This project examines the links between material culture and landscapes from local actors' points of view. This graphic describes the links between forest landscape and ecology, quality of timber, techniques of kiln management, and use of high quality charcoal (known as binchotan) produced in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan.

This project takes a humanistic approach to the study of environment and environmental problems. Its central goal is to identify nonscientific bodies of environmental knowledge that have sustained communities for generations, centuries, and millennia, to describe the structure and quality of this knowledge, and derive lessons of its relevance to contemporary social-ecological challenges. Project research explores agro-ecosystems and food systems, medicinal knowledge, built environment, and traditional craft as expressions of relatively localized systems of environmental knowledge. It examines the ways in which such traditional forms of knowledge operate primarily in the cultural realm and yet are also essential to cultural and ecological persistence through time.