Andrew P. Vayda

• Ph.D., Columbia University
• Professor Emeritus at Independent Scholar

Problems with studies, claims, and assumptions that have been made about the causes of fires in Indonesia's tropical moist forests are identified, and the kinds of concepts, methods, prioritizing, and data needed to resolve the problems are discussed. Separate sections are devoted to studying ignitions, studying fire susceptibility and fire behavio...

All social scientists, despite their differences on many issues, ask causal questions about the world. This anthology sets forth strategy and methods to answer those questions. The selected readings, all illuminating causal explanation for social scientists, are not only by anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and human ecologists but also by...

Review article on: Eric Alden Smith and Bruce Winterhalder, eds., Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior. Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1992. Pp. xv, 470, tables, boxes, figures, bibliography, author index, subject index, $59.95 (cloth), $29.95 (paper). 1992 saw the publication of Evolutionary Ecology and Human Behavior, a volume intended as a "un...

The ultimate concerns of this chapter are with (1) roles that environmental anthropologists can play in interdisciplinary research to answer questions about why environmental changes occur or don’t occur and with (2) some particular ways in which those roles can be or should, in my view, be performed. I first distinguish research to answer what-que...

A book of essays on explaining concrete events and engaging in explanation-oriented research on human actions and the environmental changes caused by them

Many philosophers and scientists now view the discovery of causal mechanisms as central to research and explanation. In this paper, we consider the relevance of this mechanistic approach to human ecology. The consensus is that mechanisms are relatively stable and recurring causal structures underlying the phenomena we are trying to understand or ex...

A critical look at fires in the peatlands of Kalimantan and Sumatra in Indonesia indicates that programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from such fires need to: 1) recognize the diverse human activities and objectives associated with peatland fire use; 2) accept that some of these activities may be difficult to regulate because of being transie...

Near‐annual landscape‐scale fires in Indonesia's peatlands have caused severe air pollution, economic losses, and health impacts for millions of Southeast Asia residents. While the extent of fires across the peatland surface has been widely attributed to widespread peatland drainage for plantation agriculture, fires that transition from surface int...

Event ecology is a research methodology put forward to counter the privileging of some types of factors or causes over others in such fields as political ecology. In contrast to approaches in these fields, event ecology seeks to explain environmental changes or events, both singular and recurrent, by first considering multiple possible social and/o...

Event ecology is a research methodology put forward to counter the privileging of some types of factors or causes over others in such fields as political ecology. In contrast to approaches in these fields, event ecology seeks to explain environmental changes or events, both singular and recurrent, by first considering multiple possible social and/o...

Achieving effective interdisciplinarity in environmental-change studies can mean effectively combining methods, concepts, and knowledge from different disciplines to answer questions either about what the environmental changes are (“what-questions”) or about why they occur (“why-questions”). Our focus here is on the latter. Four dubious assumptions...

Peatland fires are a major contributor to Indonesia‘s greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades, particularly in previously drained and burnt areas during El Niño events, as witnessed in 2015. Despite the estimated magnitude of these emissions, peat and peatland fires still lack verified field data, methods and models. Peat fire emissions are stil...

Peatland fires are a major contributor to Indonesia‘s greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades, particularly in previously drained and burnt areas during El Niño events, as witnessed in 2015. Despite the estimated magnitude of these emissions, peat and peatland fires still lack verified field data, methods and models. Peat fire emissions are stil...

This poster introduces SDSU-IPB NASA Tropical Peat Fire Research Project, the international collaboration research on peat fire between American and Indonesian researchers.

Challenges not met by spiritual ecology as a field and Leslie Sponsel's failure to deal with those challenges in his book, "Spiritual Ecology," are discussed. Degradation of the River Ganges and biologist Wangari Maathai’s tree-planting movement in Kenya are among illustrations featured in the discussion.

Draft poster on methodology and initial results of interdisciplinary research on the causes of peat fires in the Central Kalimantan area where the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) was operating.

Historical, ecological, and methodological arguments are presented against the claims of antiquity that are made by J. S. Lansing and his associates for the evolution of the role of networks of water temples not only in the allocation of irrigation water but also in the control of rice-field pests over entire watersheds on the island of Bali in Ind...

