Area of Interest:

Ecological anthropology, human behavioral ecology, Amazon rainforest, indigenous peoples, conservation, Ecuador, culture change, market integration, indigenous resource management, political ecology, environmental justice.

Education:

Ph.D., Curriculum in Ecology, UNC-Chapel Hill, 1999.

Research & Activities:

Research Background: I am interested in the human-environment interrelationship and how culture shapes the natural world, and is in turn shaped by it. I began conducting research with the Huaorani, an Amerindian group of hunter-gatherer-horticulturalists in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1992, and have examined topics ranging from hunting patterns and time allocation to the effects of petroleum exploration on diet, work, and social relations. Research conducted for my dissertation in 1996-1997 was the basis for two National Geographic Channel programs ("Inside Basecamp" and "The Next Wave II"), which aired in the Spring of 2003.

Present Research: In collaboration with Dr. Richard Bilsborrow at the Carolina Population Center and Dr. Steve Walsh from the Department of Geography, I am co-leading a multi-year (2000-2003), National Institutes of Health-funded project in northeastern Ecuador investigating the demographic, socio-economic, and biophysical factors influencing land and resource use by five Native Amazonian groups. We are not only comparing inter- and intra-cultural patterns among the Huaorani, Quichua, Cofán, Secoya, and Shuar, but also examining how these groups differ from colonists (using data previously collected by Bilsborrow). It is important to understand how different indigenous populations respond to external forces, such as oil development, tourism, and cash cropping activities, and how these responses are linked to population, cultural values, access to infrastructure, and ecological characteristics. The data we have gathered includes an intensive ethnographic study of 8 indigenous communities; household and community surveys in an additional 28 villages; and GPS and satellite images which will be used to conduct GIS analysis. Such an interdisciplinary approach combines methodologies and insights from demography, anthropology, and landscape ecology.

Selected Publications:

2004 "Demography, Household Economics, and Land and Resource Use of Five Indigenous Populations of the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon: A Summary of Ethnographic Research." With Richard E. Bilsborrow, and Ana Isabel Oña. Occasional Working Paper, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

2003 "A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Human Impacts on the Rainforest Environment in Ecuador: Preliminary Results from an Ethnographic Study," with Richard E. Bilsborrow. Chapter contributed to the upcoming edited volume, Human Ecogeography: Relationships between Human Population Dynamics and Biological Diversity. Richard Cincotta and Deirdre Magean, editors. Springer-Verlag Ecological Studies Series.

2005 "The Catch-22 of Conservation: Indigenous Peoples, Biologists, and Cultural Change." Manuscript submitted to Human Ecology.

2001 "The Common Property Regime of the Huaorani Indians of Ecuador: Implications and Challenges to Conservation." Human Ecology 29(4): 425-447.

1999 "Risk-sensitive Adaptive Tactics: Models and Evidence from Subsistence Studies in Biology and Anthropology," with Bruce Winterhalder and Bram Tucker. Journal of Archaeological Research 7(4): 301-348.

1997 "A Forager-Resource Population Ecology Model and Implications for Indigenous Conservation," with Bruce Winterhalder. Conservation Biology 11(6): 1354-1364.