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Preface
My approach for this book was inspired by my experiences teaching undergraduate and graduate-level environmental sociology and environmental studies courses over the past ten years. In recent years, I have noticed a significant shift in student morale. The existential environmental threats we currently face, especially those posed by climate change, are impossible for students to ignore, and many feel powerless and defeated by the lack of meaningful action taken. In my courses, I actively work to counter these feelings, as they only help to ensure our current trajectory. I emphasize potential solutions and alternative pathways. I also find it critical to repeatedly communicate and illustrate that another way and a different future is possible. We are not simply “doomed,” as there are many paths left to choose from, some that offer much more positive social and ecological outcomes than others.
There is tremendous work to be done to correct our current trajectory and steer a course toward the best future possible. Even if this path is through uncharted waters and the challenges are daunting, there is a moral imperative to keep going. We are also in an exciting moment in history, where public opinions have shifted and social movements are challenging the current system. At the same time, powerful groups are using vast financial resources to protect the status quo. In addition, unexpected events, like the Covid-19 pandemic, can quickly reshape what is politically and socially possible. Rather than feeling powerless and dreading the inevitable environmental disasters ahead, it remains critical that we keep working to justly minimize harm. Environmental sociologists continue to play a key role in this work. In this book, I highlight this work and focus on how environmental sociology can help us to address the escalating environmental threats we face and forge pathways for the best possible future.
1 Environmental Sociology: In Uncharted Waters
Environmental sociology is a subdiscipline of sociology that examines the relationships between humans and the entities and processes on Earth that are often lumped together and referred to as “nature” or “the environment.” Dominant philosophical views from the past fortified the use of such terms to refer to what lies outside of the human or social world. In other words, we humans are here in society and “nature” or “the environment” is somewhere else, out there. However, as scientists, philosophers, environmentalists, and many others increasingly have realized, the idea of a separation between nature and society is far from accurate. We must also acknowledge that both “nature” and “society” represent complicated configurations of beings and entities and are concepts that are diverse, complex, and socially constructed.
If there is something called “the environment,” then we live in it, depend on it, and are a part of it. It is where we live, work, and recreate. It includes all life, plant and animal, as well as nonliving things such as soil, rocks, water, and atmosphere. While some who want to protect “the environment” might be thinking only about the nonhuman world, our inherent relationships and dependencies make humans a part of the biophysical community. The idea of a divide between nature and society has perniciously masked these fundamental linkages. The belief that we can take resources from “the environment” and put waste into “the environment” without any consequences is not only false, but dangerous. The long-ignored interconnections between the human and nonhuman worlds are now clear, as environmental impacts directly affecting humans have increased over time. In response to these impacts, environmental sociology emerged in the 1970s to better understand these overlooked relationships.
While environmental sociology emerged over forty years ago, this book focuses on more recent definitions and applications. Gould and Lewis (2009: 2) define environmental sociology as “the study of how social systems interact with ecosystems.” Lockie (2015: 140) defines environmental sociology as “the application of our sociological imaginations to the connections among people, institutions, technologies and ecosystems that make society possible.” In both of these definitions is the term ecosystem, which refers to all living organisms in a community, the nonliving components of this community, and their relationships. While humans affect ecosystems and ecosystems affect humans, a more accurate depiction is that humans depend on ecosystems, live in ecosystems, and are also driving rapid ecosystem change. With accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, it has become clear that human activities now shape the fate of all species on the planet. Therefore, as a field of study, environmental sociology examines how humans interact with the nonhuman beings, entities, and processes on Earth and how these relationships shape our mutual existence, survival, and possibilities for flourishing.
In Uncharted Waters
As we now face global and existential environmental threats, environmental sociology has never been more important. Early environmental issues such as the pollution in the Cuyahoga River and Love Canal were regional. While we still face these kinds of environmental issues, which threaten humans and other species in certain places, we now also face environmental crises that are existential because they threaten the future existence of our species and others. Environmental issues have been on the social radar for decades, yet we have reached a new era of global and existential environmental threats.
Calling these threats “existential” may sound extreme or exaggerated, but unfortunately it is not. We face unprecedented global environmental impacts putting our existence at risk. In recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019), scientists have illustrated the severity of both the climate and biodiversity crises and how current trajectories put us at risk of societal collapse, massive population loss, and even possible extinction. These reports call for rapid and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society to address these crises and minimize ecological and social impacts. The climate and biodiversity crises together pose a global existential threat to the human race. While these two distinct crises are discussed here, they will sometimes be grouped together and referred to as “the environmental crisis” or “existential threats” throughout the book.
With only about a 1.1° Celsius (C) average global temperature increase thus far, we are already seeing serious impacts due to global climate change, including unprecedented fires, floods, and hurricanes; and much more severe impacts are projected as warming continues. The words “crisis” and “emergency” are increasingly used by scientists and in the media to describe climate change. Steffen and colleagues (2018) explain the very real possibility of reaching a critical threshold of warming, a global tipping point, after which additional warming would be uncontrollable, resulting in a “Hothouse Earth” scenario. In Nature, Lenton and colleagues (2019: 595) state that climate change “is an existential threat to civilization,” explaining that “the evidence from