Vayda's reply to the five reviews of his 2009 book, "Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes," that were, along with his reply, published in 2011 in Dialogues in Human Geography, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 370-389. The book's presentation of a coherent, pragmatic view of causal explanation and of research that has such explanation as its goal is...

We used an events approach to understand the human causes of fire on or near deep peat in our Central Kalimantan study area. Human activities on or near deep peat that may lead to deep-peat combustion were identified by us. Further research involving social and biophysical investigations is planned in order to ascertain whether and how some surface...

Why should we engage in causal explanation and do research guided by causal explanation as a goal? And how should we do these things? These are questions we had in our minds in compiling this reader. In this introductory essay, the answers given in the chapters to follow are previewed under the following headings: A Pragmatic View of Causal Explana...

Misdirected forest-fire research in Indonesia is analyzed to show what having the goal of causal explanation of concrete events implies for the design and conduct of interdisciplinary research.

There is confirmation bias when researchers take lightly what has been referred to as “the need to deal with the by-product possibility” in certain cases of explaining behavior by highlighting one or another—or some combination—of its beneficial consequences. Such explanations, called “consequence explanations” by Jon Elster, are questionable insof...

My object in this article is to discuss some things that have been wrong with causal explanations of Indonesian forest fires in the past and some ways in which they might be made better as explanations and, concomitantly, more useful for fire management. I will give examples not only of problematic explanations but also of fire-research and fire-ma...

Research on human-environment interactions is especially challenging given its interdisciplinary character and its need to address complexly interacting causes in time and space. “Event ecology" has been suggested and illustrated as an approach which can effectively address these challenges. Yet, previous writings on event ecology offer only a limi...

What does it mean to engage in causal explanation and make it a goal of our research? And how should we do these things? These are questions addressed in this chapter. Most of the chapter will be devoted to description and analysis of what I regard, from a pragmatic standpoint, the most important dos and don'ts of engaging in causal explanation and...

The aim in the chapter is to show ways in which the methods and explanations we use in the study of human actions and environmental changes can be made more effective and more defensible on logical and evidential grounds. Need for improvement is indicated by critical references to a variety of past studies, including some of the author's own. A mai...

A paper published in Ecological Economics [Varma, A. 2003. The economics of slash and burn: a case study of the 1997–1998 Indonesian forest fires. Ecological Economics 46,159–171] claims to show that slash and burn agriculture is socially inefficient and should be banned. However, its conclusions and recommendations are flawed. It defines slash and...

Anthropological claims about indigenous or local knowledge often exaggerate the cultural mystique of such knowledge "systems" and the difficulties associated with rendering local knowledge accessible to outsiders and with ascertaining its utility for initiatives in economic development and environmental conservation. We argue that part of this conf...

Issues of methodology and explanation relevant to political ecology and presented in two of my articles cited by political ecologists are discussed. Methods for the causal explanation of events are briefly described.

The work of some ecological anthropologists, including myself, has increasingly been directed not so much towards developing or testing general theories, or even some broad propositions about environment-related behavior in particular regions or societies or types of societies, as towards empirically answering questions about why things have occurr...

This report is based mainly on field investigations, consultations, and literature review in Indonesia during June and July 1998. It is a report both on the limited research already done by that time and on the research that remained then to be done on the causes of the extensive Indonesian forest fires of 1997-98. Problems in identifying actual ca...

Starting with a priori judgments, theories, or biases about the importance or even primacy of certain kinds of political factors in the explanation of environmental changes, self-styled political ecologists have focused their research on environmental or natural resource politics and have missed or scanted the complex and contingent interactions of...

Whenever an issue gains national or international prominence, it is a fair bet that it won't be long before enterprising anthropologists will convene meetings and produce publications purporting to put the issue in what will be claimed to be an anthropological perspective. Accordingly, with deforestation now very much a global issue, it should be n...

Eschewing restrictive culture-related considerations used by some cognitive anthropologists to define their subject matter, anthropologists can still contribute both to practical action programs such as Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and to theoretically meaningful research on the relations of cognition and action. In such research, cultural infl...

