Lives With Others: Climate Change and Human-Animal Relations

Abstract

This review assesses the contribution that a holistic, multisited, and multiscalar anthropology can make to the investigation of climate change and its impact on various human-animal assemblages. Anthropologists have a long-standing interest in animal management under changing environmental conditions. I focus on recent material that investigates the impact of anthropogenic climate change on human-animal relations using ethnography from Africa, Amazonia, and the circumpolar rim. I argue that the value of juxtaposing work in diverse settings and across various scales is to highlight the asymmetry of encounters between different perceptions of climate change and the responses they require. Anthropology's critical, holistic approach is especially valuable in places where people, animals, landscapes, the weather, and indeed climate change itself are aspects of an undifferentiated, spiritually lively, animate environment.