Social Problems: Environment, Spring 2006

Why and to what extent are people concerned with the environment? Why are some unconcerned and convinced that environmentalism is "wacky?" Is environmental concern mostly an elite white concern or do African Americans and other "minorities" also care about the environment? To what extent are environmental problems consequences of an exploitative western value system? What is the source of such values? To what extent is social structure to blame and how did society's structures come to be the way they are? Finally, how can we alter values and reform social structures in a way that would be more environmentally friendly? What would an ecological society look like?

This course examines how our culture, social institutions and day-to-day interaction affect the environment—in short, how society creates and defines environmental problems. It also examines how environmental problems, in turn, affect society. We pay special attention to how different groups in society experience environmental harm differentially, sometimes as environmental racism. We study how such groups are sometimes led to action engaging in a relatively new form of environmentalism known as grassroots environmental movements. We also study a range of environmental problems from those with a non-human referent (such as the preservation of species for their own sakes), to those with a human frame of reference ranging from the aesthetic to the strictly practical/economic.

We study attitudes toward the environment in a range of societies and across groups within our own society and analyze the growth of environmental concern in modern times. We examine both environmentalism and its opposite, anti-environmentalism, as social movements. Although we borrow from a number of academic disciplines (anthropological, historical, demographic and biological), we take a predominantly sociological outlook on environmental problems. We therefore learn that discipline’s major methods, terms and concepts in relation to the environment.

We use critical reasoning skills to evaluate information regarding environmental issues and look at said problems from differing perspectives (opposing viewpoints). We have at least one exercise involving critical analysis of a piece of research in environmental sociology. Finally, we engage in at least one service-learning exercise related to an environmental issue—probably involving prairie restoration and removal of invasive species in a local park—as a way of adding a concrete component to the course’s study of both local environmental issues and those on a larger scale. This is a unique class. It has historically had great impact on students by involving them in multiple kinds of learning including hands-on work.