Environmental Sociology

Egalitarianism

"justice as fairness" -John Rawls

Positional Goods

-"In order to make a man or boy covet a thing , it is only necessary to make that thing difficult to attain" -Difficult-to-attain things is positional goods. -Goods whose desirability is predicated at least in part on short supplies, limited access, higher process, and consequent social honor or position -Helps us to understand why some goods and not others become the objects of conspicuous consumption. -Goods that are in short supply, or can be made to be in short supply, are most likely to take on positional importance. E.g. lakefront property -The owners of positional goods may deliberately attempt to limit access to these goods, increasing their own positional advantage -Helps us understand the social pressures that sometimes result in the extinction of valued species of plants and animals -Can be extended to our concept of beauty. If scarcity makes something desirable, then, in a way, scarcity makes something beautiful

NIMBY

-"Not-In-My-Back-Yard" responses to environmental issues. -NIMBY is used as a utilitarian weapon -Individuals looking out for themselves with a knee-jerk reaction against change.

Precautionary Principle

-"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause-and effect relationship are not fully established scientifically" -"If one is embarking on something new, one should think very carefully about whether it is safe or not, and should not go ahead until reasonably convinced it is. It is just common sense." -Look before you leap. Think before you act. And, most important, talk things out with others. -We'll need some time to do that, which is the controversial part of the precautionary principle- especially for corporations eager to start getting a return on their investment in research and development. -Some people will never be satisfied, critics of precaution said.

CAFO

-"factory farms" -"confined animal feeding operations." -It affects the environment through water and fish. -Consumer in the city doesn't smell the sometimes overpowering stench that drives longtime rural people from their homes and make their properties sometimes impossible. Also doesn't see the manure spills. -Knock family farms off the treadmill -Have put together their own coalitions of interests eager to keep the exchange valves flowing.

Green Advertising

-A new form of sentimental hook is green consumerism -Companies seek to demonstrate through environmental and social good works they support that they are concerned about more than profit. -They also make a sentimental appeal to the guilt we feel over our own consumptive habits -Promote the use of organic and recycled products -The message is that you can consume conspicuously and still be an environmentalist -The environment is a common theme in the ad campaigns of major corporations such as oil companies, automobile manufacturers, etc. "Green-washing" is what its called. -A green halo is good for a corporation's image

Human-induced disasters

-A profound difference between those disasters that can be understood as the work of nature and those that need to be understood as the work of humankind" -Called these human-induced disasters a "new species of trouble". They have several characteristics and interrelated features: 1) The crumbling of trust and the shredding of community ties 2) A chronic social trauma that victims only slowly recover from, if at all 3) A pervasive sense of dread about what the future will bring -These new troubles contaminate our minds as much as they may damage our bodies -Whereas "natural" disaster suggest a lack of control over processes beyond the reach of humans, technological disasters suggest a perceived loss of control over process thought to be within a reach of humans and our commitment to car for one another. People find this loss deeply troubling -Technological disasters are understood as preventable

Acid Rain

-Acid rain is still falling from the sky, despite substantial efforts to reduce acidifying emissions of sulfur dioxide and NOx. -These pollutants combine with water in the atmosphere to acidify rain, resulting in direct damage to plant tissues, as well the leaching of nutrients from soil and the acidification of lake waters, which, in turn, affect less capacity to buffer the effects of acid fall out. -The situation is especially severe in northern Europe, where more than 90% of natural ecosystems have been damaged -Technological improvements, international treaties, and domestic legislation have all contributed to a sharp decline in sulfur emissions in most countries. -Industry's nitrogen emissions have been reduced, but these advances have been overwhelmed by increased emissions from cars and trucks as the world comes to rely ever more on these highly polluting forms of transportation

Greenpeace

-Activists; have gone out on the open seas in small rubber boats to put themselves between dolphins a careless tuna industry -"seafood red list" of species, which are commonly sold in supermarkets and restaurants but have a high risk of being unsubstantially harvested -Estimates of extinction rates/threatened species

