Introduction to Sociology summary (2nd exam)

ITS LECTURES BLOCK 2
LECTURE 1
‘How is the ‘social constitution of our daily lives’ influencing our impact on the environment?
And how does it relate to the collective action problem and the Gidden’s paradox?

Nature vs society:
- What is this thing we call nature? This can have a lot of variations:
o World not influenced by humans (e.g., ‘let’s go hiking in nature’).
o Series of forces (e.g., ‘nature has it’s own way’ – natural disaster not a human
disaster)
o What is essential or given (e.g., ‘It is natural’).
o The environment in which human being exist (e.g., ‘we need to take care of
nature’).
o Gaia (e.g., ‘all is nature’).
 These are symbolic categories which determine how we see nature.
- Changing relationship: fighting, taming, co-existing, protecting, symbiosis.
o Agriculture (a way of taming nature)
o Industrialization: is a huge way of taming.
 Taking the forces of nature and using it for a certain purpose.
o Medicine.
o Urbanization: how we create places to live in that nature.
o Anthropocene: this all together.
- Nature is not passive but acts and reacts (not stable).

Environmental issues:
- private benefits (profits/goods) vs public squalor (costs).
o Air pollution: e.g., car pollution  ozone and CO2.
 Public squalor: creates pollution.
 Benefits: able to travel fast, warm, and efficiently.
o Water pollution: e.g., textile pollution.
 Public squalor: takes huge amount of chemicals and pollutes the
ocean/water.
 Benefits: Your jeans are clean.
o Food: e..g, Unbalanced food production: simultaneous abundances (waste)
and shortages distributed amongst different countries.
 Unsustainable production systems.
 Public squalor: exhausting the earth.
 Benefits: being able to provide a certain wanted product
(vegetable/fruit).

Climate emergency: Climate change (or breakdown).
- Cumulative greenhouse effect: stapling of gases inside of the ozon, which stick
around and cause higher temperatures by holding the sun’s heat inside.
o Has to reduce, but so far there is still an increase in CO2 mission.
- Anthropocene: where human beings are the main driving force in changing the
condition of the planet.

, o And therefore, the environment is a social problem which makes
environmental sociology necessary.

Anthropocene: We know that humans are the primary cause for the climate change through
the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
- Warnings: e.g., flooding and droughts, deforestations, water shortages, etc.
- Social consequences: it has an impact on society, people in society.
o Conflicts over scarcer resources.
o Health issues.
o Public expenses will rise.
o Huge migration rates are predicted because some areas will be hit harder
than others.
o Increasing global and local inequalities.

Environmental sociology: the study of interactions between societies and their natural
environment – e.g.:
- Study how social behavior creates pressure on environment (e.g., air pollution).
- Study how the effects and impacts of climate change are (globally) unequally
distributed (e.g., floodings do not happen everywhere / as much).
- Study impact and reactions to policies and solutions (e.g., climate agreements).
- Study how people understand the environment and their own positions in it (e.g.,
what is nature).

Why are we not acting?: Understanding barriers to act:
- Collective action problem: individuals fail to cooperate because of conflicting
interests. But it only works if they all do it (‘if I don’t act, nobody will know’).
o The responsibility towards the planet is always there, but people do not really
notice when actions affect the planet. One person feels so small that he/she
feels like its actions do not affect the earth (neither negative nor positive).
- Gidden’s paradox: stuck between agency and structure.
o Disjunction between acceptance, experience, possibility, and willingness to
change  We make the structure to our agency (by what we find important),
but at the same time that structure limits what our agency can do.
o Behavior comes from the continuous connection
between structure and agency.
 Structure: the things around us that make us
do certain things (e.g., institutions,
resources, norms, conditions)
 Agency: individual central to actions (e.g.,
identity, beliefs, reasoning, desires, etc.).
- Political polemics (kind of war) and position taking
o Left vs right: the environment as topic is stuck
between left and right. First it was more of a topic of
the right, but now it has become a topic of the left.
 Might be a reason for people to resist change (resisting to vote for ‘the
other side’).
- Difficulty enforcing international agreements.

, o No clear basis to sanction: There is no global police which makes it difficult
reinforce global agreements.
 Most countries have not done what they promised, but there are no
sanctions.
- Problem of responsibility: global north vs global south?

There are two important views on how to tackle the sociological debate on climate
emergency: (critical) realism and/or social constructivism.
- Critical realism: to understand the social world and its tangible and observable effects
we need to understand the hidden structures that generate them/make them
possible.
o Realists argue that we need to
understand how we have organized
society in order to understand how
climate change happened, including
the organization of ecological
relations.
- Social constructivism: how do people
understand their surroundings and how do
they construct such an understanding.
o Constructionists focus on the ideological origins of environmental problems –
including their very definition as problems (or as nonproblems).
 Thus it is about what kind of ideas people have and how these impact
us and our beliefs and actions now.

Critical realist research questions:
- How does our societal organization cause ecological problems?
- Which hidden power mechanisms cause unequal distribution of environmental
costs?
- What are the causal mechanisms behind pollution?
- Who is benefiting and who is suffering?

Social constructivist research questions (examples):
- What do people mean when they say environment?
- How do they understand environmental issues?
- Who is for and against ecological policies?

Example of a cow:
- The critical realist reading of a cow: Who is profiting of cows?
- The social construction of a cow: What does a cow mean to us?

It is not one or the other, it is about how the two together can help us to
understand the world around us  picture.

How do people respond to climate change:
- Catastrophism: it is uncertain, and we are moving away from the balance.
- Gradualism: it is a slow process that we can adapt and transform.