Environmental sociology is the scientific study of human causes and consequences of environmental problems, examining how these issues are defined, understood, and responded to through two main approaches: realists who focus on the material world and objective reality of environmental problems, and constructionists who study how people socially define and interpret these problems; key themes include the relationship between individual agency and social structure, environmental justice (where marginalized communities disproportionately bear environmental burdens), and the multi-level nature of the field spanning global, national, institutional, and individual levels, with practical applications aimed at creating policy improvements and behavioral changes.
Environmental Sociology Explained: Key Concepts and Themes
Added:This video will consider the question, what is environmental sociology? When we take a look at the field what we see is that the field starts from a view that what we call environmental problems are usually caused by humans. They're human-induced, or if you like the term, anthropogenic, which is another another way of referring to a human-induced environmental problems. The field of environmental sociology seeks to explain how these problems are defined, how do people maybe look at these things in the media, through science, through everyday conversation. How are those problems understood, how do people think of them in terms of their their starting points, and their impacts, and then how do people act upon those problems? Do we come up with policies, do we come up with solutions, or do we throw our hands up in the air and say "well it's too big, I can't do anything about it!" Or, do we say "well I just don't choose to believe it's real." These are all types of responses that people have had to human-caused environmental problems. There's two basic approaches in environmental sociology. The realist approach is looking primarily at the material world, so here we're looking at directly those environmental problems that are affecting people, and which people are also causing. The material world implies that there's some kind of objective independent reality that we're trying to study and understand. The other side of the coin is the constructionists. The constructionists aren't so much concerned directly with environmental problems, as much as indirectly with regard to how people define those problems and choose to react to them. We study how we think and form ideas about the material world, using our social imagination, and of course, that includes all of its many problems. In the ideal way of looking at things, problems are constructed subjectively. We have sort of this objective materialist view which looks directly at environmental problems, and then we have this constructionist, subjective view, which looks more at the social understanding and imagination of those problems. Next we'll look at some key themes that define the field of environmental sociology. One of those has to do with the relationship between individuals and social structure. both in terms of understanding the causes of environmental problems and also in terms of understanding solutions. On one hand, humans have agency--that is we have the ability to make choices to act in ways that we want to act. If I decide to stretch my arms out, then I'm going to stretch my arms out, and nothing can stop me, except maybe a really strong wind, or maybe a really low ceiling, or something like that. Those would be structural constraints.
Human agency, as much as we like to think we have perfect freedom to choose to act the way we want, human agency is all oftentimes, and almost always constrained by some kind of social structural rule, policy, something built into the structure itself, technology maybe. It's going to limit our choices and our human agency. Structure, now it's a kind of a metaphor in some ways, when we're talking about a social structure, it's really just referring to the way that society is arranged, and of course, that's going to influence our choices.
To a large degree, that just comes down to different sets of rules. For example, when we're thinking about environmental impacts and these kinds of things, one of the goals is to drive less.
Of course, on one hand, driving a car is an individual choice: people can decide to live their life without a car.
On the other hand, communities that lack public transportation, such as a bus system, or subway, or something along those lines, are very hard to navigate, at least, if they're pretty large communities, in the absence of a vehicle. So, we may have a choice to go without a car, but if we live in a community that doesn't provide a good alternative, then that sacrifice becomes less realistic and we're sort of forced by the structural constraints, to mean we're strongly influenced to buy the car. We see in fact, very commonly, in rural areas this is something that people often reluctantly have to do. In fact, some people have to commute for quite some distance just to work a minimum wage job and to do that, they have to maintain a car. Anybody who owns a car knows that can be a significant burden on your budget, and if you're working a minimum-wage job, it's much easier if you don't have to support a car. But, you don't really have a choice if you live in some remote kind of rural place. So the upshot is: driving is an individual choice, but the structural constraints can make the choice to go without a car very difficult. Another theme is environmental justice, and this has to do with who gets the environmental goods or bads, or benefits and costs, who has the privilege of living near the desirable stuff, and who has the unfortunate circumstance of living near the undesirable stuff, and even the toxic stuff. So that comes down to social organization, and social organization, the way we choose to organize our society, is of course, highly stratified, and that's something that has been observed just as endemic within our social structure.