Rights and beauty of habitat

-An essential part of beauty is the sustainability and justice of what we behold. -Beauty of ecology is to speak about living thing's right to a home, a habitat that is sustainably beautiful and beautifully sustainable

Toulouse factory explosion

-An explosion happened through the AZF fertilizer factory of Toulouse, France -The residential area closest to the plant is one of the poorest districts in Toulouse -The residents discovered for themselves the negative association between who gets the bads and who gets the goods of the environment. Those get the bads typically are those who don't get much of the goods, like decent housing

Factory Farming

-CAFOs -Such "factory farms" for live stock are becoming increasingly common throughout the industrialized world, despite concerns about their implications for human health, animal health, economic justice, and the environment

Green Christianity

-Christianity has often been at odds with science. -Everything has a right to "be fruitful and multiply" -Dominion is to have responsibility, not domination

Patriarchy

-Common Western tendency to consider women as being closer to nature than men -

Grassroots movement

-Conflict based approach -Avoid friction is fiction. If something worth doing that hasn't been done, it is probably because some powerful interests out there stand in the way. And if there is something worth doing that hasn't been done, it probably won't be easy. -It could potentially be off-putting potential allies and that it works more by fighting fire with fire instead of water. -It resists the material expression of power as embodied in laws, regulations, police, locks, and fence with the material power of people out there on the street, blocking traffic and ready to fill the holding cells. -It begins this double politics by first analyzing the political opportunity structure that it will have to contend with to gain its goals.

Living downstream

-Connections between environment and invironment -Because of the body's perpetual dialogue with an environment on the move, we are all always living downstream of what goes on around us. We may wish sometimes that we were separate. But, we're not. -In matter of who gets what is coming downstream, we are neither separate nor equal. -E.g. Ojibwa Indians (methyl mercury)

Virtual Environmentalism

-Environmentalism you don't have to worry about because you just find yourself doing it anyway. -Lies behind and beneath your daily lives -Ex. walking or taking your bike to work; buying food produced with sustainable production methods; etc. -Doing these things not because you've made a conscious decision to be environmentally good today, but because these were the cheapest, most convenient, and most enjoyable things to do. -Is being environmentally good without having to be environmentally good -Means making environmentalism easy

Dematerialization

-Finding ways to accomplish our economic goals with a lot less material use of ecology's productive capacity -Good ecology is good economics

Frames

-Frame Analysis: This theory describes top-down methods of knowledge cultivation well. -Monologic ways of cultivation depend on framing issues so that people will respond to them as the framer desires. -Frame Alignment: an individual's frames become congruent or complementary with a knowledge cultivation Four Tactics: -Fram Bridging: links frames -Frame Amplification: invigorates the values behind a frame -Fram Extension: widen's a frame's boundaries -Frame Transformation: which reconfigures a frame's meaning -The effort is to link knowledge to social relations, often subtly reshaping them -Frame analysis restates (and reframes) ethos, pathos, and logos -Environmental sociologists have applied frame analysis to understanding the success of the environmental movement and the success of countermovements to environmentalism

GMO food

-Genetically Modified Organisms -In wealthy nations, use has increased with the widespread planting of herbicide-tolerant GMO crops like "Round Up-ready" corn and soybeans -That is, crops with a gene spliced in that lets farmers increase their use of Round Up, a popular herbicide, without hurting the crop. The resulting runoff continues to threaten the safety of many drinking water supplies -Many people see the prospect of genetically modified crops with considerable alarm; some think there is nothing to worry about at all; many find themselves in between -45% of US supported in 2005; 23% in European countries -The global debate over GMOs is a good example for the precautionary principle -With regard to GMOs, precaution is just what we needed -World Health Organization (WHO) current view: "GM organisms contain different genes inserted in different ways," their "safety should be assessed on a case-by-case basis" -2010, at least 169 regions and more than 4,700 municipalities in Europe had declared themselves GMO-free zones

