In Search of a Public Environmental Sociology: Ecological Risks in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The twenty-first century poses many chal lenges to the human community. However, none of these challenges are more daunting than those posed by environmental hazards and risks. Environmental degradation, com munity contamination, and ecological disas ters will increasingly cause social problems by disrupting communities, families, and individ uals and exacerbating historical patterns of social inequality. In turn, these trends will generate new forms of social disorganization and personal distress. European social theo rists, such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have addressed these untoward charac teristics of late modernity by specifying new risks that signal transglobal, trans generational, uninsurable, irreversible, and manufactured consequences that seriously threaten the future of the human community by undermining ontological security (Gid dens 1990; Beck 1992). American sociologists, most notably Kai Erikson and Charles Perrow, have documented the dire social conse quences of disastrous environmental degra dation in terms of collective trauma and normal accidents (Erikson 1976; Perrow 1984). Indeed, the ongoing disaster we have come to know as Hurricane Katrina reawak ened the sociological community and the gen eral to a host of anthropogenic envi ronmental risks that increasingly threaten the vulnerable social fabric of the modern world (Picou and Marshall 2007). How should the social sciences, in general, and sociology, in particular, respond to these inevitable catastrophic environmental risks? At present, there seems to be little concern with risk within our emerging models of both public and applied sociology. In order to go beyond these models, sociology's under standing of environment-society relationships needs to be reframed and the potential con tributions of sociology for identifying and mitigating the disastrous consequences of ecological risks should become an area of inquiry for sociological practice. A environmental sociology would promote,