ANTH 9 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Flightless Bird, Siltation, Habitat Destruction

• School: Irvine Valley College
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH 9
• Professor: Clifford

Document Summary

It is commonly thought that preindustrial societies lived in balance with nature through the development of particular cultural institutions and customs. There can be do doubt that people whose very survival is tied to their natural settings are quite knowledgeable about the world around them. Important to draw a distinction between sustainable yields and an absence of any impact on the environment. Just because groups have minimum impact o their environment is not sufficient to call them natural conservationists. Small groups in resource-rich environments can easily maintain sustainable harvests: small groups of hunters can be wasteful but still have a negligible effect on prey populations. Population size has a great effect on the outcome of human activity: a high population density has a greater environmental impact, even with the same subsistence practices, than a low one. Popular image of natural conservationists does not match historical, ethnographic, and archaeological reality.