This Title is Boring but Environmental Sociology is Not

Environmental sociology is when sociologists think about the biophysical world and how it performs “services” for humans. There are three main parts of this topic. First, the biophysical world provides necessary things for life. This means sustenance based things. There are some issues arounds this involving transportation, conservation, and extraction. The second service is that the world is a repository for waste. The issue that comes from this is pollution. The final service is that the earth is our home. Something to think about in this context is how urban spaces are designed, deforestation, and climate change. An acronym used by some sociologists is POET (Population, (Social) Organization, Environment, Technology). Closely tied in with these subjects is environmental justice. Environmental justice is the concept that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection by environmental health laws and regulations. One theory about why this doesn’t happen is called the “treadmill production thesis.” This thesis starts with capital expansion. This required energy and expansion of the economy, and this creates wealth and negative byproducts. The wealth and negative byproducts are unevenly distributed between the classes. There are also a small number of plants creating a huge proportion of waste. Another theory is that the inequalities we see surrounding class and the environment are discrimination based. This is because of the stark racial divides in environmental policy.

There are certain things that are heavily affecting the environment today. The increasing size of concentrated populations and very uneven access to resources are a couple of issues that are affecting imbalance in the environment. This includes pollution, climate change, and deforestation. Humans have the ability to create environmental problems far beyond their ability to fix them. For a long time people took natural resources for granted. We are at a point where we need to start conserving our resources.

A lot of the pollution and imbalance of the ecosystem is from big companies and plants, and these companies don’t want to spend more money trying to conserve resources. A lot of the issues come from companies wanting to do things in the cheapest way possible. In the book Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina some of the main actors are big agribusinesses. These businesses would ignore the complaints of the locals and deny the contamination of the environment. They did what was the cheapest option, and they also exploited the people who they thought wouldn’t be able to fight back.

I think that a lot of environmental injustice comes from systemic inequalities in our society. I don’t think that the treadmill production thesis does not fully account for systemic oppression of lower class communities. The theory makes sense, but it is missing a lot of important social factors. The discrimination based theory also fails to recognize the interests of the companies. These two theories are very well thought out and they make sense, but they make more sense together than apart.

In conclusion, I agree with most of the theories I stated above. Some of them are a bit lacking in explanation, so it is a bit frustrating to read theories that disregard some crucial reasons for inequalities.