Written during the height of the ecology movement, The Ecological Transition is a stunning interdisciplinary work. It combines anthropology, ecology, and sociology to formulate an understanding of cultural-environmental relationships. While anthropologists have been studying relationships between humans and the physical environment for a very long time, only in the last thirty years have questions inherent in these relationships broadened beyond description and classifi cation. For example, the concept of environment has been extended beyond the physical into the social.

This "anthropological history" tells the story of homesteading and community organization in the Canadian-American West through personal reminiscences and locally written histories. John W. Bennett and Seena B. Kohl interpret those stories through the lenses of history and social science, and they present a view of settlement experience as one phase of the evolving postfrontier society and culture of western North America. Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890-1915 contains a synthesis of Canadian and U.S. settlement experiences giving, to the extent possible, equal space to both sides of...

Human interaction with the natural environment has a dual character. By turning increasing quantities of natural substances into physical resources, human beings might be said to have freed themselves from the constraints of low-technology survival pressures. However, the process has generated a new dependence on nature in the form of complex "socionatural systems," as Bennett calls them, in which human society and behavior are so interlocked with the management of the environment that small changes in the systems can lead to disaster. Bennett's essays cover a wide range: from the philosophy...

Classic anthropology is Bennett''s label for the work produced by anthropologists between 1915 and 1955. In this book, Bennett criticises classic anthropology for ne glecting the contemporary world and modern societies. '