BLOCK 2: READINGS WEEK 6
CHAPTER 5: THE ENVIRONMENT
‘How is the ‘social constitution of our daily lives’ influencing our impact on the environment?
And how does it relate to the collective action problem and the Gidden’s paradox?
Nature vs society:
- What is this thing we call nature? This can have a lot of variations:
o World not influenced by humans (e.g., ‘let’s go hiking in nature’).
o Series of forces (e.g., ‘nature has it’s own way’ – natural disaster not a human
disaster)
o What is essential or given (e.g., ‘It is natural’).
o The environment in which human being exist (e.g., ‘we need to take care of
nature’).
o Gaia (e.g., ‘all is nature’).
These are symbolic categories which determine how we see nature.
- Changing relationship: fighting, taming, co-existing, protecting, symbiosis.
o Agriculture (a way of taming nature)
o Industrialization: is a huge way of taming.
Taking the forces of nature and using it for a certain purpose.
o Medicine.
o Urbanization: how we create places to live in that nature.
o Anthropocene: this all together.
- Nature is not passive but acts and reacts (not stable).
Environmental issues:
- private benefits (profits/goods) vs public squalor (costs).
o Air pollution: e.g., car pollution ozone and CO2.
Public squalor: creates pollution.
Benefits: able to travel fast, warm, and efficiently.
o Water pollution: e.g., textile pollution.
Public squalor: takes huge amount of chemicals and pollutes the
ocean/water.
Benefits: Your jeans are clean.
o Food: e..g, Unbalanced food production: simultaneous abundances (waste) and
shortages distributed amongst different countries.
Unsustainable production systems.
Public squalor: exhausting the earth.
Benefits: being able to provide a certain wanted product
(vegetable/fruit).
Climate emergency: Climate change (or breakdown).
- Cumulative greenhouse effect: stapling of gases inside of the ozon, which stick around
and cause higher temperatures by holding the sun’s heat inside.
o Has to reduce, but so far there is still an increase in CO2 mission.
- Anthropocene: where human beings are the main driving force in changing the
condition of the planet.
o And therefore, the environment is a social problem which makes
environmental sociology necessary.
,Anthropocene: We know that humans are the primary cause for the climate change through
the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- Warnings: e.g., flooding and droughts, deforestations, water shortages, etc.
- Social consequences: it has an impact on society, people in society.
o Conflicts over scarcer resources.
o Health issues.
o Public expenses will rise.
o Huge migration rates are predicted because some areas will be hit harder than
others.
o Increasing global and local inequalities.
Environmental sociology: the study of interactions between societies and their natural
environment – e.g.:
- Study how social behavior creates pressure on environment (e.g., air pollution).
- Study how the effects and impacts of climate change are (globally) unequally
distributed (e.g., floodings do not happen everywhere / as much).
- Study impact and reactions to policies and solutions (e.g., climate agreements).
- Study how people understand the environment and their own positions in it (e.g., what
is nature).
Why are we not acting?: Understanding barriers to act:
- Collective action problem: individuals fail to cooperate because of conflicting
interests. But it only works if they all do it (‘if I don’t act, nobody will know’).
o The responsibility towards the planet is always there, but people do not really
notice when actions affect the planet. One person feels so small that he/she
feels like its actions do not affect the earth (neither negative nor positive).
- Gidden’s paradox: stuck between agency and structure.
o Disjunction between acceptance, experience, possibility, and willingness to
change We make the structure to our agency (by what we find important),
but at the same time that structure limits what our agency can do.
o Behavior comes from the continuous connection between structure and agency.
Structure: the things around us that make us
do certain things (e.g., institutions, resources,
norms, conditions)
Agency: individual central to actions (e.g.,
identity, beliefs, reasoning, desires, etc.).
- Political polemics (kind of war) and position taking
o Left vs right: the environment as topic is stuck
between left and right. First it was more of a topic of
the right, but now it has become a topic of the left.
