Ethnography - A Companion to Environmental Geography - page 381

subjects are constituted (and constitute each other) via practices of discourse and
knowledge production, to document the dynamics and impacts of power as it is
experienced and performed by people within particular environments, and to effec-
tively examine a host of processes (e.g., social, economic, environmental, as well as
cultural) as they are manifest 'in location' rather than relegated to scales other than
the local.
To access the potentials of ethnography, environmental geographers are funda-
mentally rethinking the objectives of research and 'fi eldwork'. They are acknowledg-
ing the ways in which academic research constitutes environments and are beginning
to use their research, via participatory ethnographic methods, as vehicles for social/
environmental change. They are also pragmatically mixing methods to better com-
plement the mixed and interdisciplinary strengths of environmental geography itself.
To address questions of social practices and meanings relative to the environment,
ethnographic approaches are merging with statistical, GIS, survey and other methods
long familiar and effectively used by environmental geographers. Environmental
geography, as it hones its unique interdisciplinary contribution to understandings
of nature/society relations, will increasingly rely upon the power of ethnography to
explain those relations and, indeed, to transform them.
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