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Objectives. Although many observers have interpreted Hurricane Katrina's damage to New Orleans as a case of nature striking humans, we draw on the sociological concept of the growth machine to show that much of the damage resulted instead from what humans had done to nature—in the name but not the reality of “economic development.” Methods. We triangulate findings from multiple qualitative techniques, including first-hand fieldwork, interviews, and analyses of historical records. We focus on a particularly telling illustration: the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a transportation canal. Results. Although the canal was widely predicted to deliver prosperity, it mainly created environmental damage, destroying wetlands that had formerly protected New Orleans from hurricanes. Despite enthusiastic predictions about its economic importance—plus millions of dollars in ongoing federal investments—the “outlet” was used by only a dozen of the ships for which it was designed during the entire last year before Katrina hit. Conclusions. This was clearly not a case of an “enduring conflict” between the environment and the economy; it was a case where economic benefits to a tiny number of beneficiaries created profound costs to the environment, and to humans in turn. Claims about supposed “economic benefits” from environmentally harmful projects need to be examined more closely in other contexts, as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster studies have made important progress in recognizing the unequally distributed consequences of disasters, but there has been less progress in analyzing social factors that help create "natural" disasters. Even well-known patterns of hazard-creation tend to be interpreted generically - as representing "economic development" or "capitalism" - rather than through focusing on the more specific dynamics involved. We illustrate this point with two recent and well-known cases of flooding - those in the upper Mississippi River Valley and in the Katrina-related devastation of New Orleans. In the former case, damage was caused in part by building the very kinds of higher and stronger flood walls that were shown to be inadequate in the latter. In the New Orleans case, a more important factor in the death and destruction was the excavation of a transportation canal. In both cases, and many more, the underlying causes of damage to humans as well as to the environment has involved a three-part pattern, supported by the political system - spreading the costs, concentrating the economic benefits and hiding the real risks. In very real senses, these have been floods of folly, created not just by extreme weather events, but by deadly and avoidable patterns of political-economic choices. Comparable patterns appear to deserve greater attention in other contexts, as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Although existing literature does discuss difficulties of doing science in contexts of litigation and regulation, work to date reflects little first-hand experience in such contexts. This gap is understandable but also potentially troubling: Concerns that seem important from afar may or may not match those that are most salient for scientists actually engaged in such work. OBJECTIVES: Drawing on experience on scientific committees and in lawsuits, and using skills developed through doing qualitative fieldwork, I reanalyze past experiences and field notes from the perspective of the 2006 Coronado Conference "Truth and Advocacy in Contexts of Litigation and Regulation." Although I initially shared the kinds of concerns generally stressed by other scientists and science-studies scholars—emphasizing overt, relatively sinister efforts to limit scientific objectivity-neither the literature nor my initial instincts provided adequate preparation for more subtle influences, which actually created stronger pressures toward bias. Particularly unexpected pressures came from consistent deference and praise for independence and credibility. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: The cases discussed in this article are by nature suggestive, not definitive; additional research is clearly needed. Future research, however, needs to focus not just on pressures toward bias that are easy to imagine, but also on those that are easy to overlook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most discussions of legitimation focus on factors that are expected to contribute to it, such as tradition, expertise, or prosperity. Less attention has been paid to “the dark side” of legitimation, which depends heavily on evading attention. A potentially informative approach is to learn from professionals with special expertise in evading attention while making things “disappear”—magicians. Rather than seeking overt control over the audience, they perform in plain view, largely by using well-timed distractions, or “misdirection.” Preliminary evidence suggests that similar techniques may be widely used in political contexts, with some of the most effective forms of misdirection involving diversionary reframing—diverting attention away from any questions about existing distributions of privilege, not by brute force, but by changing the subject, especially by raising questions about the legitimacy of critics. These and related techniques clearly deserve to be the focus of additional research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental harms involve a "double diversion" -- two forms of privilege that deserve greater attention. The first involves disproportionality, or the privileged diversion of rights/resources: Contrary to common assumptions, much environmental damage is not economically "necessary" -- instead, it represents privileged access to the environment. It is made possible in part by the second diversion -- the diversion of attention, or distraction -- largely through taken-for-granted or privileged accounts, which are rarely questioned, even in leftist critiques. Data show that, rather than producing advanced materials, major polluters tend to be inefficient producers of low-value commodities, and rather than being major employers, they can have emissions-to-jobs ratios a thousand times worse than the economy as a whole. Instead of simply focusing on overall/average levels of environmental problems, sociologists also need to examine disproportionalities, analyzing the socially structured nature of environmental and discursive privileges. Doing so can offer important opportunities for insights, not just about nature, but also about the nature of power, and about the power of the naturalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing sociological analyses express differing expectations about state control over economic actors and the political feasibility of environmental regulation. Recent literature on the environmental state sees environmental protection as becoming a basic responsibility of postindustrial states, with economic actors no longer having the autonomy they once enjoyed. In contrast, much of the work in environmental sociology expects commitments to environmental state responsibilities to be largely symbolic. Scholars working from this perspective tend to see environmental damage as proportionate to economic prosperity. To assess the differing expectations, we analyze actual environmental performance among the most prosperous nation-states focusing on national-level emissions of carbon dioxide. The strongest predictors of emissions are found to be measures of ecological efficiency, which tend to be associated with potentially less symbolic policy decisions. For the future, there is a need to move beyond broad assertions, devoting greater attention to the conditions under which states are more or less likely to impose constraints on economic actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the proposal of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) regarding the importance of external perturbations in policy change in the U.S. Information on the strategies used by the ACF in dealing with policy change; Application of the proposal of the ACF to federal policies for offshore oil leasing; Discussion on the autogenic succession theory for policy change.

