Forests & Oceans for the Future Discussion and News

The Human terrain system (HTS) was not as big an issue at this year’s AAA as it was in previous meetings.  The issues has, it seems, been decided.  Most anthropologists seem to agree that there are serious ethical issues involved with using anthropologists with military operations such as the HTS.  From Franz Boas’ criticism of US archaeologists spying on behalf of the US Navy in Central America during world war one to Eric Wolf and Joseph Jorgensen making similar criticisms of anthropologists working in Thailand in the late 1960’s/early 1970s.

The AAA’s report on the HTS was released during the annual conference.  The Chronicle of Higher Education has this to say on the report:

In the shadow of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan, social scientists remain deeply anxious about the roles they are being asked to play in American counterinsurgency strategy.

A report released here Thursday during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association expresses serious doubts about the Human Terrain System, a three-year-old military program that embeds scholars within military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program’s creators argue that it has improved the military’s ability to understand local cultures and social networks. But skeptics have said that the program has been severely mismanaged and that it has not established clear ethical guidelines for its participants.

“Where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment,” the report says, ” … it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

And the program’s aims are murky, the report continues. Is it a research program? An intelligence program? A program for improving the cultural awareness of military commanders? Ask three different Pentagon officials, the report suggests, and you will get three different answers.

During a news conference on Thursday, Robert Albro, the chair of the 11-member committee that wrote the report, suggested that anthropologists might be able to productively cooperate with the military in other ways—but the human-terrain program is probably best kept at arm’s-length, he said. Read full article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This year the annual event of the American Anthropological Association will be held in Philadelphia.   I’ll be tweeting from the meeting:  you can find me at www.twitter.com/charlesmenzies.  hashtag is #AAA09

Here’s my preliminary itinerary of the sessions that I am planning to check in on.

The interaction between blackfish (often called Orcas or Killerwhales) and humans can sometimes have tragic results for the blackfish.  The story of Luna is such an example.  Environmental writer, Robin Ferruggia, does a nice job reviewing the story and presenting the central issues. It’s worth a read.

When journalists Mike Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm arrived at Nootka Sound, a remote inlet on the west coast of Vancouver, in March of 2004 to do a brief story on a lost baby whale named Luna, they didn’t realize he was going to change their lives.

Luna became separated from his pod in the summer of 2001 when he left his mother’s side to follow his uncle. Nobody knows what happened to the older whale, but without him to guide him back, Luna became lost. He was first sighted in Nootka Sound in July 2001.

The L-pod, as it was known, is an endangered group of whales. Their numbers are growing smaller. One of the most significant risks to this pod is that their primary food source, Chinook salmon, is being contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from agriculture, pulp mills, other industries, military bases and urban runoff, according to an article in the Vancouver Sun dated Nov. 26, 2008. (Continue reading, click Saving Luna?)