Chapter Summary for Chapter 5
The environment qualifies as a sociological issue by virtue of the fact that (a) natural disasters affect people in unequal ways – poor individuals and poor countries are more vulnerable – and (b) many environmental threats are in part the result of human behaviour and sociology makes sense of that human behaviour.
‘Nature’ is a complex word with several main meanings. In recent years use of ‘the environment’ has tended to override nature in debates concerned with human-nature relations. Classical sociologists paid little direct attention to the environment and research into environmental problems today has largely been from social constructionist or critical realist perspectives.
Environmental issues of interest to sociologists include air and water pollution, resource use and the production of waste, soil degradation and desertification, deforestation and the introduction of genetically modified foods.
Three examples of renewable resources that are being depleted are water, soil and wood. The main issue with the former is its equitable location and distribution. In the second case, intensive farming threatens to lead to desertification, already affecting large areas of the world. The third is perhaps the best publicized: the phenomenon of deforestation as a result of commercial logging. This has a double significance as the forests constitute not just a stock of resources, but provide a home for species that contribute to the Earth’s biodiversity.
The use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has been controversial, especially in Europe. Opponents of this speculative technology have invoked ‘the precautionary principle’ in their opposition to its initial rapid development.
Currently the major global environmental issue is global warming, or climate change. An overwhelming majority of environmental scientists now agree that the enhanced greenhouse effect is largely anthropogenic, that is, it is caused by human activity. The potential consequences for human populations are serious including rising sea levels and more flooding, desertification and soil erosion, the spread of harmful diseases, poorer harvests and food shortages, unstable climate patterns and geopolitical instability as a result. The Kyoto Protocol to limit and reduce carbon emissions is an example of the international response to global warming.
Sociology has a major part to play in our understanding of environmental problems and issues. Theories of mass production and modern consumerism help to explain some of the deleterious consequences of human activity on the natural environment. The 1970s ‘limits to growth’ thesis was seen as overly pessimistic, but recent United Nations Millennium Ecosystem reports have reached a similar conclusion that there are some natural limits to continuous economic growth.
The concept of sustainable development has become central to political debate and policy across the world’s societies. Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept brings together economic development and environmental protection but has proved very difficult to operationalize in the very different social contexts of developed and developing societies.
Environmental issues have stimulated research into ‘the risk society’. In the work of Beck and Giddens, many of the risks associated with the environment today are in fact ‘manufactured risks’ which effectively bring nature back into sociological research and theorizing.
Ecological modernization is a recently developed perspective that looks to find technological solutions which minimize environmental pollution, enabling a form of green economic growth to continue to provide employment. Ecological modernization also seeks to change markets and economic agents, nation-states, social movements and ecological ideologies in order to transform societies in environmentally benign ways for the future.
Ecological justice movements are concerned with the quality of life in working-class areas and inner-city environments and have diverged from the traditionally middle-class character of environmental movements. Ecological citizenship is the attempt to expand the concept of citizenship beyond political and welfare rights into the right to a clean and sustainable natural environment.