Social scientists should seek greater involvement in interdisciplinary scientific committees, which often play important roles in natural resource management. In addition to our acknowledged areas of expertise, we have the ability to educate other disciplines about social sciences and, importantly, also about the realities of biophysical science input into policy processes. Two examples are worth noting. First, the asymmetry of scientific challenge can mean that biophysical science views/interpretations with favorable implications for organized groups’ interests may have been “accepted” with little scrutiny, relative to work having unfavorable implications. Second and paradoxically, the structure of decision making can mean that preferences for “scientific caution” will result in resource management decisions that are anything but cautious. These and other observations need to be tested through participant observation by a greater number of social scientists on scientific committees in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a response to a critique by professor Matthew S. Carroll and colleagues to a longitudinal analysis of logging industry job losses. The critique by Carroll and colleagues has two main parts. The first involves questions of scientific and technical judgments, the second has to do with what is sometimes called the moral exclusion literature and with the perceptions of those who live in the logging-dependent communities of the Pacific Northwest. There are a number of statistical and inferential problems with their argument. At the outset, however, it is worth pointing out that the arguments of Carroll and colleagues ignore the extensive work that has been done by historians who have explicitly examined the logging industry of the Pacific Northwest. Those historians, including Carroll's respected Washington State University colleague Paul Hirt, have reached a very different set of conclusions. In Hirt's memorable terminology, the ready embracing of optimistic assumptions, combined with the failure to note the more ominous warning signs, amounted to a veritable conspiracy of optimism. Still, like another distinguished historian of the forests of the region, Nancy Langston, he notes that the conspiracy was not a matter of straightforward venality. Instead another crucial consideration involved the realm of psychology.

Historically, nuclear power facilities have been popular in the specific "host" communities where they have been built. The Three Mile Island (TMI) accident may have ended that. No known preTMl host community survey showed more than 33 percent opposition; no known post-TMl survey has shown less than 50 percent opposition. Pre/postTMl status explains over 70 percent of the variation across surveys—despite major variations in question wording, survey locations, and other factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on risk perceptions in a broader perspective to include not only the individual perceivers and the risks they perceive, but also the institutions that are responsible for risk management. Recreancy can involve failings in either or both of the aspects of trust emphasized by Barber (1983)-- technical competence and fiduciary responsibility--but the term is also intended to describe cases where the failing is neither a matter of (individual) incompetence nor one of self-interest. While recreancy involves the performance of actors who occupy positions of societal trust, it is most appropriately measured not in terms of those actors' perceptions, but, through the assessments of others who have fewer vested interests in describing the legitimacy of their own actions. Risks of death have been dropping significantly for more than a century, but during that lime, there has been a dramatic growth of societal interdependence and hence of the potential for recreancy the failure of institutional actors to carry out their responsibilities with the degree of vigor necessary to merit the societal trust they enjoy.

The 1983 Supreme Court decision on Three Mile Island held it would be almost impossible to distinguish between persons suffering genuine psychological stress and those who merely opposed the facility. While this argument was treated as factual by the justices, it is merely a hypothesis. This article provides an empirical test of the hypothesis, using the only other nuclear host community known to have experienced as much opposition as Three Mile Island. If the Supreme Court hypothesis were correct, attitudes toward the facility would be almost perfectly correlated with stress symptomatology. In fact, the strongest attitude-stress correlation in this community was -.096, even though simple sociodemographic variables showed far stronger correlations with the stress measures. By contrast, the broader literature reveals growing support for the alternative hypothesis implicitly rejected by the Supreme Court, namely that the risk of technological accidents may indeed be a significant predictor of psychological stress. The findings have implications for both policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on sex differences on the attitude towards environmentalism. Feminist literature on gender socialization; Features of research on environmental and technological controversies that has addressed the issue of gender differences in attitudes; Findings on sex and attitudes toward technological/environmental risks.

