Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the people of New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for economic development via logging and commercial agriculture have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.

Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth. This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level and provides a voice for community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, ultimately in the hope of offering critiques that build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the locals.

The Carbon Calculation critically highlights the ways in which politics has reinforced a scientific focus on one possible solution to the problem of climate change—namely those that largely absolve the industrialized world from undertaking politically painful transformations in its own economic model.

An ethnographic exploration of the world of conservation voluntourism and relations of care between humans and vulnerable species on the Honduran Bay Island of Utila.

This book looks at social-environmental activism in one of the world’s most important and threatened tropical forests—Southern Bahia, Brazil. It explores what it means to be in and of a place through the lenses of history, environment, identity, class, and culture. It uncovers not only what separates people but also what brings them together as they struggle and strive to create their individual and collective paradise.

Drawing from personal experience, Sarah Milne looks inside the black box of mainstream conservation NGOs and finds that corporate behavior and technical thinking dominate global efforts to save nature, opening the door to unethical conduct and failure on the ground.

Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives. It offers conservation efforts that not only include people as beneficiaries but also demonstrate how they are essential and knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change. Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Susan Alexandra Crate shows how local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions.

The book discusses the reproduction and legitimization of racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. Michela Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. She documents how calls to save nature have only deepened and naturalized inequality.