Ch. 14 Environment

Question 1

Environmental Problems as Social Problems

Answer 1

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS AS SOCIAL PROBLEMS:

• UNSUSTAINABILITY – if human activities are depleting or degrading resources faster than they can be renewed, the long-term effects are economic, social, and cultural stresses.
  
  • Environmental problems are all social problems because members of a population experience environmental phenomena differently.
  • They relate to our beliefs about the environment and how it influences the practices of everyday life.
    
    • EX: during the Chicago heat wave, children became ill as their school buses got mired in traffic – Using buses to get to school and driving to the movies on a hot day are social practices that influence the experience of a heatwave
    • EX: If you are a gardener, the climate index and the number of growing degree-days in a year determine what you can plant.
    • EX: If you are an elder whose life can be threatened by summer’s extreme heat, an early heatwave may be cause for alarm.
      
      • What you experience and the way you experience it influence the way you interpret it.
  • What some people experience as a problem may be unnoticeable or unimportant for others because their lives are organized differently.
    
    • Environmental problems, for this reason, can be highly contested and difficult to resolve.
• Causes of environmental problems are also social.
  
  • We extract too many resources, produce too much stuff, and throw too much stuff away. We use hazardous extraction and production methods and generate toxic materials that we release into the environment.
    
    • Environmental sociologists would suggest that our society encourages us to.
  • Those already marginalized by society, are disproportionately affected by environmental problems.

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION – Social structure, is the way people are divided into groups and categories and placed in a social hierarchy.

• This hierarchy influences people’s access to economic, cultural, social, and political resources.

Question 2

Environmental Justice and Globalization

Answer 2

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND GLOBALIZATION:

SOCIAL EQUITY – Refers to equality and takes into account the different contexts that shape opportunities, needs, and resources.

• It’s closely related to the concept of social equality, social equity stresses fairness and justice – looking beyond just the Rich vs the Poor.
• Equality can actually be quite unfair because, by applying the same rules to different people, or giving everyone the same resources, we ignore the differences that already exist in their lives.
  
  • The poor must work to preserve a wealthy society, yet they don’t get the benefits of the wealth and are subject to the laws that inhibit the poor most of all.
• There is an irony of applying the same law to the rich and the poor when clearly the poor—and not the wealthy—are compelled to do things that are outlawed just to survive (EX: seek shelter under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal their food).

ENVIRONMENTAL DISPOSSESSION – Is when powerful people take away environmental resources (land, water, etc.) from less powerful people.

• Issues of equity and dispossession are commonly used in the context of colonialism to refer to processes where indigenous peoples are denied access to land and resources they had inhabited.
  
  • Ecological knowledge that has been crafted over many years by the indigenous people is no longer available to be used in the management of the space (because those knowledgeable about the land – the indigenous people – have been removed).
    
    • As a result, those who take over the land, tend to do it carelessly, using those resources intensively, ruining or pillaging the natural resources, and creating environmental problems.
• EX: ENVIRONMENTAL APARTHEID – Environmental dispossession occurred through the apartheid system, where black South Africans were excluded from a range of rights, including access to fertile and economically productive land.
  
  • Environmental apartheid has meant that those who were politically disenfranchised and officially excluded from economic opportunities also had to graze cattle on marginal land, produce food on depleted soil, and retrieve water from poor sources, with the social and economic effects lasting long after racial segregation was officially abandoned as a national policy.
• In such a context, environmental degradation is clearly entangled with questions of justice.

A critical question to ask when we consider climate change, waste management, deforestation, and nuclear radiation is who benefits from the processes that create environmental problems like these, and who suffers?

• A THEORY OF JUSTICE – (John Rawls, 1971) – said that if we were committed to a just society, we would want the best for everyone, not just the majority of people or the people who seem most worthy.
  
  • Imagine what sorts of principles we would come up with for a just society if we were ignorant of where we would end up on the resulting social spectrum. Rawls believed we would arrive at two principles:

1. Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
2. Social and economic liberties are to be arranged so they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

• Inequality CAN be fair, but ONLY when it benefits everyone.
  
  • EX: The inequality of allowing only people who are trained and certified to serve as doctors.
• Environmental justice requires that everyone be able to participate fairly in decisions about the environment.

