Historical Ecology, Heterarchy and Multitemporal Dynamics: Papers in Honor of Carole Crumley

In an ongoing career, so far spanning more than four decades, Carole Crumley has consistently delivered original frameworks for understanding the dialectic of human-environmental relations and her work has embodied the holism of anthropology. Documenting long-term interactions between historical and environmental circumstance and the social, political and economic elements of land use practice, her research in Burgundy fostered new ways of seeing landscapes, the imperative of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study, the significance of historic climate change, and the value of multitemporal and multiscalar approaches. In collaboration with her research partners, Crumley advanced the interdisciplinary theory and method of Historical Ecology. Her key concept of "heterarchy" is now applied to studies of societal and environmental resilience. Critiquing default presumptions of hierarchy allows scholars to better perceive social structural alternatives in the past that were successfully responsive to environmental constraints, and to imagine them for the future. Following her retirement from teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill, Crumley’s work continues as director of the 'Integrated History and Future of People on Earth' (IHOPE) initiative, a global network of researchers based at Sweden’s Uppsala University and uniting biophysical and social sciences.