Chapter 15 - Environment Flashcards
“Anthropocene” period
A new geological era characterized by human impacts on the planet
How sociologists view the environment
As a social problem threatening our current forms of social organization
saving ourselves by addressing environmental degradation
Environmental problems are the consequences of larger social forces and social organizations.
We need to address the way we collectively structure our lives.
Sustainable Development
As defined by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development
“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”
Environmental Sociology
Focuses on the interaction between the social and the natural systems, provides many useful insights to guide us toward sustainability
Ecological footprint
Indicator as a yardstick to assess sustainability. Represents the productive area - expressed in number of “planet Earths” required to provide the resources humanity is using and to absorb its waste.
According to the calculation, we need 1.5 Earths to sustain our current consumption level.
If everyone lived like the average U.S resident we would need 5 earths.
Overshoot situation
using resources at a pace more than the earth’s regenerative capacity
Overall recourse use
Happens in the “background” - infrastructure, power generation, agriculture - beyond individual control
We need to be thinking about larger social forces that shape environmental outcomes and facilitate changes in our communities as well as changing individual behavior
Social Construction of Nature
A category (natural or artificial) or phenomenon (climate change or biodiversity) is understood to have certain characteristics because we agree they do.
Constructivist analysis of the environment
Focuses on the role of ideology and knowledge in understanding our environmental conditions.
Wilderness
Environmental historian Bill Cronon famously traced the concept.
We tend to think of wilderness as the highest idea of nature: pristine, pure, and untouched by humans.
A product of America’s frontier mentality, in which people romanticized the vast and supposedly untrammeled landscape
This understanding of nature is a social construction and a product of North American cultural and historical contexts.
China’s great leap forward
Another example if the social construction of nature.
Environmental disasters that occurred in revolutionary China during the 1950s.
Threatened by Western powers and driven by Marxist ideology, Chinese leader Mao Zedong took an adversarial and extreme stance toward the natural world.
Viewed humans as distinctly separated from nature.
Humans must “conquer” and “defeat” nature to achieve the modernist ideal
Philosophy represented a sharp break from the traditional Chinese emphasis on harmony between humans and nature
Consequence was large-scale environmental and social disasters
Mao encouraged every commune or neighborhood to build furnaces in their backyards to produce steal and to fuel these there was massive deforestation
Championed unscientific agricultural practices including eradicating sparrows - birds that eat grain - and overusing fertilizer resulting in famine and irreversible ecological damage to Chinese soil
Constructing environmental problems
a social constructivist approach
Constructing Environmental Problems
A social constructivist approach.
Examines how we come to perceive and define certain issues such as air pollution, the ozone hole and climate change as environmental problems.
Ex. Ozone hole rather than ozone thinning or depletion
Ozone hole
ozone layer is a lot thinner
metaphor is a powerful representation of the problem - that hydrofluorocarbons from aurosol sprays, refrigerants and so on were severely thinning the ozone layer that protects us from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays.
“Ozone hole” caught many peoples attention
Montreal Protocol
limits ozone-depleting substances
widely recognized as the most successful international environmental agreement and effectively phases out the ozone depleting substances
Paris Agreement
2015
UN - nations across the globe agreed to work to limit further warming of the world to within 2 degrees celsius
In 2017 Trump said he would pull US out
Paradigm shift theory
sociologists Riley Dunlap, William Catton, and their colleagues have come up with.
Distinguish two sets of worldviews
The old “human exemptionist” paradigm (HEP) - reflect an anthopocentric, human-centered relationship with the environment
The “new environmental paradigm” (NEP) - views humans as only part of the complex ecosystem and subject to ecological limits
Environmental issues tend to be an elite concern. Women and minority groups rate higher concern.
People in more dominant positions tend to have better resources to protect themselves from environmental risk and thus may care less about the environment.
Risk perception
the tendency to evaluate the danger of a situation not in purely rational terms nut through the lens of individual biases and cultures
ex. fear of flying when car crashes are more common
Attitude-behavior split
When we think one way and act another, does not mean that we are hypocrites.
It does reveal that we live in a society and do not have compete control over the everyday choices we are offered.