The loss of environmental rights is not always unjust – as long as EVERYONE loses the right for the common good:

• EX: Some people may lose the right to use a resource because it is being overused, or because they are polluting it. This, under Rawls’s definition, can arguably be quite just.
  
  • In the age of globalization, some countries choose to have few environmental regulations as a strategy for attracting companies from other countries.
    
    • TOXIC COLONIALISM – This leads to the relocation of environmentally damaging production to poorer countries.
      
      • Manufacturing jobs move to underdeveloped countries, while white-collar jobs stay in industrialized countries.
      • Similarly, toxic waste moves to poorer countries while the products that generate the waste are enjoyed by the wealthy in richer countries.

Question 3

Climate Change

Answer 3

CLIMATE CHANGE:

• Climates that have historically experienced the least climate variability will be the most sensitive to change (Brazilian Rainforest and the poles).
  
  • Given that equatorial countries also contain the most biodiverse regions on the planet, as well as some of the poorest populations, these regions will see much greater effects of climate change, and much sooner than other regions.

Scientists often object to defining the issue as “global warming” and favor the more accurate term CLIMATE CHANGE. Placing the emphasis on warming suggests that we should focus on heat alone.

• If our definition of this environmental problem reminds us that greater heat in winter is likely to be accompanied by other effects—like stronger winter winds, bigger snowfalls, and faster evaporation of snowpack—we will consider the problem differently and act on it differently.
• Definitions matter enormously in social life.

One of the most profound visible aspects of climate change is the melting of polar ice.

• Climate change threatens the Inuit physically but also culturally because many of their traditional activities now place them in danger.

As the ice melts, the sea level also rises because of thermal expansion, and as water gets warmer, it takes up more space.

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report, completed in 2001, projected that sea level will rise between 0.5 and 1.4 meters by 2100.
  
  • In low-lying coastal regions, even small increases in sea level can flood wetlands and leave people who live in these areas at greater risk of flooding and vulnerability to storm surges; more than a billion people could be displaced.
• Moving populations paired with shifting access and increasing scarcity of natural resources has the potential to increase violent conflict.

Question 4

Natural Disasters

Answer 4

NATURAL DISASTERS – Natural disasters have uneven effects on people.

• Some locations are more prone to tornados, heat waves, or hurricanes. Often, these higher-risk areas are also associated with the poor.
• EX: HURRICANE KATRINA – Katrina was one of the five deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history, with a death toll of more than 1,800. Just over half those deaths occurred in Louisiana, and many of those were in New Orleans. Black people in New Orleans were much more likely to die than whites, and more generally the elderly were also at higher risk.
  • Low economic resources made it difficult for people to evacuate and relocate while the city flooded with water.
  • Thus, income, race, and age all influenced the magnitude of the disaster for groups of people.

Question 5

Waste

Answer 5

WASTE:

• NIMBY (NOT-IN-MY- BACKYARD) APPROACH – Whereby people who may not be opposed to the establishment of landfills object to having them located near their own homes and businesses.
  
  • Health effects aside, the presence of landfills decreases nearby property values.
  • Waste sites are more likely to emerge in poor and minority communities – primarily because firms may locate waste management plants in areas where the cost of land is low
    
    • Also, once a plant has been built, the more affluent may move away from the area.
      
      • And the wealthy have more political clout to influence the placement of waste management sites.
• The placement of waste management systems exemplifies environmental racism, in which environmental degradation is more pronounced in places occupied by minorities.

Question 6

Radiation

Answer 6

RADIATION – Globalization makes it difficult to identify the stakeholders in environmental decisions because things caused in one country can have negative effects all around the world.

• EX: The fallout from Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, was not contained to the city, it spread all over Europe.
  
  • The population that experienced the highest radioactivity from Chernobyl in Norway was the Saami, a minority group of reindeer herders. The fallout covered the grass that the reindeer ate and the entire way of life for the Saami was destroyed.
    
    • Not only were their traditional grazing and slaughtering practices disrupted, but their cultural identities as herders with traditional knowledge and a unique relationship to nature were challenged.
• An environmental justice framework would suggest that they should have been protected from the unequal burden of contamination that they faced, but also that they should have been able to maintain access to the resources that are economically and culturally so important for them.
• EX: Daiichi nuclear plant disaster in Fukushima. In 2011, following an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, they too had a meltdown.
  
