Environmental anthropology is distinct from approaches to the environment in other social sciences. While all the social sciences share a common commitment to understanding environmental problems and issues of sustainability as, in essence, social problems, amenable to the tools of the social sciences, anthropology brings a number of distinct emphases and approaches to the problem. Anthropologists have long been committed to understanding the environment from others' points of view, engaging in the kinds of deeply committed, extended and engaged research that forms the basis of ethnographic inquiry. As a holistic science, anthropologists learn new languages, immerse themselves in other cultures, and strive to understand perceptions of the environment from wholly distinct ideological, linguistic and cosmological perspectives. As part of their holistic approach, anthropologists have also developed models for understanding human interactions with the environment that draw on evolutionary ecology and ecosystem science, studying such things as energy and nutrient flows through systems that include humans as components of broader networks of interaction. Finally, anthropologists have worked to test the assumptions built in to various models of environmental behavior, empirically testing models from political economy or common property theory, but doing so in ways that dig deeper and overcome more social distance than can the survey-based methodologies of sociology or the econometric, sampling and statistical approaches used by social sciences focused on aggregate social action.