Environmental Anthropology, Crisis, and Common Ground

When the first edition of this volume was published in 2017, we opened the Introduction by situating the text in the era many have dubbed the Anthropocene, a period marked by humans’ large and active imprint on the global environment. While debates over this term are ongoing, the environmental changes it seeks to name have only deepened since that time ( Davis et al. 2019 ; International Union of Geological Sciences 2024 ). A new report from the World Meteorological Organization indicates the hottest ten years on record have all occurred within the last decade ( World Meteorological Organization 2025 ). Climate change, along with rapid biodiversity loss and increasing pollution, has already reshaped life on Earth in profound ways. As the contributions to this handbook demonstrate, humans are responding to these changes in multiple and complex ways. As a discipline concerned primarily with human–environment interaction, environmental anthropologists recognize that we are now working within a pressure cooker of rapid environmental damage that is forcing behavioral and cultural changes around the world. As we see in the breadth of subjects presented in this volume, these environmental challenges have inspired renewed foci on traditional topics such as food procurement, ethnobiology, and spiritual ecology, as well as a broad new range of subjects such as disaster and resilience, nonhuman rights, movements for environmental justice, and environmental education. These studies are illustrated by ethnographic case studies that blend “traditional” anthropological methods with innovative, transdisciplinary, and engaged approaches in pursuit of a more ecologically holistic understanding of the human–environment relationship – and perhaps even solutions to environmental degradation.