[1] It is a theoretical foundation of contemporary anthropology that considers whether nature and culture function separately from one another, or if they are in a continuous biotic relationship with each other.
[5] Greenwood and Stini argue that agriculture is only monetarily cost-efficient because it takes much more to produce than one can get out of eating their own crops,[2]: 397 e.g. "high culture cannot come at low energy costs".
For example, Donna Haraway's works on cyborg theory, as well as companion species[8] gesture toward a notion of "naturecultures": a new way of understanding non-discrete assemblages relating humans to technology and animals.
European expansion would be motivated by this desire to claim land and extract resources through technological developments or the invention of public trading companies.
Colonialists from Europe saw the American landscape as desolate, savage, dark and waste and thus needed to be tamed in order for it to be safe and habitable.
[11] So whether the ruling of these other lands and peoples was direct or indirect, the diffusion of European ideals and practices spread to nearly every country on the globe.
They saw the land as a shared entity of which they were a part, but the Europeans saw it as a commodity that could and should be divided and owned by individuals to then buy and sell as they pleased.
Though it is simplified in thought and definition, it offers an excellent way for readers to see the major conservation movements plotted together in which elements of their philosophy are highlighted.
When looking at adaptations, anthropologists such as Daniel Nettle state that animals choose their mates based on their environment, which is shaped directly by culture.
For example, there are beauty standards intertwined into the culture because they are associated with better survival rates, yet they also serve personal interests which allows for individual breeding pairs to understand how they fit into society.
Sandra Harding critiqued dominant science as "posit[ing] as necessary, and/or as facts, a set of dualisms—culture vs. nature; rational mind vs. prerational body and irrational emotions and values; objectivity vs. subjectivity; public vs. private—and then links men and masculinity to the former and women and femininity to the latter in each dichotomy".
[16] Instead, they argue for a more holistic approach to knowledge-seeking which recognizes that every attempt at objectivity is bound up in the social, historical, and political subjectivity of the knowledge producer.
The other end of the conservation spectrum then, would be conservation-near, which would mimic native ecological practices of humans integrated into the care of nature.