William Balée

William Balée (born 1954) is a professor of anthropology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

About
Balée was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and educated at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he received a B.A. in Anthropology before moving on to Columbia University in New York City where he earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology (1984).

Career
Balée was appointed research fellow in 1984 by the New York Botanical Garden, collecting plants for an ethnobotany project sponsored by a Noble Grant. Later he took up a research position with the Museu Goeldi in Belém, Brazil.

His primary ethnographic work was with the Ka'apor indigenous culture of Maranhão, Brazil (Balée 1994). During his time in Brazil, however, he also carried out fieldwork with the Tembé, the Assurini of the Xingu River, the Araweté of the Ipishuna, which is also a tributary of the Xingu, and the Guajá.

However, he is most renowned as a proponent and foremost expert of historical ecology (Balée 1998). Balée has proposed four interdependent postulates, which set historical ecology apart from other more traditional research programs. Basically summarized, these postulates are: (1) Humans have affected nearly all environments on Earth; (2) Humans do not have an innate propensity to decrease biotic and landscape diversity or to increase it; (3) Various types of societies impact their landscapes in dissimilar ways; (4) Human interactions with landscapes can be comprehended holistically.

Current Work
Currently he is working on issues of applied historical ecology.

Dr. Balée has won the Mary W. Klinger Book Award from the Society for Economic Botany for two of his books, in 1996 (Footprints of the Forest) and 2014 (Cultural Forests of the Amazon). He was appointed Officer of the Order of the Golden Ark, a Dutch conservation merit order, by Prince Bernhard in 1993. In 2016 he received the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching from Tulane University. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. Balée is the 2023 recipient of the Distinguished Ethnobiologist Award from the Society of Ethnobiology.