A number of studies have found a correlation between the racial demographics of a community, as well as class demographics, in relation to toxic waste storage and dumping locations.
What we find is racial and ethnic minorities, as well as those lower on the social class ladder, are more likely to live near some kind of toxic waste.
The other side of that is a racial majority group, white people in the United States, and those from a more middle or upper upper class background, are more likely to enjoy a clean, safe environment. In some ways environmental justice views environmental quality as yet another privilege that those without power do not have access too. Ultimately, who you are is going to influence how you experience the environment, and of course those experiences are going to be very different. Another theme of environmental sociology is practical application. It is true that environmental sociology is a social scientific field and as such it's largely interested in doing research, but there are few who are involved with environmental research that don't also want to see some kind of improvement, some kind of follow-up, somebody making use of that research to either write a new policy or create a new program of some kind that could possibly lead to some improvements. With practical application, the framing of environmental problems should not represent only the dominant narratives.
Many times what we call common sense, which is often the dominant narrative, gets it wrong and we have to be careful about those times and that's something that science in general can help us sort of penetrate through, and raise attention about real problems that are going on. The last thing we'll think about for the field of environmental sociology, is the multi-level nature of the field. There are those who study the global level of environmental sociology, looking at entire countries and multinational corporations. They tend to focus on different types of exploitation and issues of governance and national sovereignty as they pertain to the environment. Of course, international relations are a big part of that. At the national level, environmental sociologists study production, consumption, as well as culture, looking at theories such as the treadmill of production and ecological modernization theory, for instance. At the institutional level, environmental sociologists look at all the different social institutions and the way that they are related to environmental outcomes and also in terms of how they're related to the social construction of environmental problems.
So of course our family is going to play a part there, or education, religious upbringing, the place where we work is going to have a lot to do with how we think about environmental issues, and the military, political structure, economics at the sub-national level are all going to be relevant. At the individual level, environmental sociologists tend to study things like individual attitudes, values, and behaviors, which are of course the subject matter of public opinion research. Next, since environmental sociology is a social science, I think it's important to take a look at what that means. This is the general process of social science where you kind of start off with a a topic of some kind, in this case would be an environmental problem, and then when we do research. We tend to do literature reviews where we look at other studies on that topic or problem. When we're done with that, we see what kind of remaining research questions there are, and then we design our own study. That means we collect data, we analyze the data, and we draw conclusions, and usually those conclusions will evaluate those research questions that we formulated after having read the literature.
Environmental sociology as a social science is theory-driven, that means that we try to use well-developed explanations that don't just apply to one environmental problem, but that apply to several or many, if not all environmental problems. There are three basics families here: the demographic theories tend to focus on population first and foremost, but also look at technology and geography. Then there's the conflict theories, which tend to focus heavily on the political and economic processes in society. Then there's the cultural or constructionist theories that focus on the beliefs, values, and norms which really speak more to the idealist side of things in terms of not so much environmental problems, but the way people think about, define, and respond to those environmental problems. So it's a scientific study of the human causes and consequences of environmental problems.
Again, those are the realists just to kind of revisit this distinction here between realists and idealists and the idealists look at the definition: how do we define the problem, how do we define its causes, and then how do we imagine we could respond to that problem. Maybe that's to do nothing, maybe it's to come up with a new law. But the human response is going to dictate the type of definition. So the practical approach of environmental sociology, again, remember that even though it's a social scientific field, the goal is usually to make some kind of improvement.
That can happen at any of the levels we are talking about. Maybe at the international level that means developing global treaties and agreements. At the national level, new laws and policies. At the institutional level, maybe that leads to new rules and regulations. And, at the individual level, maybe that leads to new types of behaviors, attitudes, or values. That is essentially just a broad overview of the field of environmental sociology.
Thank you!
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