Integrating Historical Ecology and Environmental Justice

Environmental justice studies (EJS) provides a framework for interdisciplinary research and advocacy in the realm of cultural heritage research and management. Ethnobiologists, in particular those who focus on environmental archaeology, are no strangers to the heritage arena as our scholarship commonly concerns “cultural keystone places,” which are rich with meaning for one or more groups of people. Three dimensions and three core concepts of EJS can serve as guideposts to research centering on these significant places. These EJS concepts align and intersect with core principles of historical ecology (HE), particularly through the study of landscapes as complex systems. This paper highlights how environmental justice and HE can be conceptually integrated. This EJS-HE framework is relevant to research design in environmental archaeology and more broadly ethnobiology, a framing to be adopted at the beginning of the research process that explicitly considers whether a research question is ethical to approach within a particular heritage context.