My focus in these comments is on causal explanations of events. Part of the reason for this is my own interest in such explanations and my own conviction that giving causal explanations of events and doing research guided by the goal of giving such explanations are appropriate and worthwhile pursuits for anthropologists and human ecologists. Howeve...

"CIFOR has been actively engaged in field research in Indonesia focussing particularly on the role of forests and forest products in generating sustainable livelihoods for local users. Issues such as incentives and institutional structures for equitable and sustainable management systems have been highlighted in this research, which has been undert...

East Kalimantan's Kutai National Park consists of 198,629 hectares of lowland rainforest and was first established as a 'protected area' in 1936. Kutai is important for the conservation not only of plant and animal species but also of water resources for major industries and rapidly growing coastal communities adjacent to the park. The largest of t...

[The work is a short, single paragraph, available here and not calling for an abstract.]

Review article on "Failures of Explanation in Darwinian Ecological Anthropology [Human Behavioral Ecology]"

That the New Guinea data cited by Soltis et al. constitute a meaningful test of their model of group selection is questioned on a number of grounds. Thus, for their crucial assumption that biased cultural transmission is a mechanism whereby cultural differences among small local groups are maintained despite contacts and intermarriage, there is no...

While positivists and interpretive anthropologists have been debating how patterns and order in sociocultural phenomena should be studied and what their determinants are, there has been increasing but still relatively little attention to the development on which I focus here, namely, the emergence of the view that patterns and order have been exagg...

A central purpose of this book is to provide a forum on the question of “how human influences can be better incorporated into ecological studies.” In this chapter, the answer that I give to the question is, very simply, that we need to make concrete human actions and their concrete environmental effects our primary objects of study, and that we nee...

The chapter addresses the question of how human influences can be incorporated better into ecological studies. The answer given is that we need to make concrete human actions and their concrete environmental consequences our primary objects of study and that we need to proceed in our research by progressively relating these to factors that can expl...

Much of the polemics about explaining war may be related to thinking simply that war is our object of explanation. This is inadequate insofar as those involved in the polemics, including participants in the 1986 seminar on which the reviewed volume is based, make the mistake of thinking that their different explanations are answers to the same ques...

Research conducted under the UNESCOs' MAB (Man and the Biosphere) Program began in East Kalimantan in 1979 with a joint Indonesian-U.S. project on "Interactions between People and Forests." The project brought together American and Indonesian scientists to investigate various forest-related activities throughout the province and some of their biolo...

An introduction to articles on issues of methodology and explanation in the social sciences, e.g., such issues as the relation between explaining social and cultural processes and explaining their constituent acts and events.

Social scientists using one or another concept of process have paid little attention to underlying issues of methodology and explanation. Commonly, the concept used is a loose one. When it is not, there often are other problems, such as errors of reification and of assuming that events sometimes connected in a sequence are invariably thus connected...

The book is commended for its convincing use of case studies to disabuse readers of notions about the balance or stability of nature (or of ecosystems) and to make them see that ecological studies are not necessarily concerned with how that balance is or can be, despite disruptions, maintained. However, the book is also criticized for the author's...

Particularly valuable in Brennan's book is his extended, critical analysis of the "deep-ecology" movement and its holistic and idealistic appeals for identifying more strongly with nature and acting more committedly for its preservation. Brennan takes on not only the easy targets produced by the movement, such as the notion that the entire biospher...

Appropriate concepts and methods of human ecology research related to problems of forest management are described.

Following a brief review of what Indonesia in general can offer ecotourists, we focus on small-scale ecotourism or "adventure" tourism in one particular area: the Kayan-Mentarang Nature Reserve in the interior highlands of East Kalimantan. We conclude with a discussion of how to integrate the development of ecotourism with nature conservation in su...

While positivists and interpretive anthropologists have been debating how patterns and order in sociocultural phenomena should be studied and what their determinants are, there has been increasing but still relatively little attention to the development on which I focus here, namely, the emergence of the view that patterns and order have been exagg...

Warfare among the Marings of New Guinea is reexamined to show that the original analysis suffered from process reification and from the attribution of unwarranted or exaggerated explanatory import to the territorial annexations which were occasional consequences of fighting. Criticisms of the original analysis are shown to be defective also, and an...