  • Evacuations took place, displacing people from their homes and somehow killing hundreds, and the long-term stress of eating what may have been contaminated food affected the people psychologically as well as physically.

Question 7

Theoretical Approaches In Environmental Sociology

Answer 7

Theoretical Approaches In Environmental Sociology:

• Environmental problems, like climate change, natural disasters, waste disposal, and nuclear radiation, are actually abstract, social concepts, and the experiences associated with them are rarely immediate and direct.
  
  • Consider climate change: We cannot see carbon dioxide rising to the sky and getting trapped in the atmosphere and then immediately feel the temperature rise. In a sense, there are no direct effects—only indicators that we place within a larger context of meaning.

INDICATORS – Observable changes in social and ecological behaviors that are used to indirectly measure other changes that are less visible.

Question 8

Marginalization and Hurricane Katrina

Answer 8

MARGINALIZATION AND HURRICANE KATRINA:

• They found that low-income African Americans were the most likely to have never left the city. Black workers were 3.8 times more likely to have lost their jobs.
  
  • Those who have historically been socially marginalized based on race, class, religion, or gender may feel these events more profoundly, in part because they receive the least social protection and meet more barriers to recovery resources.

Question 9

Waste in a Global Context

Answer 9

WASTE IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT:

• Electronic waste is highly toxic and difficult to recycle. As a result, nations like the United States often ship their waste to China, India, or Pakistan to be recycled or dumped.
• This flow of waste from wealthy to poor is a concern of environmental justice.

Question 10

Functionalism

Answer 10

FUNCTIONALISM – Structural functionalism focuses on the macro-level structures and processes that shape society. In environmental sociology, a structural functionalist perspective directs our attention to the organization of society and how it might create environmental problems.

• Our society is organized in ways that encourage some behaviors while making others more difficult.
  
  • EX: We tend to do what is best for us (most convenient or productive) regardless of the environmental cost. Avoiding these things would put us at a disadvantage relative to those who embrace them.
• We have become too dependent on environmentally bad behaviors because they are easier and cheaper.
  
  • EX: driving a car to work is simply much better for our INDIVIDUAL lives to resort to the hassle of public transportation.

Policy Implications of Structural Functionalism:

• We need to focus on reorganizing society to make bad environmental behaviors less appealing and more inconvenient.
  
  • EX: raising the economic costs associated with them, or making good practices cheaper and more convenient.
    
    • We could also make bad practices much less harmful.
• We’ve basically described the ecological modernization (EM) perspective.
• ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION THEORY (EM) – suggests that we can find solutions to our environmental problems by altering our current economic system to encourage good environmental behaviors.
  
  • Rather than rejecting modernization, as some environmental sociologists do, we should solve problems by modernizing further.
    
    • The greatest benefit of the EM approach is that it does not ask for massive changes to people’s lifestyles or challenge the cultural practices they enjoy. It does not require any radical economic restructuring. The changes are subtle and organic and can occur without significant discomfort.
• The government can offer incentives for green changes too.
  
  • EX: The “cash for clunkers” program, or Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), was an EM-style program introduced in 2009 in the United States to subsidize the purchase of high-efficiency vehicles when the buyers traded in old low-efficiency vehicles.
    
    • Fuel is expensive, and people are willing to pay more for a clean environmental conscience, so high-efficiency technology is being developed and refined, and cars that utilize it are increasingly accessible and affordable.
      
      • Critics say EM theory may not be aappropriate for nonindustrialized nation since the process it would take to reach the necessary level of modernization could be disastrous for them.
  • Ironically, electric cars still require considerable energy and resources in their manufacture and may not be using nonrenewable energy depending on the electricity available to their owner (though it is still much better for the environment overall).
    
    • The ideal would be to BOTH switch to electric cars AND use renewable electricity sources.

ECOLOGICAL MODERNIZATION THEORY: The theory that society can become environmentally sustainable through the development of greener technologies and government regulations.

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION: Using the consumption of goods to display social status, like prominently carrying a designer handbag.​

CORPORATE GREENWASHING – The practice in which organizations advertise themselves as green when their actions are not.

• EX: “clean” coal technology and oil-drilling innovations might reduce the environmental impacts of the coal and oil industries, but these will never be green industries.

Question 11

Conflict Theory

Answer 11

CONFLICT THEORY – Society’s structure is tied to the distribution of materials and resources.

