The current ecological crisis has led to a critical review of anthropology's mainstream paradigms and to questions over its contribution to environmental policy-making and the political aims of environmental movements. This article argues that anthropology is valuable in two ways for those attempting to build a more sustainable society. Firstly, it produces critical information and knowledge about the meanings of pre-modern and modern human attitudes towards the natural environment. Secondly, and more importantly, by providing methodological guidelines for studying relations between culture and the environment, anthropology allows us to understand these relations as the outcome of mutually contradictory processes of producing meaning one rooted in the unequal transformation and appropriation of nature, the other opposed to a consumerist vision of culture. At the same time, by apprehending culture as a historical process, anthropology is capable of overcoming the failures of radical cultural relativism which have so far limited the discipline's participation in environmental policy making.
Ecological anthropology; Culture-nature relations; Sustainable development