Abstract
The impacts of human activities on ecosystems are significantly increasing the rate of environmental change in the earth system, reshaping the global landscape. The rapid rate of environmental change is disrupting the ability of millions of people around the globe to live their everyday lives and maintain their human niche. Evidence suggests that we have entered (or created) a new epoch, the Anthropocene, which is defined as the period in which humans and human activities are the primary drivers of planetary change. The Anthropocene denotes a global shift, but it is the collective of local processes. This is our frame for investigating local accounts of human-caused disruptive environmental change in the Pampana River in Tonkolili District, Northern Province, Sierra Leone. Since the end of the Sierra Leonean civil war in 2002, the country has experienced a rapid increase in extractive industries, namely mining. We explored the effects of this development by working with communities along the Pampana River in Tonkolili, with a specific focus given to engaging local fishermen through ethnographic interviews (N = 21 fishermen and 33 non-fishermen), focus group discussions (N = 21 fishermen), and participant observation. We deployed theoretical and methodological frameworks from human niche construction theory, complex adaptive systems, and ethnography to track disruptive environmental change in and on the Pampana from upstream activities and the concomitant shifts in the local human niche. We highlight the value of integrating ethnographic methods with human evolutionary theory, produce important insights about local human coping processes with disruptive environmental change, and help to further account for and understand the ongoing global process of human modification of the earth system in the Anthropocene.
Highlights
The impacts of human activities on ecosystems are significantly increasing the rate of environmental change in the earth system, reshaping the global landscape [1,2,3,4]
We investigate people’s perceptions of change in the Pampana River and how these changes are affecting local human niche construction processes and practice primarily through the lens of village fishermen
We draw on this strength by using multiple lines of evidence including participant observation, interviews conducted by one of the co-authors (RAM), and focus group discussions to understand how the Pampana has changed, how this has affected the human niche of communities that live along the Pampana, and what this may signal about broader trends in human engagement with disruptive environmental change. It is because of the potential evolutionary impacts of disruptive environmental change that we must employ an human niche construction theory (HNCT) framework, accounting for the proximate, and estimating the long-term effects of these changes where other anthropological frameworks often stop short. This is especially necessary as we look to connect this local process to the ongoing global process of disruptive environmental change and the potential changes they have on bodies, behaviors, and ecologies across time
Summary
The impacts of human activities on ecosystems are significantly increasing the rate of environmental change in the earth system, reshaping the global landscape [1,2,3,4]. The rapid rate of environmental change is disrupting the ability of millions of people around the globe to live their everyday lives and maintain their human niche—the ecological and cultural contexts humans live in and construct [5,6,7]. People already living in impoverished conditions are the most exposed and vulnerable to human-caused environmental disruptions [8,9]. Exemplifying this pattern, the riparian communities in Tonkolili.
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