MR. CASAGRANDE & HIS CAREER

Tell us about your environmental background. When did you know that you wanted to pursue this field as a career? How did you settle upon Ecological Anthropology?

It was a very long process. As a child I gained a love and respect for the outdoors through activities like hiking and fishing. By the time I was ready for college, I had toyed with the idea of majoring in marine biology, but decided to pursue a degree in music, but later switched to engineering, and finally settled on geography. Then, I ended up with a great job as a highway planner for the state of Connecticut. But the whole time I was becoming more and more concerned with environmental issues.

I began to write to my representatives and got involved in local campaigns to protect open space and wetlands, and was eventually appointed to my town wetland commission. I also discovered bird-watching and botany as hobbies. But I was getting more and more frustrated with my job, where I was being forced to make decisions like whether to destroy people's houses to save a few acres of wetlands to build a highway when I didn't really think we needed the highway to begin with. I thought about trying to "fight the system" from within, but finally decided it was futile. In order to be effective at changing a system you are a part of, you have to change your own way of thinking to a point where you become more like that system, which inevitably reduces your zeal for changing it.

I quit my job and went to get a masters degree to learn more about the politics, science, and psychology behind environmental problems. My goal was to take a masters in environmental studies and then go to work for The Nature Conservancy or Greenpeace. But the more I learned about the issues, the more I became fascinated with questions about human nature - what makes us do what we do? Is there really some innate conservation ethic that we lost somewhere during the industrial revolution? Why do some people, but not others, care about endangered species? Is it possible to have an ecologically informed economy?

These types of questions required serious research skills and a theoretical background that was best provided by anthropology, which is the holistic study of human nature in all its forms. I found out about ecological anthropology and found a great program by searching the internet.

What are your long-term and short-term goals that have guided you through your environmental education? Why did you decide to pursue a doctorate?

I'll be honest. I have basically followed the questions that interested me and let the rest fall into place on its own. A Ph.D. program is the only place you have the freedom to pursue deep and complicated questions about human nature, so that's the way I went. I figured I'd worry about what to do with the degree later. Mostly, I've found in my life that if I'm doing what I like, and I work hard at it, great opportunities always turn up.

I've enjoyed anthropological research so much that I've decided I want to continue to do research and teach people - not just what I've learned, but to help them develop the skills they need to figure things out for themselves. That's the only way we'll solve our environmental problems. We need a population of critical thinkers. We don't all have to have Ph.D.s, but we all need to question the motives behind the information that is given to us, and to reflect on why we behave the way we do on a daily basis.

You're set to graduate this fall. What are you career plans and options for after graduation?

There are lots of options. Because I want to teach and do research, I'm starting to apply for faculty positions at colleges and universities. But the competition is absurd. So, I'm also looking into starting a consulting company with a few other social scientists. A lot of organizations like The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and even the World Bank hire consultants with special social science research skills or knowledge of languages or foreign cultures to help implement conservation and sustainable development projects. Consulting is a growing field for Ph.D. graduates because these organizations usually don't need to hire people with such specific skills on a permanent basis and there are far more Ph.D.s being awarded each year than there are faculty positions opening up.

I will also be applying to a few select conservation organizations and government agencies. I have a friend who just received his Ph.D. in anthropology and was hired by Conservation International right away because he did his dissertation research on the Maya in Guatemala and CI is just starting up a big project there. They needed someone who understood the language and the culture to help with the project on a long-term basis. I'll probably qualify for some of these types of jobs because I have researched how indigenous people interact with their environment. But I'm concerned about becoming more of an administrator and having less opportunity to do research in this type of job, so I'm being very selective. If the organization appears to be flexible in its approach, then I'll have the freedom to innovate. If the organization appears to be too rigid about how it wants everyone in the organization to behave and what analytical tools they should or should not use, I won't apply.

What have you been doing professionally in the field? What are the most interesting projects that you've worked on to date?

I started my masters degree at Yale University by focusing on parrot conservation. Methods for estimating parrot populations in order to set international trade laws or sustainable harvesting quotas for the pet trade or just to determine the status of a local population are very poorly understood. My advisor and I worked out a project for which I went to Venezuela for six months and tested several different methods for estimating parrot populations. We published the results in Condor, which is an influential journal of bird ecology. But what became most fascinating to me was how much the local people knew about parrot populations and ecology. I became interested in human-related questions, like why someone would cut down the parrot nests knowing that they would destroy the population. I wanted to know more about human behavior and how conservation could fit with peoples values and needs.

When I came back to the states, I joined a project at the Yale Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems, in which ecologists were studying the possibility of restoring a salt marsh wetland in a low income urban neighborhood. I convinced them to include a social component to see how the project could fit in with the needs of the local community. These researchers were all very busy, and no one had really thought about how to combine the social and natural sciences for such a project, so they hired me to be in charge of the whole project!

