effects in the past and knowing such calamities will inevitably happen again. I enjoyed his perfunctory attitude towards future climate change, in which he stated that extreme weather is going to happen, without a doubt; many people are reluctant to make such confident assertions. But the lecture concluded with a vague and markedly unassertive reiteration of the fact that humans are adaptable, and that environmental refugees will become a more and more commonplace factor of the twenty-first century world. I wondered his specific ideas for redress of or reaction to global climate change, as none were mentioned.

Bollig’s talk, as thoroughly outlined below by merle, focused on the changes in productive practices of a society in Kenya generally referred to as “pastoralist.” Bollig focused on the fact that anthropologists usually like to understand social change in a Darwinian time-frame – that is, the reconfiguration of cultural worldview (and the way this metamorphosis is manifested on the landscape) does not typically happen quickly. The Pokot, however, appear to exemplify rapid change, modifying their mode of production three times within a two-century period. What accounts for this change? Why the need to change? Someone in the audience suggested that all societies rely on more than one productive practice, so that for example, in times of drought, they have a back-up plan, thus perhaps the Pokot simply favoured one over the other at different times, but did not actually undergo any cultural change. Bollig, however, did not buy this as a strong enough reason for the Pokot’s alternating pastoralism/non-pastoralism history.

These two scholars’ area of inquiry is pertinent to today’s climate – literally and figuratively. Applied anthropology is one sub-field which draws on such fieldwork and research to work to enact change, or at least help in policy-making, development work, and so forth, but such work is obviously not limited to the one discipline. Nonetheless, such fields, no matter the specific categorization, are contentious; application seems to be equated with “intervention” and “fixing,” both dangerous words in the minds of most cultural relativists. But relativism, in some ways, becomes a term of moot significance in the era of global change. And application and advocacy go hand-in-hand with the precautionary principle here, as uncertainty is often presented as reasons for not acting. However, I will save that lengthy debate for another time. For now, in searching for answers and calls to action in McLeman’s and Bollig’s inevitably, necessarily inconclusive presentations, I reiterate merle slightly in declaring the need for further research on the mechanisms of cultural change and adaptation – in theory and practice alike.