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the sociologists’ take on the environment by 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 all of us—specialists and citizens alike—understand changes in our ecosystems and what we choose to do (or not) about them.

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

Sociologists were among the first to unpack the idea that some communities suffer the harmful effects of environmental degradation more than others—that people with less influence or wealth are more likely to bear the brunt of some kind of hazard. “Environmental racism” is the catchphrase, but the idea behind it—the unequal impact of environmental degradation on different 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 written extensively about environmental racism. Disputes over garbage collection in Chicago followed the trajectory exactly: While community activists fought for better recycling programs and to close landfills in minority neighborhoods, the politicians, many of whom were African American or Latino, fought to bring the landfills, hazardous waste dumps, or incinerators into the neighborhoods.

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

After numerous reports, some by environmental sociolo- gists, proved conclusively that landfills, hazardous waste dumps, and dirty factories were overwhelmingly established in poor or minority neighborhoods, President Bill Clinton signed an environmental justice executive order.

While it established an office in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the order and the office unfortunately provided no enforcement mechanism. There is no evidence any groups have seen businesses or the government making concessions 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 or bad intentions but broader economic forces and social struc- tures. These are frequent targets of analysis and critique by environmental sociologists.

Many scholars have called attention to the environmental problems caused by global economic interests and forces by studying the institutions, policies, and practices surrounding them. One large institution causing environmental mayhem is the World Bank.

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

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

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

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

In reality, the project was an environmental disaster. Only the farmers and villagers along the main canal arteries actually received water, and those areas were controlled by wealthy city landlords whose profits didn’t even trickle back to the local communities. Smaller, less well-positioned farmers saw their crops die. Small sheep farmers were forced off the land, and the shepherds, traders, and farmers who had lived off the land there for generations fell into debt.

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

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

Environmental problems aren’t so much the result of misguided leaders or bad intentions but broader economic forces and social structures.

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

bined with its willingness to work with environmental organizations, had the per- verse effect of suddenly allowing projects into areas such as the Amazon rain forest and the Mekong River and delta where they had been previously kept out. The results were disastrous, Goldman says.

One project he wrote about in his book Imperial Nature was the construc- tion of hydroelectric dams on the Mekong River in Laos. The bank had been trying to build the dams for years, but protesters had complained its environ- mental and social impact assessments were flawed, performed by the dam-building companies, and biased toward construction.

To counter that opposition, the World Bank hired environ- mental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists to conduct the studies. However, the bank made impossible demands, like requiring a fish study that would have taken years if done properly be completed in three weeks. Worse, the outside scientists didn’t understand the local languages, 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’s the ‘greening’ of the bank, but it has disastrous ecological effects. These dams provide electricity for Bangkok, and it floods biodiversity areas, and the money goes to ministries, not the poor.”

In considering the environmental movement itself, sociologists study activism and social change—how environmental con- cerns receive public attention, how activists and organizations emerge to advocate for new public policies and broader social change, and the impacts these movements have on policy and ultimately ecosystems themselves.

We know from sociological research that the citizen- turned-political-activist in response to environmental insults on a community tends to follow a well-documented arc. Residents see pollution and, assuming the government doesn’t know about it, contact the responsible agency. The government does nothing and the residents become angry. They organize, become political players, and continue agitating until they get action from elected officials and the offending business.

Cable, at the University of Tennessee, documented this pattern in Middlesboro, Kentucky, where a local tannery was the source of pollution.

Mobilization here began with women comparing stories about illnesses in their children and livestock, progressed to their 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 be related to the pollution, and eventually run- ning for local public offices.

“They go through an amazing transfor- mation,” Cable says. “What comes out of it is political awareness. They say, ‘I am not going to let it happen to me again.’” People who take on environmental problems in their communities begin to recognize other envi- ronmental problems, and the politics behind them, and are less likely to ignore them, she has found.

Analyses like these can help activists and scholars better understand how to make protests more effective. But such cases also highlight the challenges—increasingly more com- plex and abstract these days—standing in the way of broader movements and change.

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

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

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

Laurel Holland, a sociologist at the University of West Georgia, has studied the role of organized religion in moving congregants 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 the 2006 signing of “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action” by more than 80 well-known evangelical Christians, Holland sees the potential for them to turn global warming into a major issue for their members in the 2008 presidential election.

The call to action already has moved the discussion among leaders from the Genesis charge that humans have “dominion” over the earth to a broader discussion of how humans must be stewards of the earth as part of caring for other people, Holland says.

“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 has become 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 Presbyterian churches in Georgia about where they stood on environmental issues. All claimed to be “green” congregations and said envi- ronmental concerns were preached from the pulpit.

Holland then collected data from the churches and when she broke down the statistics one thing became clear: The churches most actively involved in preventing environmental damage were those whose ministers were active in environ- mental organizations such as the Sierra Club. Clearly, this seems to suggest, movements require not just powerful ideas and charismatic leadership but also organizations that effectively get citizens to take action.

The contemporary environmental movement certainly faces organizational and political challenges (page 14), but Andrew Szasz, chair of the sociology department at the University of California, 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’ve reacted by protecting themselves and their families, instead of society at large.

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

Unlike the traditional quarantine where the environment is considered clean and a few sick people have to be kept out of it, in the inverted quarantine it’s the environment that’s ill and people who try to remove themselves from it. With the exception 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 they have any positive environmental impact whatsoever. What’s more, protecting individuals’ bodies by purchasing products isn’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 not likely to go through the larger politicization process. They seem to care a great deal about the environment but they don’t do anything 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. If they 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 more plentiful. 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 whether they will take up arms and demand that government force businesses to follow the same rules and guidelines they them- selves follow to curb environmental degradation.

At the core of sociological conceptions of and contributions to environmental studies is the premise that the environment does not exist independent of social life and the human realm. Sociology is concerned not only with the social consequences of environmental degradation but also with its social causes.

Sociologists help us understand how human society impacts natural systems and ecosystems—and vice versa. “Basically, we tell stories, stories of the interaction between nature and humans,” Szasz says. The story of how society mobilizes—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 paymaster for large projects that do more harm than good and line the pockets of the already rich or powerful.

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 one example 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 the tide of industrial pollution by providing research about how to do things differently. He has been studying the computer and other high tech industries for years.

One of the most profitable in the world, the industry has built a “clean” mythology around itself, in contrast to its Industrial Age brothers, steel and coal. But researchers learned from workers and environmental scientists the industry real- ly isn’t as clean as it professed to be, Pellow says. In fact, right from 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 the toxic chemicals are used for etching and dangerous metals such as lead have to be handled and disposed of.

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

Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice, the toxic wastes from the electronics industry invariably finds its way into the natural resources of those same poor countries.

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

“We decided to support the efforts of environmental and labor groups to push the industry,” Pellow says. “We did more research to point out the good and the bad practices. The International Campaign for Responsible Technology is led by environmentalists, worker activists, [and] lawyers. They say a lot of things are not going well here and we need to change it. I’m proud 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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