The Environmental Crisis
Earth scientists suggest that this concentration of carbon dioxide, associated with a 1.5 C degree increase in average temperatures, should not be surpassed.
What is the significance of 425 parts per million?
Environmental sociologists Riley Dunlap and William Catton suggest that, historically, sociology has been guided by this paradigm, which believes human social systems are free from environmental constraints.
What is the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm (HEP)?
This theory refers to the loss of several nutrients that are key to soil fertility as a result of populations moving from rural to urban areas to participate in industrial activities.
What is Metabolic rift theory?
This theory, which developed outside of sociology, suggests that to address the environmental crises we must decenter humans in our decision making processes.
What is deep ecology?
This theory tells us that processes of modernity encourage risky behavior, as decision making relies more and more on uncertain sciences and the processes of large bureaucratic institutions.
What is risk society?
The geological epoch in which human society has developed.
What is the Holocene
The reform environmental movement is believed to have been spurred into action by, among other things, the publication of this foundational book.
What is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring?
According to Foster these are the reasons that classical sociologists, and Marx in particular, are not seen as having had concern for the environment.
What are the appropriation problem and the definitional problem.
According to this theory, there is a fundamental tradeoff between wealth and riches.
What is the Lauderdale paradox?
Due to the uncertainty inherent in many modern (e.g. post-normal) risks, these are critical aspects of risk management.
What are science, democracy, adaptive management, nested governance, institutional variety, analytic-deliberative processes?
According to earth scientists, these three earth system boundaries have been crossed.
What are Biosphere integrity, Biogeochemical flows, and Climate change?
Unlike other fields in the environmental social sciences, this discipline started from the work of social activists and is often traced back to protests in Warren County
What is Environmental Justice?
According to Weber, these two fundamental, ideal-typical societies broadly characterize the ways that societies understand their environmental surroundings, and mobilize resources within those surroundings.
What are traditional-organic and rational-inorganic?
This theory suggests that processes of growth will eventually lead industrial societies in capitalist economies to undermine the resource base necessary to production, resulting in economic crisis.
What is the second contradiction of capitalism?
Modern day risk management is difficult, because many of the risks we face are lacking these features.
What are ostensibility and repeatability (OR)?
These processes suggest that earth system boundaries are interrelated, and crossing one could lead to others being crossed as well by initiating a process that continually intensifies the rate of change.
What are positive feedback loops?
According to environmental sociologists Kari Noorgaard, this is a social denialism strategy that limits the scope of social problems in order to make them unproblematic or unaddressable.
What is Perspectival Selectivity?
This framework suggests that societies develop in response to their interpretations of their environment, but in doing so they subsequently change the environment and thus change their interpretation of/ organization around it.
What is refractive materiality, or environmental refractivity?
This hypothesis suggests that societies which are not able to provide basic needs, such as job security and adequate nutrition, will not be concerned with protection of the environment
What is the environmental kuznets curve?
This definition of risk is held by proponents of the positivist paradigm, which holds that there are real objects in the world outside of human perception of them (ontological realism), and that our we can know those objects in an unbiased way.
What is risk= (probability of occurrence)*(consequence of occurrence)
Geologists suggest that these substances act as stratigraphic signals that will likely serve as markers of a new, human induced, geological epoch.
What are radionuclides, microplastics, domesticated animal remains, carbon 'soot' (unburned carbon spheres)?
According to human ecologists, this period follows the introduction of a species into a new environment where the species uses newfound resources in novel and unsustainable ways, often leading to a period of overshoot, where they live beyond their carrying capacity in environmental deficit.
What is the age of exuberance?
Weber influenced environmental economists to believe that this law of physics could be applied to natural resource cycles.
What is entropy?
This theory of environment-society relations argues that as concern with the environment deepens society will rationalize around ecologically beneficial principles.
What is ecological modernization theory?
These ontological and epistemological approaches constitute the HERO approach to understanding, interpreting, and mitigating post-normal risks.
What are ontological realism and epistemological hierarchicalism?