How and why, beginning in the early 1950s, Bugis people moved from their South Sulawesi homelands to East Kalimantan to convert lowland tropical forest to pepper plantations is described. Implications of the Bugis migrations for forest- protection programs in East Kalimantan are also considered.

By making human actions and their consequences our objects of explanation in human ecology, we can resolve important issues and answer important questions. The article tries to show this by means of a seriatim consideration of methodological points and conceptual distinctions, supported by illustrations from empirical research. Both how and why act...

Description of interior Borneo's human geography, turbulent history, and the Dayak inhabitants' social organization, forest-resource use, farming, longhouse construction, woodworking, metalworking, and past headhunting and warfare.

Contrary to Harris' comment on my 1987 review of his book, "Good to Eat," I explicitly do not reject a cost/benefit approach, do not claim that only benefits intended by the actors can be regarded as causes of their activities, do not hold a brief for "arbitrary sentiments, desires, intentions, etc." as explanantia, and do not demand "precise metri...

In recent anthropological debates concerning food, the contention between materialists/utilitarians and symbolists/structuralists has been vociferous...but both sides have neglected some important methodological problems and broad issues of explanation. An opportunity to focus on these is afforded by the publication of a new book in which Marvin Ha...

From consideration of Bugis (Buginese) colonization of tidal swamplands in Sumatra and lowland dipterocarp forests in Borneo's East Kalimantan, the following conclusions are drawn: 1. Bugis migration and colonization can happen quickly in response to new opportunities. 2. The process can effect major transformations of environments and can do so wi...

Shifting cultivation and tree-felling for timber in the remote Apo Kayan region of Indonesian Borneo are compared with natural disturbance events (tree-falls and landslides) generally known to affect tropical forests. The causes of spatial and temporal patterns in human-caused disturbances are examined. Farmers in the Apo Kayan practice a tradition...

Review article on: Rappaport, Roy A. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, enlarged edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. xviii + 501 pp. including illustrations, appendices, bibliographies, and index. $30.00 cloth, $9.95 paper.Ellen, Roy. Environment, Subsistence and System: The Ecology of Small‐Scale Soc...

Migrants have frequently been cited as agents of tropical deforestation, but this has been done with little understanding of the actual forest-related activities of migrants or of the circumstances surrounding their decisions to move. In this article, we first describe some circumstances of migration by Kenyah and Bugis farmers and some effects of...

Errata in the article, "Progressive contextualization: Methods for research in human ecology ," as published in the journal in September 1983, are noted.

The approach advocated and used in this study has produced some findings which are important for development planning in East Kalimantan and which may be relevant to other tropical forest areas. In the Apo Kayan, contrary to the popular image of shifting cultivators that is prevalent among government officials in East Kalimantan, the Dayak people a...

Integrated social and biological research at several tropical forest locations in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan indicated variation among farmers in their reasons for practising shifting cultivation, the extensiveness of their farming, and the amount of forest damage they caused; it was among the most remotely located farmers that long...

Theoretically or practically significant research results concerning transitory as well as persistent phenomena can be obtained by human ecologists while avoiding commitment to long-term, expensive projects, rigid frameworks, traditional disciplinary goals, and unwarranted assumptions about the stability and purposiveness of units or systems. The p...

The chapter first reviews and criticizes some conventional ways of viewing and classifying traditional resource use patterns in tropical forests and then discusses actual subsistence patterns in these areas and their prospects for development.

The advantages of progressive contextualization as a method for integrated social and biological MAB research are: (1) resolution of the" research unit" question; (2) avoidance of unwarranted assumptions about the stability of units or systems; (3) latitude in the time, effort, and money required for the use of the method; ( 4) elimination of MAB's...

Contrary to a common conception of the Iban people of Sarawak as prodigal, forest-destroying shifting cultivators, Christine Padoch's monograph shows that various responses other than migration are made by Iban when land or other resources available to them become limited. The monograph demystifies the Iban by showing them to respond pragmatically...

Initial work within the Man and Biosphere project in East Kalimantan has dealt with the environmental effects of different kinds of land use, entailing study of floristic, faunistic, and soil changes in logged-over forest, secondary forest and dry-land farm, as well as socio-economic conditions in the neighboring settlements of transmigrants. In lo...

