Introduction: building on the legacy contributions of William R. Freudenburg in environmental studies and sociology

Abstract

One of the most essential ways of ensuring continued advances in scholarship is to identify and nurture those ideas and insights with the greatest potential for enhancing our understanding of the ways things work (and the ways they do not). This special edition of JESS is dedicated to just this task, by focusing on the ideas and insights of a scholar who had a special talent for planting such intellectual seeds, especially in the areas of rural and environmental sociology as well as environmental studies. That scholar, William R. Freudenburg, passed away on December 28, 2010 at a young 59 years, having finally lost his 18-month battle with bile duct cancer, a battle which—according to his doctors—he should have lost much sooner. In this special issue we highlight several areas of intellectual contributions by Dr. Freudenburg, in essence tracing his historical development as a scholar from his initial graduate student work on “energy boomtowns” in Colorado, to his latest work on un-natural disasters, which was capped by publication of Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America. That book came out shortly before his untimely death, having been written with long-time collaborator Robert Gramling in the mind-bogglingly fast period of 2 months. The respect, admiration, and affection for Bill felt by his students, both current and past, and colleagues was on display at “Freudenfest,” a symposium held in November, 2010 at Bill’s home campus, the University of California at Santa Barbara, to honor Bill and his many contributions. The contents of this special issue consist primarily of papers generated from the presentations offered at Freudenfest, all of which highlighted different aspects of Bill’s scholarly contributions. As the following papers will exemplify, Bill’s work typically involved a creative synthesis of qualitative and quantitative evidence, solidly grounded in sociological theory, and often cast with an eye toward policy relevance. This approach enabled Bill to break two particularly formidable boundaries. First, he found himself at the center of policy debates—one of a striking few sociologists to be called upon by official bodies to contribute to debates in which participation from academe was, and continues today, to be dominated by natural scientists and economists. His success at breaching this boundary is most clearly marked by his article on risk assessment in the journal Science (Freudenburg 1988), a rare social science contribution in this prestigious journal. Bill wrote at length about the need for, and strategies to improve upon, social scientific contributions to environmental and technological policy (Freudenburg 1989; Freudenburg and Gramling 2002; Freudenburg 2005a), particularly in the area of social impact assessment methods (e.g., Freudenburg and Keating 1985). His enthusiasm for contributing to policy was evident early in his career, when he was accepted into the ASA’s Congressional Fellow program, working with the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the US House of Representatives (1983–1984). Bill compiled an exemplary record of service on prestigious advisory panels and boards,