In this collection of recent essays, Andrew P. Vayda argues for a pragmatic approach to explanation and explanation-oriented research in social and environmental sciences. He supports his arguments with causal analyses of both human actions, such as cutting down trees and fighting over resources, and environmental changes, such as forest fires; and he voices his opposition to methodological and ethnographic holism and the notion that explanation can be achieved by deploying theories rather than by obtaining evidence of the causal histories of concrete actions and events. Vayda is critical of much recent scholarship_in such areas as political ecology, local knowledge studies, discourse studies, and evolutionary human behavioral ecology_for its indifference to questions of evidence and methodology and its failure to give proper consideration to multiple and alternative possible causes of whatever is being explained. He also discusses the use and misuse of evidence and generalizations, the payoffs and pitfalls of moving from one level of analysis to another, the dos and don'ts in interdisciplinary research, the uses of statistics, and the importance of being clear about objects of explanation. This original and challenging work makes sense of the future of ecological anthropology and will be of interest to researchers in the social and environmental sciences in general.

"Vayda's significant critique …clears the way for the proposal of an explicitly event-based causal approach for understanding environmental changes. This important book should be required reading not only for human ecologists and ecological anthropologists, but also for all other social scientists concerned with environmental change. It will make for an exceptional and stimulating reading for students in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses addressing environmental issues and provide an excellent springboard for new research and understanding." - Human Ecology

"This book is all about the truth, and not being distracted. It is an intellectual treatise built on solid scholarship hence the first word in the title-explaining-is most appropriate….As different as humans may be from other animals, we are still animals…. We are in every way part of nature. In the course of satisfying our needs we impact the environment around us-other parts of nature. Vayda's book is magnificent in its arguing the complexity of human actions, questioning the self-perceived uniqueness of disciplinary perspectives, arguing against focusing on certain factors assumed in advance to be important, pointing out failure in various explanations, untying the Gordian knot of processes typically treated superficially, demonstrating how different conclusions can be reached when asking different questions, and illustrating confusion stemming from polemics." - Dialogues In Human Geography