Table Of Content

ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY F r o m A n a l y s i s t o A c t i o n F O U R T H E D I T I O N Edited by LESLIE KING Smith College DEBORAH Mc CARTHY AURIFFEILLE College of Charleston ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Executive Editor: Nancy Roberts Assistant Editor: Megan Manzano Senior Marketing Manager: Amy Whitaker Interior Designer: Ilze Lemesis Credits and acknowledgments for material borrowed from other sources, and reproduced with permission, appear on the appropriate page within the text. Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. First edition 2005. Second edition 2009. Third edition 2014. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: King, Leslie, editor. | Auriffeille, Deborah McCarthy. 1966– editor. Environmental sociology: from analysis to action / [edited by] Leslie King, Smith College, Deborah McCarthy Auriffeille, College of Charleston. — 4th Edition. | Lanham : ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018044291 (print) | LCCN 2018055545 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538116791 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538116777 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781538116784 (paper : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Environmental sociology. | Environmental justice. | Environmentalism— North America. Classification: LCC GE195 (ebook) | LCC GE195. E588 2019 (print) | DDC 333.72— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044291 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.48–1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface viii Introduction: Environmental Problems Require Social Solutions 1 Deborah McCarthy Auriffeille and Leslie King Part I Imagining Nature 23 1 Nature’s Looking Glass 25 Hillary Angelo and Colin Jerolmack Part II Political Economy 33 2 Why Ecological Revolution? 35 John Bellamy Foster 3 The Unfair Trade-off: Globalization and the Export of Ecological Hazards 49 Daniel Faber 4 The Tragedy of the Commodity: The Overexploitation of the Mediterranean Bluefin Tuna Fishery 63 Stefano B. Longo and Rebecca Clausen 5 Ecological Modernization at Work? Environmental Policy Reform in Sweden at the Turn of the Century 81 Benjamin Vail 6 A Tale of Contrasting Trends: Three Measures of the Ecological Footprint in China, India, Japan, and the United States, 1961–2003 97 Richard York, Eugene A. Rosa, and Thomas Dietz iii iv Contents Part III Race, Class, Gender, and the Environment 111 7 The Du Bois Nexus: Intersectionality, Political Economy, and Environmental Injustice in the Peruvian Guano Trade in the 1800s 113 Brett Clark, Daniel Auerbach, and Karen Xuan Zhang 8 Ruin’s Progeny: Race, Environment, and Appalachia’s Coal Camp Blacks 129 Karida L. Brown, Michael W. Murphy, and Appollonya M. Porcelli 9 Environmental Apartheid: Eco-Health and Rural Marginalization in South Africa 143 Valerie Stull, Michael M. Bell, and Mpumelelo Ncwadi 10 Turning Public Issues into Private Troubles: Lead Contamination, Domestic Labor, and the Exploitation of Women 159 Lois Bryson, Kathleen McPhillips, and Kathryn Robinson Part IV Media 171 11 Media Framing of Body Burdens: Precautionary Consumption and the Individualization of Risk 173 Norah MacKendrick 12 Legitimating the Environmental Injustices of War: Toxic Exposures and Media Silence in Iraq and Afghanistan 191 Eric Bonds Part V Disaster 205 13 The BP Disaster as an Exxon Valdez Rerun 207 Liesel Ashley Ritchie, Duane A. Gill, and J. Steven Picou Contents v 14 Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis 215 Thomas D. Beamish 15 Left to Chance: Hurricane Katrina and the Story of Two New Orleans Neighborhoods 227 Steve Kroll-Smith, Vern Baxter, and Pam Jenkins Part VI Social Movements 237 16 People Want to Protect Themselves a Little Bit: Emotions, Denial, and Social Movement Nonparticipation 239 Kari Marie Norgaard 17 Environmental Threats and Political Opportunities: Citizen Activism in the North Bohemian Coal Basin 254 Thomas E. Shriver, Alison E. Adams, and Stefano B. Longo 18 Politics by Other Greens: The Importance of Transnational Environmental Justice Movement Networks 272 David N. Pellow Part VII Changes in Progress 287 19 Ontologies of Sustainability in Ecovillage Culture: Integrating Ecology, Economics, Community, and Consciousness 289 Karen Liftin 20 Plans for Pavement or for People? The Politics of Bike Lanes on the “Paseo Boricua” in Chicago, Illinois 303 Amy Lubitow, Bryan Zinschlag, and Nathan Rochester vi Contents 21 Campus Alternative Food Projects and Food Service Realities: Alternative Strategies 318 Peggy F. Barlett 22 From the New Ecological Paradigm to Total Liberation: The Emergence of a Social Movement Frame 331 David N. Pellow and Hollie Nyseth Brehm Index 348 Acknowledgments For help, assistance, and great ideas on this fourth edition, we would like to thank first and foremost our student assistants: Zoe Tilden, Samantha Peikes, Kathryn Maurer, and Shea Leibow. Their insightful comments and questions on dozens upon dozens of chapters and articles helped us narrow down our choices. Zoe also helped us proofread and edit the pieces we included. In addition, we thank our editor at Rowman & Littlefield, Nancy Roberts, and her assistant Megan Manzano. vii Preface We both strongly believe that humans have come to a turning point in terms of our destruction of ecological resources and the endangerment of human health. A daily look at the major newspapers points, without fail, to worsening environmental problems and sometimes (but not often enough) a hopeful solution. Humans created these problems, and we have the power to resolve them. Nat- urally, the longer we wait, the more devastating the problems will become; the more we ignore the sociological dimensions of environmental