GNP

-Gross National Product -includes overseas earnings -46% of toxic releases in the United States come from the chemical industry, and yet the chemical industry is only 2.9 percent of the GNP of the US

Phenomenological Rupture

-How do social relations of knowledge get going? -Through people's existing cultivation of knowledge, a wrenching experience that causes them to doubt the bases of trust upon which they had long committed themselves of cultivation

Salinization

-Irrigation can also salinize soils. Because most irrigation occurs in parched regions, the abundant sunlight of dry climates evaporates much of the water away

Natural capitalism

-Karl Marx saw a connection between Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and capitalism 1) Life's incredible diversity. To Marx, that sounded like the division of labor advocated by capitalist economists 2) Competition for reproductive success. Marx heard here the echoes of capitalist competition 3) The link between new species and the discovery of new ecological niches. To Marx, this sounded suspiciously like the opening of new markets 4) Selection of the best features from the range of variation that any species exhibits. Marx saw here the idea of technological progress through new inventions. 5) The struggle for survival caused by the tendency of populations to increase unless checked by external constraints. That sounded like Thomas Malthus's theory of population

Colonization

-Much of the rest of the world was divided into spheres of influence that achieved a similar political result -Although it brought some benefits to the affected regions, these relationships, growing in wealth while their colonial possessions, for the most part, languished in poverty

Christianity

-Not only does the economy of the West have religious origins, then, but Western science and technology do as well. -One of the great intellectual revolutions of the Western tradition: the Christian ethic -Farmers at the time were giving up paganism for Christianity -Early Christianity, saw time as linear and nonrepeating -Saw the environment as dead and inanimate, as seperate from the people. -The spirit world of God and the saints was not immanent in nature, but rather transcendent above nature. -Early Chrisitan doctrine taught that God gave the world to human beings to exploit, to change, and re-create, much as God himself could do -Karl Marx

Chernobyl Disaster

-Nuclear energy -Killed several thousand as a direct result of the explosion and is expected in time to cause at least another 4,000 deaths due to radiation exposure. -Most of its victims are yet to be born

Conspicuous Leisure

-Often more subtle -Means the nonproductive consumption of time, an indication of distance from environmental needs-from productive needs-and thus a sign of power. Most obvious example is a long vacation to an expensive place -Most high-status and well-paid jobs are far removed from environmental production, which is why he referred to the wealth as the "leisure class"-not just because they wealthy have more leisure time.

Wilderness

-Often seen, particularly among North Americans, as the fullest expression of the true ends of nature and environmentalism. -Political process has defined it as national parks and other areas of land set aside from deliberate human interference -The highest exemplar of the natural, it is also based on the often forcible absence of and regulation of, one widespread aspect of the natural world: people. -Most wilderness area are routinely patrolled by rangers who monitor boundaries and police human activities within. Often our wilderness parks have been created through the removal of the people who were living there previously. -Establishing a wilderness park may actually increase the number of humans in an area by promoting tourism -The issue of constructing wilderness through forced removal of local people is not limited to developing nations -Wilderness is, in the end, a state of mind more than a state of nature -It is deeply political

Aldo Leopold

-One of the most important figures in the history of the environmental movement. -"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. -Those word's direct our attention to a sense of community-to a sense of ecos, of home, of the habitat we share with so many others -Integrity sounds like justice; stability sounds like sustainability; community is to talk about the interdependence of justice and sustainability for all. -Also directs our attention to a word that is certainly one of the hardest of all to define but is no less significant for that difficulty: beauty -Beauty of Ecology

Smart Growth

-One route to the positive externalities of virtual environmentalism is through structuring real estate development so that what we get built uses land efficiently, promotes community, builds tax base, and is beautiful enough that people will want to live their. -Cities across the industrialized world are discovering its ecological, economic, and social good sense. -The basic idea is to reject the standard polarization between anti-growth naysayers and pro-growth yeasayers -It says, yes, there are serious problems with how development usually goes on in the US. But we can use the power of development forces to "grow out of" sprawl. -Coupled with an architectural style and approach to planning called new urbanism

