M10: Environment, Climate Change, and Health Flashcards
What is Sociology of the Environment?
What are the 3 Keys?
- Concerned with “how humans (their cultures, values, and behaviours) affect the physical environment and how the physical environment affects human activities”
- Examining how they are mutually influential.
- Foci of sociology of the environment:
1. Consequences of human action
2. Influence of the environment on humanity
3. Social policies
What are Products and Consumption-related
Environmental Harms?
- Petrochemical Industry - Manufactures a wide range of synthetic products (e.g., plastics, paints, detergents, pesticides, rubber) -> Effects on air, land
- Carson’s Silent Spring: Silence of the birds – their song stifled by pesticides
- Pollution travels -> vast impact - >Pollutants from Indiana have been found in the breast milk of women living in Nunavut
What is Environmental Racism?
List some Examples.
A term used to describe how disadvantaged communities are disproportionately exposed to environmental health factors and disasters brought about by government and/or industrial policies
- Illustrates the relationship between race, class, and exposure to environmental hazards
- Indigenous communities in Canada: 28 BWAs + DNCs as of Aug 23, 2023
- Africville in Halifax, NS (history; coverage)
- Toxic chemical levels prompt partial evacuation of Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Oct 3, 2024)
- Imperial Oil Kearl Lake spill in northern AB near First Nations communities (March 2023)
10 ways climate change affects our health
Climate hazards are disproportionately and unfairly distributed among the most vulnerable social groups.
This is not a coincidence.
Example #1: 2021 BC Heat Dome
Ex 2: Addressing the Urban Heat Island Effect through an Equity Lens:
richer areas have more green, open spaces
more traffic, less green
What casues hotter related deaths/injuries?
What is redlining?
Factors accounting for hotter temperatures:
Income
Health Disparities
A/C possession
Air Quality & Asthma
