The Give and Take of Sustainability

Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on Tradeoffs

Michelle Hegmon

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781107078338
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108166720
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sustainability strives to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future, but increasingly recognizes the tradeoffs among these many needs. Who benefits? Who bears the burden? How are these difficult decisions made? Are people aware of these hard choices? This timely volume brings the perspectives of ethnography and archaeology to bear on these questions by examining case studies from around the world. Written especially for this volume, the essays by an international team of scholars offer archaeological and ethnographic examples from the southwestern United States, the Maya region of Mexico, Africa, India, and the North Atlantic, among other regions. Collectively, they explore the benefits and consequences of growth and development, the social costs of ecological sustainability, and tensions between food and military security.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Multiple Perspectives on Tradeoffs
• 2 Diversity, Reciprocity, and the Emergence of Equity-Inequity Tradeoffs
• 3 Modeling Tradeoffs in a Rural Alaska Mixed Economy: Hunting, Working, and Sharing in the Face of Economic and Ecological Cha ge
• 4 Trading off Food and Military Security in Contact-Era New Guinea
• 5 Will Agricultural Technofixes Feed the World? Short- and Long-Term Tradeoffs of Adopting High-Yielding Crops
• 6 Tradeoffs in Pre-Columbian Maya Water Management Systems: Complexity, Sustainability, and Cost
• 7 Growth and Inter-Generational Tradeoffs: Archaeological Perspectives from the Mimbres Region of the US Southwest
• 8 Vulnerability to Food Insecurity: Tradeoffs and Their Consequences
• 9 Tradeoffs in Coast Salish Social Action: Balancing Autonomy, Inequality, and Sustainability
• 10 Tradeoffs and Human Well-Being: Achieving Sustainability in the Faroe Islands
• 11 Household- vs. National-Scale Food Storage
• 12 Some Analytical Tradeoffs of Talking about Tradeoffs: On Perspectives Lost in Estimating the Costs and Benefits of Inequali y
• Index