• For the conflict theorist in environmental sociology, materials are pulled from the environment and used to generate profit, essentially without being paid for.
  
  • Our economic system rewards companies for producing more and reducing costs, which encourages them to exploit the environment.
• From the conflict perspective, we could think of the environment as a type of labor: It generates goods, such as wood and steel, and services, such as waste disposal. The free ‘labor’ of the environment then simply participates in the class conflict inherent in capitalist production. Why is environmental labor free for these companies when there is a CLEAR COST to society?
  
  • First, the environment produces goods but has no ability to negotiate prices for those goods.
    
    • An apple left unpicked can feed insects, attract wildlife, and fertilize the ground when it falls. But without price negotiation, most environmental products are treated as free because they cannot be withheld.
  • Second, many environmental consequences of human activities are shared and do not fall specifically on the individuals who caused the problems. Once carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is in the air, there is no way to contain it and attach it to the exact producer who put it there.
  • A third reason why environmental labor is free is that many actions don’t show their environmental consequences for many years, sometimes centuries.

TREADMILL OF PRODUCTION – Resources and work generate goods that are sold for a profit, the profit is reinvested into the system, and waste from the production process is deposited back into the environment.

• The ToP perspective suggests that the capitalist economy is organized to promote cost-cutting and expansion, so the environmental benefits of new technology will always be limited.
  
  • Rather than solving environmental problems, ToP theorists say, ecological modernization is more likely to perpetuate them by supporting a fundamentally unsustainable economic system.
• What we need is a different economic system. We need to get off the treadmill of production.
• ToP PERSPECTIVE illuminates;
  
  1. Even if we reduce costs through technology and efficiency, we still cannot reduce the environmental impact to zero.
  2. Competition in capitalism is so fierce that even if technology improves the efficient use of resources, firms will still be compelled to find the cheapest supply sources.
  3. The treadmill is always accelerating: If firms get more from their resources, they won’t necessarily use less but instead might expand production. If a firm can use half the amount of energy to make the same number of cars, for example, why not double the number made and sell them for less.

Policy Implications of the Conflict Perspective:

• We must deal with the problems of consumption, competition, labor, and environmental degradation simultaneously, by addressing the capitalist economic system.
  
  • One solution is to legislate labor and environmental protections.
• Globalization has curbed governments’ ability to resolve environmental abuses and labor exploitation through governance because companies simply shop for the country with the fewest regulations and the cheapest labor.

For conflict theorists, the plight of the environment is closely tied to the plight of labor.

• One of the only ways to resolve environmental problems from a conflict theory perspective is to drastically reduce inequality among people – GLOBALLY – while developing a strong, environmentally protective state.
  
  • Reducing inequality would reduce the availability of near-slave labor and lax environmental regulations.

Question 12

Symbolic Interactionism

Answer 12

SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM – People attach different meanings to environmental problems depending on who they are and what they want to accomplish.

• Symbolic interactionist theorists say that every environmental problem is really a conflict over the meanings different groups attach to an environmental phenomenon.
  
  • These meanings shape what is deemed an appropriate response to the phenomenon.
    
    • EX: consider the bulk movement of undesirable materials from one site to another. When is this called waste management and when is it constructed as an environmental problem?
      
      • The disposal of waste becomes an environmental problem when it is seen as a threat to our health, our sense of justice, or our vision of a beautiful landscape and functioning ecosystem.
• SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM – Highlights the ways we give environmental materials meanings through social interactions, even though we often think those meanings are inherent in the things themselves.
  
  • EX: The concept of global warming is necessary for us to know what we are seeing and interpret it and give it meaning. Hotter days become much more ominous when the concept of global warming is available to us.
• Gaining knowledge is an active process of culture, closely bound up in our sense of identity, which we can call the CULTIVATION OF KNOWLEDGE – The way people build environmental knowledge depends on the social foundations from which they are building.
  
  • ​EX: If you are a city planner, the concept of global warming might include adaptations that relate to things like sea level and water supplies. If you are a manufacturer, public discussion about global warming may seem accusatory and uninformed about business practices, or it may make people feel on edge.
    