We came up with lots of new ideas, so I asked everyone to write about their results, ideas, and how their research was helped by working with people who have very different perspectives. I compiled these into a book, which I edited and published through the university. This was a very rewarding project because I was able to give something to the local community and also advance our knowledge of conservation and restoration projects. A local conservation organization gave me an award, and I think that award means more to me than any of the fellowships or research grants that I've received because it's a direct acknowledgement that I made a positive a difference in people's lives.

Then, of course, there is my doctoral research, for which I am looking specifically at how Tzeltal Maya in Chiapas, Mexico learn and transmit environmental information. This requires collecting and identifying plants, studying how people think and talk about them, the structure of their informational networks, how children learn, and many other factors to eventually determine what ecological characteristics and forms of social organization are most important for influencing environmental knowledge and behavior.

In 1998, I was asked to be one of the co-editors of the Journal of Ecological Anthropology. It's been incredibly time consuming, but this has been more than offset by the opportunity to encourage the direction of the field and interact with some of the foremost thinkers.

Is this where you thought you'd be five years ago? What are your personal and professional goals for the next five years?

Five years ago, yes, because that's about how long I've been in the Ph.D. program. But if someone told me that I might want to be a college professor seven or eight years ago, I would never have believed it. Like I said, I've really just followed the threads that were of interest to me. At one time, I planned out how I wanted my career to progress after reading a "how to" book on the subject. But then I decided I didn't want to be commissioner of the state Department of Transportation after all.

This is a postmodern world - everything is changing rapidly. There is no job security. This morning's social dissent is this afternoon's commodity. My goal is to hold onto my integrity, continually re-evaluate my ideals, and roll with the punches. I plan to work hard, do only what I enjoy, and keep an open mind about whatever opportunities turn up.

THE ACTUAL WORK

What exactly is Ecological Anthropology?

Ecological anthropology is the study of how people interact with their social and biophysical environments. Mostly we try to understand why people behave or think the way that they do. It represents the link between the sciences of ecology and human culture. The core ideas - human adaptation, ecosystems, and environmental change - are similar to those of traditional ecology, but the anthropological notion of culture is added as an additional level of complexity.

It's a very broad field ranging from human evolution over the millennia to the study of how specific hunting, foraging, agricultural or reproductive strategies of contemporary populations are environmental adaptations; to how complex human systems are organized in relation to environmental resources, power struggles, and people's concepts of their own identities; to how people think and talk about plants, animals, habitats, or other resources; to archaeological study of social complexity and resource use in prehistory. It can involve skills like analyzing tape recordings of conversations to find out what environmental themes are important to people, following people and recording their behavior, or archeology.

Some practitioners might choose to live in some exotic indigenous setting and employ complicated mathematical models and computer simulations to explain what they observe. Other researchers might use a library to analyze historical literature and compare it to changes in land use to see how changing values are reflected in the landscape.

On a basic level, what are the three most essential skills that a successful professional in this line of work must possess?

Curiosity, patience, and a willingness to continually reassess your own assumptions about how the world works and your place in it. This final point can be very upsetting for some people. Other skills like statistics, languages, or how to write grant applications can be learned through practice. But you won't make it if you don't start out with the three skills I've mentioned above. Imagine you get a grant to go and study another culture and find out that your way of seeing the world is only one of many possibilities, and it may not be a good one at that. For example, you may consider your environmental values to be noble, but other people may see them as a threat, they simply may not understand them, or (worst of all) they may not care about them. Curiosity and patience can help you deal with such complications.

How do you use computers in Ecological Anthropology? Are there specialty software programs? If so, what are they and what do they do?

We use the typical word processing and spreadsheet software. More and more people are using Power Point to present research results at meetings and to teach classes. We also use statistical packages like Systat, SPSS and SASS. ANTHROPAC is a software package designed by anthropologists and is used to generate interview questionnaires and surveys and analyze results from a variety of anthropological interviewing techniques that are mostly targeted at finding out how knowledge is organized in the mind and across populations. Envivo (pc) and HyerResearch (mac) are two software applications we use for analyzing text from interviews to find general patterns in the way people talk and relationships between ideas and themes.

What are the most challenging aspects of the field?

As I mentioned above, questioning your own cultural values and ideals in juxtaposition with the people you are studying can be unsettling. Also, the fieldwork can involve very difficult conditions; it may even get dangerous, and people can get extremely lonely when living in a different culture. It is also difficult to come face to face every day with poverty and disease that you may not have the ability to alleviate. It's difficult to keep focused on your research and long term goals when faced with such daily difficulties. Then again, I just may not be good at finding comfortable research sites.