Many environmentally significant decisions, such as fuel economy standards, food safety regulations, and city planning, happen at the societal level. As individuals, we can only control a small part of our environmental impacts.
An Essay on the Principle of Population
Essay by English philosopher Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus ([1798] 2007) noted that populations tend to grow exponentially—that is, more and more rapidly—while food supply only increases linearly—that is, at a steady rate. If population growth is left unchecked, he predicted that society will end up with misery, starvation, and resource scarcity. This is the so-called Malthusian catastrophe.
proved largely incorrect. Yet his ideas never faded away completely.
As the ecological economist Herman Daly said, “Malthus has been buried many times…anyone who has been buried so often cannot be entirely dead”
The blind spot of Malthusianism lies in its overly deterministic view on population and the environment. Human interaction with the environment is mediated through technologies that change constantly. Malthus failed to foresee the tremendous productivity growth in agriculture that supports an ever growing number of people.
Demographic transition
Malthusians overlook
associated with modernization
Looking at population growth trends, demographics have noticed that in traditional societies, the birth rate (number of births per 1,000 people per year) and death rate (number of deaths per 1,000 people per year) are both high causing the pop to stay in a stable state. As societies go through industrialization, the death rate tends to drop before the birth rate bc of improvements in health and increases in food supply. As the birth rate is higher than death rate the pop increases
In the last stage of economic development, social norms finally catch up with the improved standard of living, causing the birth rate to drop to a level similar to the death rate. The population thus stabilizes again. Some scholars optimistically predict that the global population will cease growing by 2050.
One lesson is particularly worth mentioning: scholars consistently find that the status of women is the best predictor of the fertility rate. The more power women have in society, the fewer children they tend to have. Therefore, women’s empowerment is not only a gender issue but also an environmental issue.
Production and the Environment
To sociologists, environmental degradation is not a result of too many people in the world, nor is it due to individuals’ bad intentions or technological failures. Instead, it is a product of our unsustainable economic system.
Externalities
are all the side effects—things people fail to incorporate in their decision-making—of economic activities. Externalities can be both positive and negative
Ex. Positive - flowers outside your home. Negative - pollution
Capitalism
has an ecologically destructive tendency. In the capitalist system, firms do not simply produce goods and services; they try to maximize profits. To do so, they have incentives to externalize the costs
Many other schools of Marxist-inspired analysis have reached the same overall conclusion—capitalism is the ultimate cause of our ecological crisis. According to capitalist logic, the system must continue to grow, seeking to secure raw materials, cheap labor, and new markets. The mantra of growth and accumulation inevitably will run into the physical limit of finite natural resources
.
Treadmill of production
Marxist-inspired conflict theory
On the capitalist treadmill, firms must use and degrade natural resources to sustain their profits. Because of the constant pressure to expand profits, they are forced to compete with others by running faster and faster, producing more and more, and drawing ever more resources. If they don’t, they will go bankrupt and “fall off the treadmill.” In this process, firms face no choice but to externalize environmental and social costs or lose out to firms that do.
Eco-Marxists
Marxists who focus on the environment argue that if we do not steer our societies toward an alternative economic system, they will collapse. Their solution is a massive radical movement toward a system that focuses on communal needs and the balance between human and nature.
Ecological modernization theory
unlike eco-Marxists, maintain that societies have the potential to develop “ecological rationality”—decision making that incorporates ecological concerns—to replace the old model of modernization, which
focuses only on economic growth and industrial development. The proponents of ecological modernization argue that humans are smart enough to internalize the negative externalities—to shoulder the costs of conducting their business in ecologically friendly ways—through new technologies, social innovations, and better management. Researchers found that some European countries, such as Germany and the Netherlands, have successfully achieved economic growth while lowering environmental impact through better product design, clean technology, and government incentives for innovation.
Argue that a different modernization is possible for the United States and the rest of the world without having to overthrow capitalism
Consumption
Does not happen in a vacuum
There are many factors going into what you buy, why you buy, and how you buy. For sociologists, the central tenet is that consumption is not an individual but a social process.
The Theory of the Leisure Class.
