This week we discussed two
interesting articles that promoted further anthropological thought as well as
the idea of scale when talking about global climate change issues. One article
talked about the REDD plus program and the other discussed the scale of Climate
Change as a variable; focusing on the main scope of response in Egypt.
In
the REDD by Pamela McElwee, she pointed out the many barriers to implementing
the REDD plus program when rights are in question. The general picture here was
that the program would save trees thus create more carbon absorption around the
world. With that said political implements were questioned as they disregarded
the ethnic group who lived there and took advantage of the old land tenure.
In
the other article by Jessica Barnes, both scale and agency were put into
question. Often times in places like Egypt, people would often use scale global
models to fit a smaller problem. Often times issues are more of a result of
local issues rather than global ones. The idea of meetings here also took a
blow because often times people present the big picture data, which ultimately
is irrelevant when figuring out local issues. As a result in Egypt, they were
trying to tackle a problem revolving the entire basin area when in fact it was
the rainfall and nile source water in Egypt that needed to be addressed.
Looking
at both of these cases I think it’s safe to say that both stress the importance
of looking at issues on a local level as well as global. As seen in these, it
was especially important to include those concepts of anthropology as there
seemed to be an overall translucent connection between the higher ups and the
middle level class people (culture, practice, tradition, concern, etc.). Very
interesting reads for me despite having not looked into anthropology very much.
No comments:
Post a Comment