Explorers, amateurscientists, and early ethnologists like William Byrd all assumed—andunabashedly professed—that inferior or mismanaged lands bred inferior,ungovernable people.

More recently, from 2009 to 2014, Hastrup ran Waterworlds, a major European research project analysing social responses to climate change,[5] followed by fieldwork in Greenland, where she researched the effects of the modern world on a small community of hunters.[6]