CONTENTIOUS ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

Contentious Environmental Issues

Contentious Environmental Issues

Introduction

The foregoing work on societal awareness of environmental problems can be technically considered as the sociology of environmental issues, but in recent decades it has become common to find research that clearly involves investigations of societal-environmental interactions or relations. While sometimes involving examinations of perceptions and definitions of environmental conditions held by differing interests, such work is at least implicitly and more often explicitly “realist” in orientation—and clearly ignores the Durkheimian dictum that social facts be explained only by other social facts that hampered early environmental sociology. Rather than problematizing environmental claims, this work typically investigates how changing environmental conditions (often in interaction with social factors) produce societal impacts or, more commonly, how social factors affect environmental conditions.1 Although space constraints prevent us from providing a comprehensive review of such work, we highlight environmental sociologists' contributions to three particularly important topics: the sources of environmental problems, the impacts of such problems, and the solutions to these problems.

Contentious Environmental Issues

Given that environmental sociology emerged in response to increased recognition of environmental problems, it is not surprising that a central concern of the field has been to explain the sources of environmental degradation and why such degradation appears endemic to modern industrial societies. Early work often involved analyses and critiques of the rather simplistic views of the causes of environmental degradation that predominated in the popular literature, particularly monocausal explanations highlighting population growth emphasized by Paul Ehrlich or technological development stressed by Barry Commoner. The ecological complex or POET model (highlighting relations among population, technology, social organization and the environment) was used to explicate the competing explanations and point out the limitations of their narrow foci.

Finer-grained analyses of the linkages between economic activity and environmental degradation are needed to examine the validity of the treadmill model's assumption of an inevitable relationship between the two. Two examples of such analyses include Andrews and Bob (2005) work suggesting that tiny fractions of the American industrial economy, often single plants within an industry, account for an enormously disproportionate share of pollution, and work by Grant and his colleagues showing that large chemical plants and those that are subsidiaries of other companies account for a disproportionate share of toxic releases. In addition, growing recognition of the importance of consumption in contemporary societies raises questions about the treadmill model's dismissal of consumer behavior.

The rapid growth of work on environmental issues by WST proponents in the past decade has included both longterm historical analyses of environmental degradation (Andrews and Bob, 2005) and the role of ecological factors in capitalist development, and a spate of cross-national empirical studies investigating the relationship between countries' positions in the world system and, for example, national levels of deforestation (Brulle and David, 2006), CO2 emissions, and ecological footprints. These large-scale, cross-national studies—typically finding that core nations contribute disproportionately to global levels of environmental degradation—complement more narrowly focused analyses of the export of both hazardous wastes and polluting industries from core to peripheral nations, as well as the export ...