The establishment of environmental anthropology can be credited to Julian Steward, a cultural ecologist who studied how the Shosone of the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky mountains adapted their environment.
Ethnoecologists like Harold Conklin, Darrell Posey, and Wade Davis looked at traditional ecological knowledge to understand how indigenous groups around the world managed the ecosystems in which they lived.
Such factors like environmental disasters (floods, earthquakes, frost), migrations, cost & benefit ratio, contact/ associations, external ideas (trade/ latent capitalism boom),[13] along with internal, independent logic and inter-connectivity's impact now were observed.
This perspective was based on general equilibriums and criticized for not addressing the variety of responses an organism can have, such as "loyalty, solidarity, friendliness, and sanctity" and possible "incentives or inhibitors" in relations to behavior.
[16] Rappaport, often referred to as a reductionist in his cultural studies methods,[16] acknowledges, "The social unit is not always well defined[17]" exhibiting another flaw in this perspective, obfuscation of aspects of analyze and designated terms.