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Environmental (in)justice

Anthropologists at SAI study environments and environmental problems caused by processes that include colonization, imperialism, industrialization, extraction and species transfers.

Tent by a lake, where there is an extractive site behind the mountain in the distance

The image is from Austertana/Juovlavuotna, in Finnmark, Norway, by a nationally protected salmon fjord. It shows the mountain Giemaś where exctractive mining company Elkem is currently about to expand into valuable Sámi reindeer pasture, causing local and political controversy. Photo by Marianne Lien

Studying relationships between humans and the many different, changing environments they inhabit, environmental anthropology is one of the fastest growing sub-disciplines within anthropology.

Anthropologists at SAI study environments and environmental problems as the result of intertwined histories of human and more-than human. These are processes that cannot be grasped by any discipline alone and environmental anthropology therefore seeks to develop research methods that are truly interdisciplinary. As such, the field draws increasingly on collaborations with both the natural sciences and the humanities to develop new frameworks for understanding the complexities of environmental problems.

We have chosen to highlight (in)justice in the title of this research field because we recognize that studying environmental issues often involves addressing harm, inequality and contestation and therefore cannot be grasped apart from questions of politics and rights.

Our research concerns both traditional political ecology issues such as land rights, commons, property, extractivism and dispossession, and more recent themes such as toxicity and disease, multi-species studies, the underground, more-than-human landscapes and domestication practices.

We are also engaged in research on alternatives to the ongoing environmental crises, such as environmental activism, rewilding, regenerative agriculture and ecologically sustainable and experimental practices, which critically interrogate or challenge the contemporary global economic and ecological order.