The American Anthropological Association is spending the month of April focusing on the relationship between anthropology and the sustainable movement being seen in modern society. American society has recently shifted both political and social focus toward modern, progressive movements surrounding sustainable lifestyles and environmentally responsible living. The American Anthropological Association has dedicated their research to evaluating this progressive movement and the connection with and influence on culture, tradition and anthropology as a whole.

In one of the featured articles Patricia M. Clay, a worker at the National Marine Fisheries Service, discusses in the depth the crucial relationship between sociocultural , economic and biological concepts in the attempt to produce new sustainable techniques for the Marine Fisheries. Clay explains that the Marine Fisheries need to utilize modern, expanding areas of research to most successfully employ efforts of sustainable fishing. Clay highlights the agency's history of resource conservation focus and conveyed to her audience their need for a new strategy that would keep the concept of food and food systems at the fore, while simultaneously congruent with modern societal expectations.

Clay claims that the new methods of research being employed demonstrate the need to establish this sociocultural, economic and biological connection. The use of oral histories and ethnographic studies and surveys exemplify the application of traditional anthropology in the current market-place. The utilization of both modern and traditional anthropological research techniques to meet a modern demand for sustainable efforts shows a massive shift in American society. It is through this shift, and others like, it that change can be made, and progress seen in both American society and the anthropological science as a whole.