Modernization Theory

-Poor countries lacked only one thing: development. Modernization would bring it. This is the basic tenet of the influential perspective known as modernization theory

Ulrich Beck

-Risk society

Green labeling

-Schemes that emphasize transparency and traceability, verified through third-party certification -Many of these labels are backed by governmental bodies, such as the organic labels now so widespread in countries across the world. -Many are operated by nonprofits on behalf of industries -E.g. Rainforest Alliance Certified label; Global Good Agricultural Practices

Rachel Carson

-Silent Spring -Because of chemical poisoning, it was a very real possibility that a time could come when spring would arrive "unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where they once were filled with the beauty of bird song. -Widely credited with helping precipitate a great change in public attitudes toward the environment -Modern environmental movement from the publication of Silent Spring

Soil erosion

-Soil erodes from farmland at least 10 times faster than it can be replaced by ecological processes -Exceeds replacement rates on a third of the world's agricultural land

The treadmill of underproduction

-Sometimes producers find themselves undermining the same social and environmental relations that make their production possible. -A more direct and fundamental threat, as the declining capacity of environment and labor to keep output going undermines the very possibility of production. -The efforts of producers to respond to declining production lead to even greater production declines through the destruction of overworked productive capacity -E.g. Fishing

German Green Party

-Spectacular success -No other country has seen the environmental agenda take such a central political role -The continued strength of the German Greens: The Green Party has had presence in the Bundestag since 1983 and was part of the governing coalition from 1998 to 2005. -Connects to Ulrich Beck's risk society

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

-States that climate change is "unequivocal" and that there is "very high confidence" that this change is influenced by humans. -projects that the average sea level will rise another 0.18 to 0.59 meters-half a foot to 2 feet-by the beginning of the twenty-second century, as glaciers and the ice caps melt and as ocean water heats up and expands -Projects that rain-fed agriculture in Africa could be down as much as 50% in yields by 2020 -Estimates that the average temperatures will rise 1.1 to 6.4 degrees Celsius in the twenty-first century, depending on the scenario and model

Anthropocentric Environmentalism

-Suggests that consider our own interests first in our interactions with the environment--interests in sustainability and environmental justice-- -Also that we consider the environment's interests in order to gain our own. -Treat the environment well and it will treat us well in return: hence, a solidarity of interests.

Ecocentric Environmentalism

-Suggests that we consider the environment as a moral entity in its own right and with its own beauty -We see ourselves as apart of that moral entity -Argues that we need to go beyond questions of calculated human interest and recognize the importance of "respect for nature" -We are apart of that beautiful entity for which respect is due

Cornucopian

-Technologic critique of Malthusianism by anti-Matlhusian Julian Simon -A kind of anti-Malthusian argument of which Simon was the most prominent proponent -Claimed that the solution to resource scarcity is actually to increase population -People are the "ultimate resource" -A large number of people means more brainpower and labor to work out technological solutions to scarcity -When confronted with scarcity, we apply our collective brainpower and find new sources of formerly scarce resources and new techniques for extracting them. -In some cases, new technology will allow us to substitute different materials for ones that have become scarce (sustainability) -Critiques: Neglect of social inequality, brainpower is rather dubious, and optimism of technology.

How-to/have-to technology

-Technology is all the techniques we have for gaining our desired ends. The knowledge of how to work a computer is just as much technology as the computer itself. Technology is the "how-to" of life -Technology is also a have-to. Humans make technology and technology makes humans. -A dialogic understanding of tech. points to the social organization of convenience-the way we often set up our lives around a particular way of doing things so that it becomes difficult to do things an other way. -A dialogical understanding of technology this points to the common transformation of a "how-to" into a "have-to" -The transformation of a how-to into a have-to is by no means inevitable. It depends on how we spend our money and allocate our resources

Hunter-gatherer societies

-The Original Affluent Society. An affluent society is one in which all the people's material needs are easily satisfied. -Usually regarded as the poorest of the poor. -They eat well, work little, and have lots of leisure time, despite living of far less than modern people. And not only are the material needs of hunter-gatherers easily satisfied by their manner of living, their material wants are easily satisfied as well-because they don't want much -They are the world's original rich for they are rich in terms of meeting their "lower" needs-and their "higher" ones too -They show it does not take long to gather and hunt (2-5 hrs). They secure a diet that compares very well with our own in calories, protein, and other nutrients. -The rest of the day is for leisure-thus satisfying their "higher" for belongingness, love, esteem, self-actualization, knowledge, and aesthetics -Nearly everyone is some kind of artist. -They have to keep moving house, usually several times a year, when the local hunting and gathering gets thin -The most confounding to modern observers is the apparent disregard in which they hold material goods, despite their seeming poverty -They do not bother with an institution like private property. Individuals do not amass goods and commodities and what goods and commodities there are in the community are equitably distributed and communally held -Have to keep their population low

New Urbanism

-The basic idea is to model new developments on the kind of traditional neighborhoods that cities routinely turn into historic districts. -If we think such areas are nice enough to make special efforts to preserve them and to visit them as tourists, new urbanists ask, why not design all our neighborhoods that way? -In many ways is an old urbanism, the urbanism of a time when cities were built for people rather than cars. And if we build with people first in mind instead of cars, the result will be not only pleasing to the eye but pleasing to the balance sheets of local governments and local developers, because of new urbanism's efficient land use ("smart growth" part) -Advocates that such an approach helps reduce the impact of development on community in the ecological sense and helps promote more interactiveness in the community in the social sense

Nature and gender

-The dualisms of patriarchal reasoning also affect the way women and man experience the environment -On the whole, Western women and men experience the environment quite similarly, some significant differences suggest that we have indeed internalized some of the patriarchal stereotypes. -Men (village) described their natural experiences to me using significantly more aggressive, militaristic and violent imagery. -Women (village) emphasized a more domestic environmental vision based on their experience of nurturing in nature. Ecofeminism -The similarities between men's and women's stories far outweigh the differences.

Jevons Paradox

-The implementation of more efficient means of production can lower costs so much that people demand the product more. -More efficient production can actually increase resource use until in the end there is simply nothing left

Global Warming

-The main scientific controversy is over what we should do about it. -Evidence: Broiling hot summers, drought alerts, rising sea levels, etc. -The last ten years are all among the eleven hottest. It really was colder back then. -Different places are experiencing different changes, which is why the issue is often called "global climate change." -Over the next 100 years we will see major environmental changes: climatic zone shifts, rainfall patterns will change, weather conditions will become more variable, sea level will rise, etc. -Scientists place the blame most squarely on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel. The excess carbon dioxide in turn leads to an increased "greenhouse effect" through the ability of carbon dioxide to trap heat that would otherwise radiate out into space -Other greenhouse gases like methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs, etc. -Will bring about ecological disruptions: coral reef dieback, increased wildfires, increased risk of extinction for up to 30%, oceans to acidic -Increase in heat waves, resulting fatalities and property loss are on the rise -The occurrence of devastating storms and floods is way up

Greening of Capitalism

-The most important feature of our daily lives that we need to reconstitute, argue many, is our economy -Smart growth -New urbanism -Green taxes -Industrial ecology -Dematerialization -Green labeling schemes

NEP

-The new paradigm says humans are a part of nature and need to maintain a sense of balance to live within limits in an interconnected world. -"New environmental paradigm", "alternative environmental paradigm" and "ecological social paradigm" -Mainly known as New Environmental Paradigm

Paganism

-The world is full of spirits. Every rock and tree is potentially animated by something. -Nature is alive, organic, and magical. -It is cyclical and we are apart of it

Participatory Governance

-There is a widespread agreement that governing the ecological society will entail more than the work of government, in the narrow sense of the world -It will require the work of citizens too. -It will require a shift from government to participatory government -participatory development: Involving local people as equal partners and leaders in development projects ensures a sense of ownership-of sentimental commitment- to a project. It is dialogic development

The A-B Split (Attitude-Behavior Split)

-There is often a sharp disjunction between what people profess to value and believe and how they really act. -It is a source of internal struggle & conflict. -It shows the constraints we face and presents us with opportunities--the opportunities for ecological dialogue. -A-B split is really an ideal-material split -Not a problem, but leads us to getting virtual environmentalism going.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank

-They make loans to countries for development purposes. -Structural adjustment -Modernization theory

Paradigm Shift Theory

-This theory suggests that in response to discrepancies between evidence of environmental threats and ideologies that do not consider environmental implications, people are slowly but steadily adopting a more environmentally aware view of the world. -People are becoming more aware of the real material effects that industrial life has on the environment, and their ideologies are beginning to change to match this new understanding -The central feature of the emerging new paradigm is that we no longer see humans as exempt from environmental implications. We are coming to see ourselves as connected to the environment, not separate from it. -The old paradigm, humans are exceptional creatures who are able to overcome environmental limits, and the basic goal of human society is technological mastery over nature for the purpose of wealth creation. This has been viewed as the "human exemptionalism paradigm", "dominant social paradigm", and "technological social paradigm" -Mainly known as Human exemptionalism paradigm -The new paradigm (NEP). See other flashcard -Problems: 1) Problem with putting it into two categories 2) People who give surveys don't say why they chose what they did

Conspicuous Waste/Leisure/Consumption

-Thorstein Veblen -Most of modern culture revolves around attempts to signal our comparative degree of social power through conspicuous consumption, leisure, and waste -We consume, we engage in leisure, and we waste in conspicuous ways to demonstrate to others our comparative power -Conspicuous display is about showing off our wealth. -They are convincing statements of power because they show that someone is above being constrained by the brute necessities of material life and the environment. Because of your wealth and position, you don't have to engage in productive activities yourself. You can command the environment through your command of other people, a command made possible by wealth and social position -All modern materialism can be reduced to just one of these: conspicuous waste. Conspicuous consumption is wasteful, and a leisure is a waste of time -Consumption and waste are generally much more conspicuous than leisure -The greater visibility of consumption and waste is ecologically significant because leisure is potentially less environmentally damaging. Leisure is not always less environmentally damaging however. It depends on how you engage in. For example, travel-air or car -Forms of environmental power

EPA

-U.S Environmental Protection Agency -Requires all federal agencies to work toward environmental justice.

Bhopal industrial accident

-Union Carbide's infamous pesticide plant at Bhopal, India, that killed over 5,000 people in a single night, due to a chemical leak on Dec. 2, 1984 -The main product of the Bhopal plant was the insecticide Sevin; one of the stages requires the production of MIC -This tragedy was a social tragedy -Environmental injustice; human-induced disaster

Conspicuous Waste

-Using excessive amounts of goods or discarding something rather than reusing it or re-paring it. -E.g. Buying the latest model of a consumer item; Running a gas-guzzling power boat; Routinely leaving food on your plates -Those who can afford to waste in these or other ways thus demonstrate their elevation above material concerns.

Exxon Valdez oil spill

-Vice president of Exxon used the image of Mother Earth to minimize the significance of the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdex oil spoll in Alaska -"I want to point out that water in the Sound replaces itself every twenty days. The Sound Flushes itself out of every twenty days. Mother Nature cleans up and does quite a cleaning job" -Used ecofeminism

Conspicuous Consumption

-Visible displays of wealth, such as expensive homes, car, clothes, computers, boats, as well as sheer volume of consumption. -The material visibility of these displays show one's social ability to command a steady flow of material goods from the environment.

Risk Society

-We are in danger, as we seem increasingly to fear, of losing control of our own technological creations. This state of technological doubt and contention that ULRICH BECK has termed a "risk society" -Argues that Western societies are headed this way and it is leading to a major reconfiguring of the basis of social conflict. -Risk society, conflicts shifts to non-class based struggles over pollution and other social environmental bads. -The West are moving from conflicts over the distribution of goods to conflicts over the distribution of bads. -Pollution, technological hazards, ugly development are hard to escape. We are subject to a new form of equality-"equality of risk" -Our confidence is gone in the risk contract. Government not protecting us from hazards. -Public fear that science and scientists are out of control -A risk society is not an optimistic society -About more than the materially risky. It is also about the ideas of risk we bring to bear on the risky. -"Consciousness (knowledge) determines being" -It is your ideas and beliefs that matter most, including worries you may have about the trustworthiness of the social and technological world. We are thus moving from a risky life to a life of risk. -"Risk society means world risk society" -Risk has caused many scholars and politicians to reconsider the significance of environmentalism. -This theory fits Beck's native Germany better than it fits most other wealthy countries (German Green Party)

Cultivation of Knowledge

-What I take to be knowledge is a matter of my identity and a matter of social relations of trust that shape my identity and come from my identity -It's an interactive matter. It's ongoing. It's cultivated within culture and my resulting sense of lines of difference and lines of similarity with others

White-male effect

-White men tend to report considerably less concern with health risks, technological hazards, and environmental protection -White men were considerably more likely to be hierarchical individualist and that these men were the ones responsible for the overall "White male effect" -Find that white men in the US typically rate environmental risk lower than do white women and people of color

CFCs

-chlorofluorocarbons -Potent global-warming forcing that could be reacting with the ozone layer and breaking it down. -CFCs could ultimately make their way into the upper atmosphere and attack the integrity of the ozone layer -Montreal Protocol banned CFCs

Tragedy of the Commons

-economic and environmental disaster -In a world that is limited, ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons -Three examples: traffic, pollution, and overfishing -More like tragedy of individualism -It assumes that no one will notice the overgrazing until it is too late; assumes that the herders do not communicate with one another

Main critiques about Malthus Theory of Population

1) Didn't account for technological innovations especially agriculture 2) Medical advances, people weren't dying of disease and starvation 3) Traditional Western Demographic Transitions

Why and how does Bell argue that population control is a cultural issue?

1) Rights: inherent value, inherent rights of existence 2) Ethnicity 3) Religion 4) Sexuality 5) Gender 6) Family- central source of social identity and feelings of transcendence

Two ozone problems

1) The ozone layer is depleted. Problem up high. 2) Ozone at ground level. Problem down low.

uses of oil and automobile industry, what is surprising in the Bell text

Automobile- an increasingly prevalent example of technology as a social structure. They are the leading cause of death in the United States for ages 1-35. Oil- oil production is declining. It is becoming increasingly acknowledged that oil and gas, especially oil is dirty and dangerous.

How are environmental problems social problems?

Because they are problems that threaten our existing patterns of social organization and social thought. Ecology + Sociology

Positive Externalities

Benefits that were not taken into account in an economic decision and may have wide utility, such as more efficient production or conceivably, an economic arrangement in which individual economic choices promote greater equality, less pollution, and other goods.

Apocalypse

Doomsday. One of the few things that causes people to change.

Externalities

Economic effects not taken into account in the decision making in a market.

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Gives mainly short-term loans to help countries balance their budgets.

Sustainability

How long can we keep doing what we're doing? Three pillars are economy, society, and environment. -New technology will allow us to substitute different materials for ones that have become scarce

Original Affluent Society

Hunters-gatherers society

IPAT

Impact= Population + Affluence + Technology

Montreal Protocol

In 1987, the major industrial countries signed the first of a series of agreements, known as the Montreal Protocol, to reduce the production of CFCs. As a result of these agreements, CFC production for use in these countries ended on Dec. 31, 1995 and ended throughout the world on Dec. 31, 2010

Negative Externalities

Increased inequality and pollution. Costs not included in economic decision making and generally borne by those who did not make the decision

World Bank

Is composed of two arms: 1) The International Development Association- which focuses on the very poorest 2) International Bank for Reconstruction and Development- which now focuses on middle-income nations. They emphasizes loans for major infrastructure projects intended to have long-term effects, like dams, roads, irrigation canals, and schools.

Social Inequality

Not only are the effects of environmental problems distributed unequally across the human community, but social inequality is deeply involved in causing those problems. It is both a product and a producer of global warming, pollution, overconsumption, resource depletion, habitat loss, risky technology, and rapid population growth. It also influences how we envision what our environmental problems are.

Treadmill of consumption

People try to be like wealthy people and consume. Meanwhile, the wealth have gotten even richer. The result is no end to our wants and little improvement, if any, in our satisfaction--despite increased consumption of goods. This whole process of moving materially ahead without making any real gain in satisfaction is the Treadmill of consumption

World Systems Theory

Sees the process of development as inherently unequal, dividing the world into core regions and periphery regions. Because of differences in political and economic power, wealth tends to flow to the core regions from the peripheral ones. They also sometimes point to regions that have both core and periphery, what the call semi-periphery. Core countries- United States, Japan, etc. Peripheral countries- Vietnam, Ecuador, Panama, etc Semi-periphery- Costa Rica, Turkey, etc.

Who get the bads of Environmental Justice?

Social class predicts who get the bads better than race does.

Three central environmental issues

Sustainability, justice, and the beauty of ecology

Normal Accidents Theory

Systems that are more complex and more tightly couple will be more prone to unpredictable

Environmental Sociology

The study of community in the largest possible sense. People, land, animals, water air are all closely interconnected called ecology. It studies this largest of communities with an eye to understanding the origins of, and proposing solutions to, these all-to-real-social and biophysical conflicts.

Utilitarianism

The view that if something for the greater good then it must be okay. Tolerates inequality in the distribution of goods -Can lead to outcomes that are not to everyone's advantage

Anti-Malthusianism

Their moral is this: The poverty experienced throughout the world is not just a population issue. Poverty cannot be understood apart from the history of development, a history that has favored some regions over others. Any claim concerning the relationship between the environment and poverty needs to take this history into account. Critics of anti-malthusianism say the world has plenty of food for everyone. The problem of food shortages is really a problem of access to food and of overconsumption by those who do have access.

Environmental Justice

There is a striking unevenness in the distribution of environmental costs and environmental benefits--in the distribution of what might be termed environmental bads and environmental goods. Some examples are global warming, seal level rises, ozone depletion, acid rain, etc.

Who gets the goods of Environmental Justice?

These patterns are usually closely associated with inequality in the distribution of wealth.

Traditional Western Demographic Transitions

Three stages: 1) High birth rates, high death rates (Pop. would be flat ----) 2) High birth rates, low death rates. 3) Low birth rate and high death rate

Treadmill of Production

To maximize profits, each firm tries to produce more goods more cheaply than the others.Merely making a profit isn't good enough. A firm continually needs to maximize its profits or investors will withdraw their support and put their resources in a firm that does. As a result, it increases production, extraction from the environment, and third world/poor environment is affected.

Commodification

Transforming use value into exchange value. Example: if you have sex with your loved one; it is use value. Have sex with prostitute, exchange value. Bottled water another one.

Malthus Theory of Population

Unless checked in some way, population growth tends to continue until it runs up against environmental limits, causing poverty, hunger, misery, and resource scarcity. The eventual result is a population crash. He believed it is some inevitable, beyond our control.

Capitalism

Wealth/profit from producing things/services. Exchange value versus use value.

Globalization

a multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch, and intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between the local and the distant. -The richer you are, the more happy you are. MYTH -The poorer you are, the more happy you are. MYTH -Although the poor are poor, they are happy. MYTH

hyperglobalizer

in favor it, promote it. Ex: Pres. Clinton

Environmental racism

social heritage differences in the distribution of environmental bads, due to either intentional or institutional reasons -People of color are more likely than not to live in communities with hazard wastes -African Americans and other people of color were 2 to 3 times as likely as other Americans to live in communities with commercial hazardous waste landfills