Tidal swampland settlement and development in southern Sumatra are described and it is shown how historical studies of the Buginese (Bugis) people and their activities both in their Sulawesi homelands and elsewhere could have clarified the dynamics of Buginese colonization in southern Sumatra and indicated the importance of taking it into account i...

Brief discussion of the setting of an Indonesian/United States Man and Biosphere project in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan, an elaboration of the rationale for the research in terms of its workability and likely productiveness, and some illustrative examples drawn from findings at an early stage of the research.

This is an appreciative review of Mervyn Meggitt's "Blood Is Their Argument: Warfare among the Mae Enga Tribesmen of the New Guinea Highlands" (Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1977). Among the matters discussed are (1) the value of the book as a detailed account of traditional tribal warfare and the changes in it after the arrival of Europeans...

Review of a volume consisting of 13 chapters, some by anthropologists and some by nutritional scientists, on how behavioral capacity and functioning are affected by malnutrition and on what the effects imply for "sociocultural dynamics and change." On the whole, the papers by the nutritional scientists are more convincing because their conclusions...

The disruption of iodine supplies as a result of development in a variety of environments and the concomitant increased incidence of goiter and cretinism in them are shown. Remedies are discussed.

After a brief discussion of agriculture and hunting and gathering in the two islands, the following three categories in which more research is needed are considered and illustrated: (1) Land use systems already in local operation (as distinct from those being promoted from outside); (2) the existing social groupings, networks, and leadership patter...

In fewer than 300 pages of text, the book treats many and diverse aspects and features of human adaptation, evolution, energetics, and population dynamics and also gives consideration, in the form of separate chapters, to such special topics as human paleoecology and the study of human conceptualizations of environmental phenomena. The broad covera...

The chapter focuses on problems in identifying the hazards actually confronting Pacific Islanders in their environments and in judging how effectively they respond to the hazards.

On the basis of reconnaissance trips in East Kalimantan in 1976, the following topics are tentatively recommended for research: (1) effects of timber camps on economic activities of villagers; (2) comparisons of farming and its effects in upriver homelands and downriver resettlement areas; (3) comparison of ecological processes in neighboring fores...

"...the most telling point made by Des Pres is muted: people in concentration camps -- some people, not all -- were able to relearn, to reorganize their behavior, and to survive. Social organization is a precondition for human life, but it is not clear that some instinct for social life was operative in the camps: these were not human beings stripp...

The diminished role that concepts of carrying capacity, energetics, homeostasis, and fixed analytic units have in the “New Ecology Paradigm" is briefly described and contrasted with the role that anthropologist Stephen Brush attributes to them in the paradigm.

This book deals with war in three Oceanian societies. More specifi­ cally, it analyzes the following: the process of war in relation to population pressure among New Guinea's Maring people; exten­ sion and contraction in the headhunting activities of the Iban people of Sarawak during the nineteenth century; and the disrup­ tion resulting from the i...

Four criticisms of ecological anthropology are considered here: its over- emphasis on energy, its inability to explain cultural phenomena, its pre-occupation with static equilibria, and its lack of clarity about the appropriate units of analysis. Recognizing that some of these criticisms may not be justified, we nevertheless point to parallel conce...

An account and analysis of headhunting as a response to misfortunes among Sarawak's Iban tribes and of how and why, beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the practice became less localized. The relation of headhunting to population pressure and to the piracy practiced by other groups are considered. Substantial use is made of histori...

Some broad generalizations about warfare in ecological perspective and objections to the generalizations are first considered. Materials and arguments are next put forward in favor of the following: 1. Viewing war not simply as something that either does or does not occur, but rather as a process sometimes involving escalation and sometimes not; 2....

Examples of balanced or stable relations between humans and other species in the pre-industrialized world are noted, as is the possibility that the people in the African and New Guinea examples cited are ahead of us in having behavioral and psychological mechanisms to detect and respond adaptively to signals of environmental deterioration prior to...

[In his book] almost all of what Scheffler reports of the Choiseulese solution to the cognatic descent problem is based on his reconstruction from informants' accounts of what Choiseulese social structure and behavior were like some forty, fifty, or sixty years before his arrival on the [Melanesian] island. If Scheffler, like some other social anth...