Adaptation, Culture Scale, and the Environmental Crisis.

¶ … Adaptation, Culture Scale, and the Environmental Crisis. The article deals with the important issue of how the scale of a cultures dictates how that culture will adapt to its environment, and the role that this adaptation plays in damaging the environment and depleting resources. This interesting article begins with the following telling quote. "Nor are those cultures that we might consider higher in general evolutionary standing necessarily more perfectly adapted to their environments than lower.

Many great civilizations have fallen in the last 2,000 years, even in the midst of material plenty, while the Eskimos tenaciously maintained themselves in an incomparably more difficult habitat. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." This quote raises some of the most salient points that are brought out further in the article. First, it notes that the scale of the culture and the concentration of social power have very little to do with the longevity of a civilization on an evolutionary timescale.

Second, the quote brings to mind the scale of resource depletion and environmental degradation that accompany large and powerful cultures. Simply put, large, powerful cultures have often depleted their natural resources, and polluted their environment to the extent that their civilization has collapsed. The authors' initially delve into the issues of cultural evolution and adaptation. They note that it is commonly believed that higher levels of cultural development has resulted in greater security, efficiency of the use of energy and freedom from the limitations of the environment.

They then go on to argue that this is not necessarily true, as more complex cultural systems often become maladaptive. Further, they note that with increasing cultural evolution, the non-human sectors of the environment (sectors that exclude humans and domestic plants and animals) have gradually been reduced. Next, Sahlins and Service examine the character and scope of the world's current environmental crisis. They observe that the environmental crisis is "a deterioration of environmental quality" that is associated with a decrease in the earth's carrying capacity.

This environmental crisis is argued to have resulted from man's intervention in the natural world. The authors then discuss the complexity of the interaction between complex cultural systems and complex environmental systems, and the difficulty in accurately informing the public about the environmental crisis. They discuss the serious environmental crisis in the Soviet Union, where constant industrial expansion resulted in the constant poisoning of the land, air, people and water. Sahlins and Service then examine the role of environmental crisis in cultural change.

Certainly, they argue that earlier cultures have also had dramatic, negative impacts on their environment. They note that the present environmental crisis has a much large scope and scale than environmental crisis's of the past, in addition to being driven by the unique cultural features of our times. The authors then delve into the limits of growth that our current environment can sustain. Sahlins and Service are quick to note that they do not believe that the ultimate physical limit to growth is an ultimate societal problem.

However, they do not that the concept of social, cultural, and physical limits. They note that anthropologists have traditionally promoted worldwide economic growth. However, recent evidence suggests that development that emphasizes sustainability in concert with social equity is much more desirable than the unbridled and unchecked development that has occurred in the past. The authors then go on to examine environmental commissions.

They note that The Global 2000 Report to the President of the United States was a fairly conservative estimate of trends in population, resources, and environment on a global scale. However, this conservative report still contained many serious warnings about the future. The report noted the potential for water shortages, serious deforestation, increases in population, deterioration of agricultural lands, poverty, human suffering, and international tension. The report was quickly followed by several others, including the Brundtland Commission (headed by the UN), and the British This Common Inheritance.

The authors then delve into the roots of the environmental crisis. This includes the examination of the ideological basis of capitalism, the role of unregulated self-interest, land degradation of the Mediterranean.