decline, the more our proposed solutions will fail. Out of our concern for and dedication to bringing about a more sustainable future, we have worked hard to develop environmental sociology courses that not only educate students about environmental issues but also show them their potential role as facilitators of well-informed change. This reader results in large part from our commitment to the idea that sociology can be a starting point for social change, and we have sought to include in it work that reflects our vision. Sociology, however, can be good at critiquing social arrangements and not as good at highlighting positive change and explaining how that change has come about. We tried to include a few selections that show how groups of people have been able to effect positive changes, but be warned that some of the selections in this reader, reflecting the discipline of sociology, reveal problems in which solutions may seem elusive. Anthologies seek to accomplish different things. One of our goals has been to provide students and their instructors with shortened versions of fairly recent academic research. Mostly, the articles and chapters included here were originally intended for an academic audience; to make them more accessible to students new to the discipline, we have shortened most of the selections and tried to provide a bit of context for each one. We actively looked for readings that interest, motivate, and make sense to an undergraduate audience. Choosing which selections to include has been exciting and thought provoking, but it was not without a few dilemmas. For example, a good deal of research in the subdiscipline of environmental sociology is quan- titative. Some undergraduate students have the skills to read and interpret this type of work, but many do not. Thus, we have leaned toward qualitative work that is often more accessible to generalist audiences. Our selection process has evolved over the four editions, and this edition is most pointedly focused on pieces that would provoke productive discussion, whether for students in small seminars or for students in larger classes. We do not include “classical” or foun- dational works; instead, we provide an overview of more recent work in the field to give students a sense of what types of research environmental sociologists are currently engaging in. This field is relatively new and it’s evolving quickly—there are many exciting new directions to discover. In addition, several other good edited volumes and readers include the “classics,” so we did not see a need to reinvent the wheel. One of our most viii Preface ix difficult decisions was to leave out many “big name” researchers who have pro- foundly influenced the field. Some of this work represents a dialogue with a long and intertwined body of thought and research. Understanding such a dialogue would require reading the lineage of research leading up to it. In addition, much of the theoretical work in environmental sociology (as in most of our subdisci- plines) engages important, but very specialized, issues. As a way of providing students with a beginning understanding of this lineage, our introductory chapter presents a brief overview of the field for students wishing to explore specific theoretical perspectives in greater depth. The works in the book itself balance this introductory chapter—recent articles and book chapters illustrate a wide variety of ways that sociologists might address environmental questions. The field of environmental sociology has changed dramatically since the first edition of this reader, published in 2004. Our main challenge, as editors, in putting together the first edition was to find enough contemporary pieces. By contrast, the main challenge that we faced in putting together the fourth edition was choosing which excerpts to include given the abundance of great work. This, as they say, is a good problem to have. We have watched the field grow from a fringe sociology subdiscipline to a major force in research on interdisciplinary environmental issues. It’s an exciting, and hopeful, time to be an environmental sociologist. With this in mind, the introductory chapter of the fourth edition, and the pieces republished in this volume, reflect changes and growth that have occurred in the discipline over the last several years. We also wanted this reader to be accessible to a maximum number of instructors, whether or not they are specialists in environmental sociology. Most sociologists and social scientists we know speak the language of inequalities, political economy, and social constructionism; we tend not to be as fluent in the bio- logical and mechanical details of energy production, watershed management, or climate change. Thus, we organized our reader not by environmental issue but by sociological perspective. The reader frames the issues in terms of sociological concepts and seeks to show students how sociologists go about examining environment-related issues. We do want to emphasize, though, that in devel- oping the reader’s conceptual blocks, we were careful to cover a broad range of topics—from coal mining to overfishing to climate change. Ultimately, we think the most important feature of the reader is not the topics we chose or how we decided to organize the different chapters into cat- egories; rather, it is the connection between power and environmental decision making that is woven throughout the collection in the choice of material. Most of the chapters address systems of power (e.g., inequalities in the distribution of toxic waste or who gets blamed for environmental problems, among others). We believe that good environmental decision making must incorporate sociological perspectives, and we hope that activists, policy makers, and academics will benefit from exposure to these frameworks.