Might be a reason for people to resist change
(resisting to vote for ‘the other side’).
- Difficulty enforcing international agreements.
o No clear basis to sanction: There is no global police which makes it difficult
reinforce global agreements.
Most countries have not done what they promised, but there are no
sanctions.
- Problem of responsibility: global north vs global south?
,There are two important views on how to tackle the sociological debate on climate
emergency: (critical) realism and/or social constructivism.
- Critical realism: to understand the social world and its tangible and observable effects
we need to understand the hidden structures that generate them/make them possible.
o Realists argue that we need to
understand how we have organized
society in order to understand how
climate change happened, including
the organization of ecological
relations.
- Social constructivism: how do people
understand their surroundings and how do
they construct such an understanding.
o Constructionists focus on the
ideological origins of environmental problems – including their very definition
as problems (or as nonproblems).
What kind of ideas people have and how does that impact us and our
beliefs and actions now.
Social constructivist research questions (examples):
- What do people mean when they say environment?
- How do they understand environmental issues?
- Who is for and against ecological policies?
Critical realist research questions:
- How does our societal organization cause ecological problems?
- Which hidden power mechanisms cause unequal distribution of environmental costs?
- What are the causal mechanisms behind pollution?
- Who is benefiting and who is suffering?
Example of a cow:
- The social construction of a cow: What does a cow mean to us?
- The critical realist reading of a cow: Who is profiting of cows?
It is not one or the other, it is about how the two together can help us to understand
the world around us picture.
How do people respond to climate change:
- Catastrophism: it is uncertain, and we are moving away from the
equilibrium.
- Gradualism: it is a slow process that we can adapt and transform.
- Skepticism: not real or too unsure.
o Can study this in many ways:
Hoax, fake news, scare or fad.
True, but not caused by humans.
True but exaggerated (models are wrong).
True but prefer not to think about it.
, How do people construct denial: Research about people that see climate change happening
(no snow to ski) but still deny it.
- Question: Even if it is concretely observable that this is caused by humans, how can
people still deny this? People collectively share cultural frameworks (social
constructions) to ignore current situation.
o Innocence (other countries are bigger - ‘Norway alone cannot solve this’).
o Historical order (mythic Norway)
‘Norwegians know how to deal with nature being difficult, this is just
another challenge, and we will live through it’.
Comparable with the Netherlands and ‘rising water’.
Understanding risks
- Societies and people live with risks.
o External risk: natural disasters or dying of cancer.
o Manufactured risks: through our own knowledge, technology, and behavior
(e.g., I can get cancer because I smoke).
- How do we understand what risk is.
o Do we accept uncertainty (e.g., gods will), contain it (e.g., life insurance) or
calculate (e.g., you can calculate the average age of what people die)
possibilities?
- How do we deal with risk?
o Individual responsibility (e.g., own fault, own problem)? Distribute it equally?
Exploit unequal dangers (e.g., flexible contracts where some people have more
risk as others).
Beck: risk society:
- Late modernity: risk has become more important
o Secularization (no more divine powers): religions that have for example helped
us to deal with risk, have become less powerful.
o Rise of science (nature is controllable).
o Industrialization and technological innovation.
o Individualization: people navigate their own lives.
Risk takes center stage: We have to stage (construct) risk before we can act on it.
o Loss of certainty (e.g., divine plan).
o Manufactured (e.g., chemical pollution).
o Undetectable (e.g., radioactivity).
o Universal (e.g., carbon dioxide).
o Individual (e.g., private insurance).
o Science as culprit and savior (e.g., technological solutions.
- Two biggest problems:
o Modernity? Who is modernity? Time to decolonize!
o Risk might be universal, but the resources to protect ourselves are not.
Due to the way the resources are distributed (amongst class, race,
gender).
Problem of consumerism: Economic system is based on continuous production and
consumption of goods.
- Producers need to increase profit (private benefits) by cutting costs (public squalor).