Another challenge is keeping up with the literature. Ecological anthropology, like most of anthropology, changes very rapidly and is quite diverse. It's easy to fall behind the current theory and methods. As if the anthropological literature isn't voluminous enough, you also need to read topics outside of anthropology-ecology, biology, philosophy, information theory-to keep on the cutting edge. One of the greatest challenges is to develop the skill for wading through the literature to find the important, relevant ideas without becoming close-minded.

Who are some of the most important figures in the field today?

Today? Hmmmm . . . I look to the last generation for a lot of my inspiration-people like Charles Frake, Harold Conklin, Julian Steward, Marvin Harris, Roy Rappaport and Gregory Bateson. Especially, those who could think across scales from individual psychology to whole cultural systems, like Bateson, and across disciplinary concepts from cycles in forest ecology to human spirituality and cosmology, like Rappaport. These are the people who seem to have the greatest impact on the field.

Lately, the field has become more diverse, but also more specialized, so it's hard to pick just a few important figures. But some folks who are currently doing exciting and rigorous work are Fikret Berkes, Eric Smith, Michael Dove, Bruce Winterhalder, Bonnie McCay, Emilio Moran, Eugene Anderson, Willett Kempton, Norbert Ross, Conrad Kottak, Leslie Sponsel, Donald Hardesty, and the Human Ecosystems Group at the University of Georgia.

EDUCATION INFORMATION & ADVICE

Tell us about your education, including degrees, certificates or any other training. What have you liked and disliked about your environmental studies?

I fell into geography as an undergraduate major because I took a few classes as general electives and thought they were interesting. It turned out to be an incredibly diverse major that exposed me to ideas from how maps shape the way people think about the world to how natural resources affect population distributions. It really opened up a lot of opportunities for me.

I honestly can't say that I've disliked any graduate class I've taken. Every class is what you make of it. If you're really bored with a class, then you're probably not doing a good job of imagining how it fits into the bigger picture. And it always fits into the bigger picture somehow. Regarding environmental studies: go for diversity. Solutions to environmental problems require a diverse tool-kit. Even if you're focusing on endangered species from the perspective of biology or ecology, you should make room for a few courses in law or policy. You need to think about why your research will be used beneficially, misappropriated, or just plain ignored.

What kind of an undergraduate and graduate education would best prepare one for a doctoral program in Ecological Anthropology? Are there undergraduate programs for the field?

As far as I know there are no undergraduate programs specifically in ecological anthropology. A major in anthropology or ecology would be appropriate. A dual major or major/minor in ecology and anthropology would be even better. But also environmental studies, psychology, geography or sociology would fit. It's a very interdisciplinary field. Also, there is no substitute for field experience, be it through a class, a paid position, an internship or volunteer work.

There are only a handful of Ecological Anthropology programs offered in the US. What sets one program apart from the next?

Look for a program with resources and the full support of the department and university that it is housed within. You might look to see if there are only two or three faculty in the ecological or environmental anthropology focus, or whether it involves nearly every faculty member in the department.

Go for a program that offers assistantships or other funding to all or most incoming students. Programs without funding for students have probably failed to get their act together.

E-mail the students, or better yet go and meet with them, and see how they interact with each other.

A program that only has two professors on board (regardless of how famous they may be), has no funding for students, and students don't interact with each other because they are in competition for limited resources are all signs of a program that does not have strong institutional support and will probably not provide a good interactive learning environment. Remember, you will probably learn as much, or more, from your fellow students, and faculty you didn't know about beforehand, than from your major professor.

Some students identify a major professor they want to work with and only focus on that when choosing a school. What happens if that person turns out to be too busy to devote time to you, or is a pariah within his or her own department?

I advise people to look for a coherent well-supported program with vibrant student interaction in addition to a particular professor of interest. Look at the web pages of all the faculty members and you will quickly get a feel for whether you will fit in or not, and whether the professor you're interested in fits in or not. "Fit" is everything.

Also, ecological anthropology is inherently interdisciplinary, so look for a program that encourages you to take classes in other departments and have faculty from other departments on your doctoral committee. Library resources are also crucial. You might skim through the library search engines to see if they subscribe to journals that are relevant to the field.

Your Masters degree is from Yale University. Does graduating from a prestigious school make a big difference in getting accepted into a doctoral program? Why or why not?

Yes, it does - but it's not the only factor to consider. Grades are crucial, no matter the prestige of the institution. Most review committees are also looking at your overall presentation. They seriously consider your life experiences and things you've done that show you will stay committed to graduate education. They will look at your essay and try to determine if you know what you're getting into and how well you fit with their program. They don't want to waste resources on someone who might drop out in a year or two. Their program is evaluated according to retention and graduation rates, so they don't want to take chances.