Thorstain Veblen’s book
1899
Came up with the concept of conspicuous consumption - the practise of spending money for the purpose of demonstrating or enhancing social prestige
has ecological implication as this competition creates momentous to constantly elevate te consumption level leading to increasing environmental degrdation
Green consumption
allows consumers to “vote with their pockets” and to engage in social change through the marketplace
if you care about the environment, you should shop accordingly
Issues with ecololabels
certification process is expensive and privileges larger producers
Credibility - For consumers, labeling does not always provide useful information but sometimes gives us an illusion that we’re choosing something environmentally friendly. Do you know the difference between Rainforest Alliance certified and U.S. Department of Agriculture organic? Even worse, the standard may be so loose that the ecolabel does not mean anything.
Greenwashing
a public relations campaign that promotes an environmentally friendly, positive image whose environmental practises are not in line with the image
Inverted quarantines
In his book, Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves, Andrew Szasz (2007) uses the term “inverted quarantine” to illustrate this idea. Normally, we quarantine bad things from our clean environment, but as our environment is increasingly polluted, many of us have started to quarantine ourselves from the unsafe environment. For example, people worried about the chemicals in the municipal water supply protect themselves from it by buying bottled water.
efforts distract us from carrying out necessary political actions (not to mention that some bottled water is just tap water put into bottles or the environmental harm created through producing, packaging, and distributing bottled water). He points out that we could be using our resources more effectively by pressuring elected officials to pass legislation to improve the quality and infrastructure of public water supply systems.
Flint Michigan
mid-2014
the city switched its municipal water source from the Detroit water system to the Flint River. Before long, local citizens started to complain about the strange color and foul smell of the tap water. A few months later, people began to report rashes, hair loss, and vision problems. It turns out the water is seriously contaminated with lead—a persistent pollutant that can accumulate in the body over time and have devastating effects. The Environmental Protection Agency has set a goal to eliminate lead in drinking water and takes action if it is higher than 15 parts per billion. In some homes in Flint, the lead level was as high as 10,000 parts per billion.
Government officials did not, at first, take the concerns of Flint’s residents seriously. They allowed residents to continue to drink lead-tainted water. It was not until researchers from outside the community verified the lead poisoning—and held a news conference about it—that government officials began to acknowledge and address the issue
a case of environmental injustice. Flint residents, who are majority Black or African American and among the most impoverished of any metropolitan area in the United States, did not enjoy the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards as that provided to other communities.
Environmental Racism
Flint is no isolated case. Across the United States and the world, low-income and minority communities do not receive the same level of environmental protection as Whiter, wealthier communities. As in the case of Flint, Michigan, they often bear disproportionate burdens of environmental harm.
Environmental Justice
Sociologists focused on work to document the social inequality in the environmental realm and promote more just environmental policies and laws
The environmental justice movement
has the goal of ending the practise of using poor and racial and ethnic minority areas as dumping grounds for environmental hazards
Executive Order 12898
12898, signed by President Bill Clinton, mandates “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws.” The recognition of environmental justice issues has led mainstream environmental groups to make greater efforts to diversify their membership and goals.
Sacrifice zones
2007). In many cases, when a company appears to make progress in its environmental practices in developed countries, it just moves the dirty parts to developing countries, where the costs of pollution are cheaper.
Ex. Olusosun landfill in Nigeria is one sacrifice zone. The largest waste dumpsite in Africa, it is located right in the heart of Lagos, the largest city in Africa. Approximately 500 container ships, each carrying about 500,000 used computers and other electronic equipment, enter the port of Lagos every month from the United States, Europe, and Asia. Workers, very often with their bare hands, strip down discarded electronic devices to recover the lead, gold, copper, and other metals they contain. During the process, they are exposed to harmful metals like lead and mercury, and the nearby soil and water bodies are all contaminated, too
Environmental Justice Atlas
Online data collection
currently lists more than 2,700 cases of environmental injustice incidents around the world, ranging from land grabbing and mega-mining to biodiversity and conservation conflicts. Environmental issues are essentially a problem of global inequality, with lower income people burdened with more environmental hazards than others.
Climate Justice
highlights the fact that climate change relates to global inequality, in its creation and its impact. Countries have made vastly different contributions to the problem. The per capita carbon emission of the average person in the United States is about ten times that of the average Indian! Furthermore, if we look at the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, most were released by Western countries over the history of industrialization,