    • The result can be a clash of visions in which people are not simply debating global warming but defending their identities.
    • EX: In her work on logging on the northwest coast of Canada, for example, anthropologist Terre Satterfield (2002) suggests that debates about logging are about much more than trees and environmental preservation; they are about the identities of local groups and their claims to legitimacy in the area.

THEORY OF FRAME ANALYSIS – Frame analysis suggests that people present issues in ways that elicit particular types of responses.

• Framing is about the framer’s ability to convince people to see things the same way as the framer so they will form the same opinions.
  
  • EX: fishermen frame a river with deformed fish as contaminated and threatened by economic interests, while the oil company upriver frames the river as healthy and an economic resource for oil production.
    
    • If the public accepts the fishermen’s frame, it not only produces a tangible outcome—such as new legislation about acceptable levels of contaminants—but also signals that the fishermen’s knowledge is valid and that the fishermen have more right to fish than the oil company has to pump oil.
• FRAME ALIGNMENT – Presentation of information in a way that is in line with the knowledge the frame recipient already has.
• People generally like information that fits with what they already know, and they don’t like information that challenges their perceptions of the world.
  
  • Clashing of incongruent information COGNITIVE DISSONANCE – Rather than hold on to contradictory information, people will often reject it.
• Environmental activists need to frame ideas in particular ways so that others can hear and consider those ideas.

Policy Implications of Symbolic Interactionism:

• If environmental problems are at least partly about conflicts between social groups and threats to the identities of their members, then we can reach resolution only when we recognize and legitimate the different perspectives.
  
  • In other words. Communication that convinces organizations to take care of the environment has to be done in a way that is nonthreatening to the identity of those you’re trying to influence.

Question 13

Risk Society

Answer 13

RISK SOCIETY – Some basic risks are unavoidable. Our choices of which risks to take are influenced by our culture, the benefits associated with the risks, and the costs of avoiding them.

• If we know more about the risks, we can use them better and without major impacts on the ecosystem.
  
  • The trick is to make more educated decisions about what we are using and to what effect.
• Increasingly, modernization is accompanied by anxiety and caution, and the sense that projects should be undertaken only after scientific testing and due consideration.

REFLEXIVE MODERNIZATION – Modernization that is increasingly reflective about what it is doing.

• No longer confident that all technological changes will necessarily be for the best, we debate and investigate and insist on those open eyes.

Beck (1992) suggests this form of modernization is part of what he calls the RISK SOCIETY.

• Risks are everywhere and play an increasing role in shaping society. The ability to avoid risk exposure creates a new way in which people are divided into social groups, replacing old systems that differentiated them by their access to money and other economic resources.
• Whereas conflict used to arise over the distribution of goods, with everyone wanting more, it now arises over dodging bads and wanting less of the undesirables.
• Our fear is spurred by our inability to predict the future and our lack of assurance that the government can and will protect society.
  
  • If risk is about a subjective evaluation of whether the benefits of some activity are worth the potential future costs, leaving it up to the government seems foolhardy.

RISK CONTRACT – Implicit understanding that government will enact rules to make sure people will be protected as society bounds progressively forward.

• Governments still have rules about acceptable levels of risk, but people in the risk society are less likely to place their faith in these figures.
  
  • New scientific studies often find that what we knew before was wrong, and different people can draw different conclusions and even significantly different facts from the same phenomena.
    
    • EX: The industry scientists say one thing, while those employed by the environmentalists say another. Sometimes it seems there’s science to back up any claim, and all you need to be right are some really deep pockets.
• Even if our science were flawless, there is still the problem of averages. What we consider to be an acceptable level of risk is based on average exposure, but some people are much more exposed or susceptible than others.
  
  • Rejecting the role of government is also wrong. Information about risk levels may not be easily available, and the burden of negotiating those risks shouldn’t fall entirely on the shoulders of the individual.
• Sees risk as the great equalizer.

Question 14

Ecological Dialogue

Answer 14

ECOLOGICAL DIALOGUE – The material world and the ideal world interact and inform each other, together creating the world in which we live.

• Assumes that the world we experience is not a complete or stable thing that we can pin down – but there are moments when we can know it better, with greater depth and richness.
  
  • Largely assume that environmental problems have an objective, scientific grounding.
• This is called REALISM, and it is often contrasted with SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM.
  
  • Realists argue that we can separate ecological problems from human relationships and social organization.
  • Constructionists claim that environmental problems are human problems.