Week 1: Defining Environmental Sociology
Q: Define what Environmental Sociology means to you, and describe what an Environmental
Sociologist studies.
A: Environmental sociology means a field of sociology which deals with societal-environmental
interactions and focuses mainly on the social dimensions of either the natural environment or the
human-built environment.
Environmental sociologist is a person who studies environmental sociology or society-environment
interactions.
Student post: “The environmental sociology studies the environment problems and factor that
cause the problems that impact the planet. Environmental sociology also has the ability to create
solutions to many of these environmental problems.” (Aida Quito, May 6, 2018)
A: Aida, I don’t believe in the solution idea. For me the environmental sociology field has a role
as an observer, it’s a field where the information it’s gathered for creating a statistics or for giving an
summary of the society trends at one point in time.
Week 1: Environmental Racism and Justice
Q: Compare and contrast, providing examples of each, the constructs of environmental racism and
environmental justice.
A: Environmental Justice activists define the environment as the set of linked places “where we live,
work, learn and play.” The processes that have produced environmental injustice have also
simultaneously produced uneven development, marginalized landscapes, increased criminalization of
poor people and people of color, and the social movements that work to transform them. A racial
formations approach to environmental injustice seeks to interrogate not only racial categories, but also
to investigate the long roots of racism that are embedded and masked within natural resource and
environmental policies. At the same time, racism’s effects are harmful for society at large. In fact, the
dynamics that produce racism are related to those that produce environmental harms. While not all
Environmental justice research and activism directly addresses the following goals, many people are
already imagining and building broadly democratic, antiracist movements.
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