Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes

You looking to find the "Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes" Good news! You can purchase Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

   

Product Description

In this collection of recent essays, Andrew P. Vayda argues for a pragmatic approach to explanation and explanation-oriented research in social and environmental sciences. He supports his arguments with causal analyses of both human actions, such as cutting down trees and fighting over resources, and environmental changes, such as forest fires; and he voices his opposition to methodological and ethnographic holism and the notion that explanation can be achieved by deploying theories rather than by obtaining evidence of the causal histories of concrete actions and events. Vayda is critical of much recent scholarship_in such areas as political ecology, local knowledge studies, discourse studies, and evolutionary human behavioral ecology_for its indifference to questions of evidence and methodology and its failure to give proper consideration to multiple and alternative possible causes of whatever is being explained. He also discusses the use and misuse of evidence and generalizations, the payoffs and pitfalls of moving from one level of analysis to another, the dos and don'ts in interdisciplinary research, the uses of statistics, and the importance of being clear about objects of explanation. This original and challenging work makes sense of the future of ecological anthropology and will be of interest to researchers in the social and environmental sciences in general.

Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes Review

This book is a set of essays, updated, that Andrew P. Vayda has written over several years. All deal with the question of assigning cause in studies of human ecology. Ecology is notoriously a horribly difficult science in this regard, because, as the saying goes, "everything is connected to everything else." Everything seems to be enmeshed in complex feedback loops with multiple causal vectors. This has led to some brilliant analysis, but also to some very sloppy thinking, especially the use of big, vague "explanatory" theories. It is these latter that Vayda forthrightly attacks. This book is really the only one doing so, and as such should be required reading for sages and students.
Vayda prefers to look at events (however defined) and develop causal chains by meticulous analysis, looking first at the most immediate causes and then working out to more remote ones. As he says, this could take us back to the Big Bang, if not earlier, but he is willing to stop well short of that. Too often, human ecologists find a cause at one level and are satisfied. For instance, explaining huge fires in Indonesia in 1997-98 generally stopped short by coupling widespread drought with logging that was uncontrolled because of government corruption. Vayda points out that over 40% of illegally and poorly logged forests did NOT burn; why not? Clearly some other things are happening.
Vayda is most concerned about human ecologists who assume one thing has to be the "real" cause. We have political ecologists who assume it's all politics, pseudo-Darwinians who assume it's all evolved ability to maximize calorie returns, culturists who assume it's all culture, and so on. Clearly, in such a fiendishly complex field as ecology, no one causal factor or bundle of factors is likely to buy much of the variance.
Thus, Vayda advocates the classic "method of multiple working hypotheses" (from T. C. Chamberlin) and a process called "abduction" which involves (in this formulation) open-minded seeking for all possible factors and then doing detective work on which ones are involved in a case, working from proximate backward.
One of Vayda's most valuable and important cautions concerns reifying jargon terms and giving them a horrible life of their own (see also C. Wright Mills: THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION). "Extreme current examples of [this] are the many claims involving 'globalization,' which...has transmogrified from being a label for certain modern-world changes that call for explanation to being freely invoked as the process to which the changes are attributed" (p. 24). Well said indeed. I would add "neoliberalism," "resilience," "governmentality," and quite a few other words to the list of jargon terms that have been reified and lost meaning in the process.
A cautionary note is that one must work back far enough. In regard to political ecology, Vayda may be a bit too dismissive because of stopping a bit too far short. We need not go back to the Big Bang, but we do need to go back to government policy, multinational firms, and so on. Real Darwinism has its uses too; explaining why people like sugar can't avoid getting into our built-in taste for it.
Vayda is sometimes a bit uncautious about following his own rules, though. He dismisses claims that sacred groves protect biodiversity by reporting a couple of anecdotal cases where they didn't. Well, there are thousands of sacred groves out there that are right by villages and yet are and have been carefully protected, and there were many more before western influences caused the groves to be denounced as "superstition" and such. I have visited dozens of such groves. Here and elsewhere, Vayda seems to assume that people don't really save or manage things very often or very well. In fact, people often do. When they do and when they don't is a fascinating question, needing an open mind and a painstaking "abduction" process for each case. This is where Vayda's advice is most needed, and where assuming a particular outcome on the basis of precommitment to a particular theory is most limiting.
So, beware, but the point is to use Vayda's strictures even to evaluate his own work. His counsel is desperately needed in this age of jargon and grand theory.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes ...