the sociologists’ take on the environmentby chuck laszewski

A common mantra when it comes to studying the environment is

that only a disinterested, dispassionate natural scientist can untan-

gle the natural from the social and thus do things like calculate

carbon emissions or predict climate change.

But to many sociologists, this is precisely the wrong approach.

The sociological approach starts from the assumption that the

natural and the social aren't separate and distinct, but in fact mutu-

ally created and reproduced.

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It's an insight that has profound implications for how allof us—specialists and citizens alike—understand changes inour ecosystems and what we choose to do (or not) about them.

Sociologists analyze the environment and a whole host ofenvironmental issues from a variety of angles. Perhaps the old-est and most notable contribution of sociology to the manydifferent studies of the environment is measuring the harm ofenvironmental degradation and policies on various communi-ties and populations. What researchers observed many yearsago is powerfully and fundamentally sociological: environmen-tal problems are not equally distributed in their impact andconsequence.

Sociologists were among the first to unpack the idea thatsome communities suffer the harmful effects of environmentaldegradation more than others—that people with less influenceor wealth are more likely to bear the brunt of some kind of hazard. “Environmental racism” is the catchphrase, but the ideabehind it—the unequal impact of environmental degradation ondifferent social groups—is the core idea on which the environ-mental justice movement is based.

David Pellow, a sociologist in the ethnic studies depart-ment at the University of California, San Diego, has writtenextensively about environmental racism. Disputes over garbagecollection in Chicago followed the trajectory exactly: Whilecommunity activists fought for better recycling programs andto close landfills in minority neighborhoods,the politicians, many of whom wereAfrican American or Latino, fought to bringthe landfills, hazardous waste dumps, orincinerators into the neighborhoods.

The justification always was that itwould increase the tax base and bring jobsto a depressed area. But as the environmental activists easilygrasped, and as the research bore out, those dirty facilities pro-duced poor economic results and jobs that were hazardous tothe workers, not to mention a new source of toxic emissionsin the neighborhood, Pellow says.

After numerous reports, some by environmental sociolo-gists, proved conclusively that landfills, hazardous wastedumps, and dirty factories were overwhelmingly establishedin poor or minority neighborhoods, President Bill Clinton signedan environmental justice executive order.

While it established an office in the U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Agency, the order and the office unfortunately provided no enforcement mechanism. There is no evidenceany groups have seen businesses or the government makingconcessions on construction locations because of the execu-tive order, notes Sherry Cable, a sociologist at the University

of Tennessee. The unique sociological perspective is that environmental

problems aren’t so much the result of misguided leaders orbad intentions but broader economic forces and social struc-tures. These are frequent targets of analysis and critique byenvironmental sociologists.

Many scholars have called attention to the environmentalproblems caused by global economic interests and forces bystudying the institutions, policies, and practices surroundingthem. One large institution causing environmental mayhem isthe World Bank.

Few institutions can match its reach and power. It wasfounded to funnel money into projects in developing nationsso as to raise standards of living and the gross national prod-uct of those recipient nations. Instead, the World Bank oftenbecomes the paymaster for large projects that do more harmthan good and line the pockets of the already rich or powerful.

Michael Goldman, who studies environmental sociologyat the University of Minnesota, witnessed one such bungledproject while living in western India and working on his dissertation.

The World Bank had lent money to build canals in theThar Desert to bring water to the villages from the Himalayasin the interest of agricultural production and economic devel-opment for the region. Bank officials wrote glowing reportsand made movies for European school students showing how

the 700-mile canal irrigated 2 million hectares of land andturned it green with crops.

In reality, the project was an environmental disaster. Onlythe farmers and villagers along the main canal arteries actuallyreceived water, and those areas were controlled by wealthycity landlords whose profits didn’t even trickle back to the localcommunities. Smaller, less well-positioned farmers saw theircrops die. Small sheep farmers were forced off the land, andthe shepherds, traders, and farmers who had lived off the landthere for generations fell into debt.

It was a familiar story for sociologists in certain ways. ButGoldman decided to study the bank itself and its role in creat-ing such a situation. His timing was good. Environmental andhuman rights activists around the world had taken notice ofthe bank’s poor record and had begun protesting. Thosedemonstrations embarrassed the bank, and its board of direc-tors announced it would change its approach to developmentprojects. It would become a better steward of the earth andwork with villages and nations to produce more sustainable

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Andrew Szasz studied bottled water and developed a theorythat people protect themselves and their families from contami-nation rather than society at large. Photo by Jennifer McNulty

Environmental problems aren’t so much theresult of misguided leaders or bad intentions butbroader economic forces and social structures.

projects, the board announced.But the World Bank’s words, com-

bined with its willingness to work withenvironmental organizations, had the per-verse effect of suddenly allowing projectsinto areas such as the Amazon rain forestand the Mekong River and delta wherethey had been previously kept out. Theresults were disastrous, Goldman says.

One project he wrote about in hisbook Imperial Nature was the construc-tion of hydroelectric dams on theMekong River in Laos. The bank had beentrying to build the dams for years, butprotesters had complained its environ-mental and social impact assessmentswere flawed, performed by the dam-building companies, andbiased toward construction.

To counter that opposition, the World Bank hired environ-mental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Unionof Concerned Scientists to conduct the studies. However, thebank made impossible demands, like requiring a fish study thatwould have taken years if done properly be completed in threeweeks. Worse, the outside scientists didn’t understand the locallanguages, cultures, or political situation.

“It’s the evolution of how critics can be the enablers,”Goldman says. “So the bank has become more powerful. It’sthe ‘greening’ of the bank, but it has disastrous ecologicaleffects. These dams provide electricity for Bangkok, and itfloods biodiversity areas, and the money goes to ministries,not the poor.”

In considering the environmental movement itself, sociologistsstudy activism and social change—how environmental con-cerns receive public attention, how activists and organizationsemerge to advocate for new public policies and broader socialchange, and the impacts these movements have on policy andultimately ecosystems themselves.

We know from sociological research that the citizen-turned-political-activist in response to environmental insults ona community tends to follow a well-documented arc. Residentssee pollution and, assuming the government doesn’t knowabout it, contact the responsible agency. The government doesnothing and the residents become angry. They organize,become political players, and continue agitating until they getaction from elected officials and the offending business.

Cable, at the University of Tennessee, documented thispattern in Middlesboro, Kentucky, where a local tannery wasthe source of pollution.

Mobilization here began with women comparing storiesabout illnesses in their children and livestock, progressed totheir pushing their husbands to do something about it, and

ultimately being surprised when the govern-ment didn’t respond. The process culminat-ed with them attending public meetings,coordinating transportation to the local hos-pital for tests to confirm illnesses that could berelated to the pollution, and eventually run-ning for local public offices.

“They go through an amazing transfor-mation,” Cable says. “What comes out of itis political awareness. They say, ‘I am notgoing to let it happen to me again.’” Peoplewho take on environmental problems in theircommunities begin to recognize other envi-ronmental problems, and the politics behindthem, and are less likely to ignore them, shehas found.

Analyses like these can help activists and scholars betterunderstand how to make protests more effective. But suchcases also highlight the challenges—increasingly more com-plex and abstract these days—standing in the way of broadermovements and change.

For example, Cable explains, mobilizing people to fightglobal warming is difficult because of the complexity of thescience involved and how far removed it is from individual,ordinary citizens. Only scientists and native peoples living nearthe Arctic Circle see the polar ice caps melting—it’s not thesame as watching chemicals pour from a pipe into a local creekor when workers get sick from handling toxic materials.

“The farther it is from the local community, the harder itis for any of us to grasp,” she says.

Sociologists studying the environment have also empha-sized two more traditional movement challenges: leadershipand properly framing issues.

Laurel Holland, a sociologist at the University of WestGeorgia, has studied the role of organized religion in movingcongregants toward caring about the natural world.

The Moral Majority, organized around issues such as outlawing abortion, became a powerful force in American politics and helped elect George W. Bush twice. Now, with the2006 signing of “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call toAction” by more than 80 well-known evangelical Christians,Holland sees the potential for them to turn global warminginto a major issue for their members in the 2008 presidentialelection.

The call to action already has moved the discussion amongleaders from the Genesis charge that humans have “dominion”over the earth to a broader discussion of how humans must bestewards of the earth as part of caring for other people, Hollandsays.

“The first thing you have to do is convince the parish-ioners it’s God’s will and then get them in action,” she says.“Talk about it and do it, talk about it and do it. It starts with

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UC San Diego’s David Pellow hasbecome active with a group fight-ing industrial pollution by provid-ing research about best practices.

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the pastor.”According to Holland, however, it will take more than min-

isters talking about the problem. She surveyed Presbyterianchurches in Georgia about where they stood on environmentalissues. All claimed to be “green” congregations and said envi-ronmental concerns were preached from the pulpit.

Holland then collected data from the churches and whenshe broke down the statistics one thing became clear: Thechurches most actively involved in preventing environmentaldamage were those whose ministers were active in environ-mental organizations such as the Sierra Club. Clearly, this seemsto suggest, movements require not just powerful ideas andcharismatic leadership but also organizations that effectivelyget citizens to take action.

The contemporary environmental movement certainly facesorganizational and political challenges (page 14), but AndrewSzasz, chair of the sociology department at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz, adds to that list the ironies and irrationalities of uncoordinated individual actions by well-mean-ing consumers.

When Szasz studied the consumption of bottled water,he found consumers buy it because they’re aware of the dan-gers of chemicals in our water and food supply. But, they’vereacted by protecting themselves and their families, instead ofsociety at large.

They buy water filters, bottled water,or organic food and then think they’vesolved the problem. In his recently pub-lished book, Shopping our Way to Safety:How We Changed from Protecting theEnvironment to Protecting Ourselves, Szaszsharply questions this response and com-pares it unfavorably to building privatebomb shelters in the early 1960s. It’s whatSzasz has termed an “inverted quarantine.”

Unlike the traditional quarantine where the environmentis considered clean and a few sick people have to be kept outof it, in the inverted quarantine it’s the environment that’s illand people who try to remove themselves from it. With theexception of organic foods, many of the other products con-sumers buy under the assumption they’re protecting the envi-ronment aren’t regulated and there’s no way to know if theyhave any positive environmental impact whatsoever. What’smore, protecting individuals’ bodies by purchasing productsisn’t likely to transform them into environmental activists.

“If you think you have fixed the problem with a water filter, what is the likelihood you will punish a president for veto-ing the water bill?” Szasz asks. “With bottled water, you are notlikely to go through the larger politicization process. They seemto care a great deal about the environment but they don’t doanything about it. They feel distressed and they take the easy

way out, especially if they have disposable income.”Szasz’s research seems to suggest that when it comes to

global warming, middle-class and wealthy Americans will simply endeavor to protect their families and themselves. Ifthey live near the rising oceans, they’ll move farther inland.They’ll ensure their air conditioners are in good working order.If drinking water becomes scarce, they’ll move where it’s moreplentiful. If they take any positive environmental actions at all,it will be individually, such as purchasing a hybrid car or recycling their garbage.

There may indeed be those, though, who are primed to

take the fight further. The question then becomes whetherthey will take up arms and demand that government forcebusinesses to follow the same rules and guidelines they them-selves follow to curb environmental degradation.

At the core of sociological conceptions of and contributionsto environmental studies is the premise that the environmentdoes not exist independent of social life and the human realm.Sociology is concerned not only with the social consequencesof environmental degradation but also with its social causes.

Sociologists help us understand how human societyimpacts natural systems and ecosystems—and vice versa.“Basically, we tell stories, stories of the interaction betweennature and humans,” Szasz says. The story of how societymobilizes—or doesn’t—over global warming and other envi-ronmental challenges is still being written.

One path to ensuring the problems of environmental

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The World Bank often becomes the paymasterfor large projects that do more harm than goodand line the pockets of the already rich orpowerful.

degradation and racism don’t progress unabated is for sociol-ogists to get involved in environmental movements and pub-lic decision-making. Szasz’s work on water consumption is oneexample of studying a phenomenon in an effort to call atten-tion to collective problems. Others are even more engaged.

Pellow, for example, became active in efforts to stem thetide of industrial pollution by providing research about how todo things differently. He has been studying the computer andother high tech industries for years.

One of the most profitable in theworld, the industry has built a “clean”mythology around itself, in contrast to itsIndustrial Age brothers, steel and coal. Butresearchers learned from workers andenvironmental scientists the industry real-ly isn’t as clean as it professed to be, Pellow says. In fact, rightfrom the beginning, they mine the materials they need to manu-facture cell phones, silicon chips, and computers. Environmen-tal impacts continue right through the production line where thetoxic chemicals are used for etching and dangerous metals suchas lead have to be handled and disposed of.

The manufacturing of electronics in this country is oftenconducted by immigrants who don’t understand English welland don’t understand what they’re being exposed to, Pellowfound. It’s a global industry, so often the work is shipped topoorer countries where regulations are non-existent and laborisn’t organized. And as he noted in his most recent book,

Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements forEnvironmental Justice, the toxic wastes from the electronicsindustry invariably finds its way into the natural resources ofthose same poor countries.

Pellow, however, has become part of the InternationalCampaign for Responsible Technology, a network of organi-zations pushing the industry toward safe and sustainable prac-tices, and an international movement has sprung up aroundthese issues and this organization.

“We decided to support the efforts of environmental andlabor groups to push the industry,” Pellow says. “We did moreresearch to point out the good and the bad practices. TheInternational Campaign for Responsible Technology is led byenvironmentalists, worker activists, [and] lawyers. They say a lotof things are not going well here and we need to change it. I’mproud to be part of it.”

Chuck Laszewski is a freelance writer and for 25 years was a reporter at the St.

Paul Pioneer Press, where he covered the environment, among other topics. He is

the author of Rock ‘n’ Roll Radical: The Life and Mysterious Death of Dean Reed.

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“Basically, we tell stories, stories of the interac-tion between nature and humans,” Szasz says.

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