Chapter 20. Population, Urbanization, and the Environment
Chapter 20. Population, Urbanization, and the Environment
20.3 The Environment and Society
The subfield of environmental sociology studies how humans interact with their environments. This field is closely related to human ecology, which focuses on the relationship between people and their built and natural environment. As extreme weather patterns and policy battles over climate change dominate the news, environmental sociology is garnering more attention as a source of solutions for how to address these issues.
Environmental sociologists emphasize two important dimensions of the relationship between society and the environment: (a) the impact of human activity and decision making and (b) the existence and consequences of environmental inequality and environmental racism.
The primary point of analysis has to do with the ways in which human activity transforms the natural environment and human interactions with other species. Two key concepts in environmental sociology are the concepts of carrying capacity, which refers to the maximum amount of life that can be sustained within an area given the limited amount of natural resources available, and the commons, which refers to the collective resources that humans share in common. These collective resources are typically shared natural resources like air, water, plant and animal life, or ecosystems that have remained outside of private ownership or processes of commodification and trade.
In an environmental context, the carrying capacity of different environments depends on the commons to the degree that the commons are necessary for sustaining life. When the commons are threatened through pollution or over-exploitation the carrying capacity of the environment is degraded. While both concepts can refer to a number of ecological variables from local grazing lands or to rivers, they can also be applied to the Earth as a whole. Climate change is a global issue in which the degradation of the global commons through ecologically unsustainable human activities threatens the earth’s carrying capacity as a whole. Practical research in the area of environmental sociology focuses therefore on identifying the threats human societies pose to the carrying capacity of ecosystems they are embedded in as well as modifications to human practices to make them more environmentally sustainable.
Making Connections: The Big Picture
The Tragedy of the Commons
The expression “the tragedy of the commons” was the title of an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968, which described how a common pasture is ruined by overgrazing. In England, “the commons” referred to land that the community held in common. Hardin was not the first to notice the phenomenon. Back in the 1800s, Oxford economist William Forster Lloyd looked at the devastated public grazing commons and the unhealthy cattle subject to such limited grazing, and saw, in essence, that the carrying capacity of the commons had been exceeded. However, since no one held per