[3] Research pursued under this approach aims to study a wide range of human responses to environmental problems.
Steward focused on studying different modes of subsistence as methods of energy transfer and then analyzed how they determine other aspects of culture.
Studies based on this approach "seek to overcome the split in the second stage of ecological anthropology between excessively short and long time scales".
[6] The approach more specifically, examines "shifts and changes in individual and group activities, and they focus on the mechanism by which behavior and external constraints influence each other".
[1] Due to various factors associated with globalization, indigenous ethnoecologies are facing increasing challenges such as, "migration, media, and commerce spread people, institutions, information, and technology".
[1] "In the face of national and international incentives to exploit and degrade, ethnological systems that once preserved local and regional environments increasingly are ineffective or irrelevant".
[1] Threats also exist of "commercial logging, industrial pollution, and the imposition of external management systems" on their local ecosystems.
Long-term ecological knowledge of an indigenous group can provide valuable insight into adaptation strategies, community-based monitoring, and dynamics between culturally important species and human.
[8] From the beginning various scholars criticised the discipline, saying it inherently was too focused on static equilibrium which ignored change, that it used circular reasoning, and that it oversimplified systems.