The average time it takes to get a doctoral degree in anthropology is around six or seven years. That's a HUGE commitment on the part of both the student and the university. Your essay and experience must present you as someone who knows what they're getting into and will stick through the whole program. Also, if you're applying to a program that requires the GRE, take a prep class like the Kaplan course. Do the practice exercises and boost your scores, it can give you an advantage.

Regarding prestige: you can end up miserable at a prestigious institution as well as you can have an incredible learning experience at a less prestigious institution. If prestige is what's most important to you in life, then by all means focus on it. If you are interested primarily in learning, then find a program that fits your interests and needs and has institutional support, as well as considering prestige.

Is it really necessary to have a Ph.D. to be an ecological anthropologist?

A Ph.D. is intended to train people to do research and/or teach at an institution of higher education. It is not a professional degree. I think that lot of people decide to get doctoral degrees so they can be more competitive in non-research positions. This could be a mistake. A doctoral degree in anthropology can require five years or more, and most of that time will be dedicated to developing research and teaching skills, not skills such as communication, management, effective use of the mass media, conflict resolution, or project administration. These are the skills that are essential for solving problems and functioning professionally in an environmental organization.

I have seen a lot of students who have realized three or four years into a doctoral program that their time could have been better spent in the work place developing problem-solving skills and familiarizing themselves with current issues, instead of jumping through academic hoops, studying theory, applying for grants to do their research, and writing a dissertation. Environmental organizations may be impressed with a Ph.D., but what they're really looking for is people who have a proven track record of bringing people together, solving problems and successfully implementing projects.

A lot of students think of a Ph.D. as a substitute for experience, but that's not what the job advertisements indicate. If your goal is a research position in a conservation organization, or a position overseeing researchers, then a Ph.D. will be necessary. If you're not specifically interested in research or teaching, but still want more education after a bachelors degree, I would seriously consider some of the excellent professional and masters programs in applied anthropology or environmental studies, and get into the work force as fast as you can.

INDUSTRY TRENDS

What are some trends that you see in the field of Ecological Anthropology that might help prospective students?

It's definitely a growing field. Conservation organizations, universities and governments are increasingly trying to incorporate social sciences into environmental problem solving. But the field is still quite small and faculty positions are not increasing to keep pace with student enrollment. Any major growth in opportunities will be outside of academia, although a few more colleges and universities appear to be soliciting ecological anthropologists each year. But most of the growth will be in applied ecological anthropology-working as consultants or as employees of government or private development and conservation organizations.

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 linked with studies that focus on behavior. Quite often, what people say and what they do are very different. More work needs to be done to reconcile these different approaches.

Another historical debate that may be near a compromise is the question of whether non-industrialized people are better stewards of the environment-what's known as the myth of the "noble savage." It was ecological anthropology that really propelled this idea into popular thought and influenced policy regarding nature reserves and indigenous land rights. But while some studies showed that indigenous populations did conserve their natural resources, over time other studies began to show clear abuses. A continuing contribution of our field has been to dispel the notion that this is an "either/or" issue, and to elucidate those social, spiritual, and economic conditions that lead to conservation and those that don't.

What do you consider to be the three greatest challenges facing professionals in the field today?

Intellectual tribal warfare is rampant in anthropology. Too many people are trying to claim that their approach is better, or more ecological, or more anthropological when they're really just asking different questions. The greatest challenge is to avoid being caught up in this nonsense and stay focused on how people outside of the discipline are interpreting your work-in particular how to communicate ideas and findings to policy makers and the general public.

Those who are most adept at avoiding the infighting and are instead engaging the attention of people outside the field will probably have the most rewarding careers. Related to this is the challenge of designing research that has both theoretical implications as well as applications to real world problems. This is a trend being supported from within anthropology, as well as by funding agencies, as the antiquated dichotomy between basic and applied research becomes increasingly blurred.

How have computers and the Internet affected the everyday life of an Ecological Anthropologist?

The greatest benefit of the Internet is being able to find people just about anywhere in the world with similar intellectual approaches or researching similar problems. The networking potential is amazing. Then, there is access to public domain data. I can download census data of birth and population growth rates for particular counties in Mexico or Montana in minutes. Then, there is the ability to find pertinent literature including foreign journal articles and unpublished manuscripts.

Regarding the processing potential of computers, in general, you can now bring a laptop into the field, enter and analyze your data, and revise your subsequent research based on the results. Many of my analyses were simply not possible before the current generation of computers, but now they execute in seconds on most standard laptops in the field. We can be highly adaptive in the field and ask much more complicated research questions then we could as recently as 10 years ago.

If you have any questions for Mr. Casagrande related to this interview, please visit his website at www.wiu.edu/users/dgc101/.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For more information about the educational and career outlook for Ecological Anthropology majors, click here.

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