Kathleen Morrison on biodiversity and climate change
The faculty director of the Environmental Innovations Initiative, her research spans anthropology, archaeology, and paleoecology, involving the study of historic climates and environments, with a focus on South Asia.
Kathleen Morrison is interested in the long-term effects of human activity on the earth, especially the ways that changing patterns of technology and consumption have led to global-scale changes in land use and climate. Morrison is the Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts & Sciences, a curator in the Asian Section of the Penn Museum, and faculty lead for the Environmental Innovations Initiative. Her research spans anthropology, archaeology, and paleoecology, involving the study of historic climates and environments, with a focus on South Asia.
Kathleen Morrison spent several seasons conducting excavations at the site of Kadebakele in southern India. She met with three people from Kadebakele village who assisted with the field team.
(Image: C.M. Sinopoli)
By connecting the past to the present, her work has implications for the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and the impact of humans on the environment.
“With the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, we’re seeing worsening storms and other disasters, and a loss of thousands of animal species, including pollinators and plant species that are critical to human survival,” Morrison says. “A lot of my research involves issues of agriculture and the long-term impact of humans on the environment. I study the way people adapt to often very harsh environments and the way they make a living, through farming and animal husbandry.”
“Global-scale assessments rely on a lot of smaller-scale research, so I also focus more specifically on South Asia and especially southern India, where my colleagues and students and I use a combination of paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and historical data to understand the last 5,000 years or so of human and natural history. We are especially interested in how farming and other forms of food production have changed, and how those changes affect human societies, landscapes (erosion, hydrology, etc.), and regional biodiversity.”
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