What are some of the important issues and theoretical debates in ecological anthropology today?
First, there is the problem that has plagued the discipline since its beginnings: It is still very difficult to determine which human behaviors might be adaptive and which are probably more random behavioral traits that don’t really serve any function. Second, there has been a tendency for researchers to study either small populations or whole ecosystems. These require different analytical tools and yield different-sometimes contradictory-results. Until we develop a new way of linking our explanatory notions across scales of analysis, we are stuck with only a few pieces of a very complex puzzle. Both of these problems, incidentally, are not unique to ecological anthropology. They also continue to be very sticky problems within the traditional fields of ecology. There is still a large gap between population and ecosystem level theory. Another problem is that a lot of research has been done on how people conceptualize or think about their environments, but this has not been adequately li