One of the most serious challenges lacing "advanced' industrial societies is the management of technological risks. Recently. a number of sociologists have called attention to the topics noting the significant contributions sociologists can offer to the ongoing risk debate. This article takes a complementary approach. suggesting that it is important to ask not just what sociology can do tor the study of risk, but what the study of risk can do for sociology. Particular promise is evident in studies that go beyond a focus on individuals' risk perceptions, dealing with the behaviors and interests of societal institutions entrusted with the management of risks. Still lacking, however. is a more explicit and coherent conceptual framework. one that can help guide future research toward the testing of sociologically important questions, not just what questions and issues that technologists and policymakers define as important. Working from an explicitly sociological orientation, ibis article outlines a couceptual perspective that focuses on the "framing" of risk debates by institutional actors. This approach suggests that, given the profound growth of technological efficacy, in the face at modest if any growth in the efficacy of social control mechanisms, the management of technological risk is likely to become increasingly problematic for sociology as well as for society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that applied settings offer opportunities for analysis as well as employment. The theme is discussed in the context of a recent Congressional Fellowship. The first half of the article is a relatively straightforward report on Congressional staffers and their activities: it presents background information and identifies three areas of dynamic tension that seem to deserve greater attention in future research. Building on this information. the second half of the article provides examples of three types of substantive conclusions that deserve to be encouraged in future applied work. The first is the application, in a new context, of previously familiar concepts. An example in the present case is that. despite the mans ways in which Congress is unique, it is also very much like a "typicaI" small town. The second is the questioning of common assumptions: despite the frequent criticisms of the so-called "rational model of decision making," for example, information and analysis play a significant role in policy outcomes, and knowledge is indeed power in many Congressional deliberations. The third is the recognition of broader challenges to the discipline: an example in the Congressional context is that social scientists, and sociologists in particular, have been extraordinarily ineffective in educating policy- makers on the nature of their work. Individually, each of these conclusions has implications for sociologists: collectively, they are meant to illustrate the importance of looking to applied settings as a source of insights, not just income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protection of habitat for an officially designated "threatened" species, the Northern Spotted Owl, is widely seen as having endangered the survival of a very different "species," namely the rural American logger. In spite of the widespread agreement on this point, however, it is not clear just how many jobs have been endangered, over just how long a period, due to the protection of spotted-owl habitat and of the environment more broadly. In the present paper, we analyze longer term employment trends in logging and milling, both nationally and in the two states of the Pacific Northwest where the spotted-owl debate has been most intense, to determine the length of time over which such environmental protection efforts have been creating the loss of logging and milling jobs. There are three potential key "turning points" since the start of high-quality employment data in 1947--the 1989 controversy over the federal "listing" of the Northern Spotted Owl under the Endangered Species Act, the earlier increase in environmental regulations accompanying the first Earth Day in 1970, and the still-earlier "locking up" of timber after the passage of the Wilderness Protection Act in 1964. We also examine the effects of two other variables that have received considerable attention in the ongoing debates--levels of U.S. Forest Service timber harvests and the exporting of raw logs. We find that the 1989 listing of the spotted owl has no significant effect on employment--not even in the two states where the debate has been most intense. Instead, the only statistically significant turning point came with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. The direction of the change, however, was precisely the opposite of what is generally expected. Both nationally and in the Pacific Northwest, the greatest decline in timber employment occurred from 1947 until 1964--a time of great economic growth, a general absence of "unreasonable environmental regulations," ... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to sociologist Andy Pickering's comments, partly because of the inherent intellectual stimulation of exchanging ideas with such a distinguished colleague, but partly also because of the need for much greater interchange between the two fields, the sociology of environment and technology, on the one hand and the sociology of science on the other. Pickering's comments raise three important points about the analysis of Iron Mountain, Michigan. First, he praises what he calls papers symmetry in noting the importance of physical⁄environmental as well as social factors in understanding social outcomes. Second, he argues that people have not taken this point far enough, in large part because, he believes, the social is not sufficiently at stake in papers. Third, he argues that a fruitful antidote would be to trace the evolution of actual practices, in detail, over time.

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on these a priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be "physical facts" are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be "strictly social" will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature--a mountain--that has undergone little oven physical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of bath the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be "physical" and "social" factors can be conjointly constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the difficulties of integrating environmental variables into sociological analyses is that societies have a dualistic relationship with the biophysical environment. Humans are like other species in depending on the environment, yet humans are also unique among all species in the potential for altering and sometimes evading environmental constraints. A second and related difficulty results from the degree to which humans incorporate the environment into their everyday views of reality; the process often seems so automatic that the biophysical realities can be forgotten, taken for granted, or ignored, both by residents and by those who study them. This problem is particularly significant for studies that fail to be sufficiently comparative to be able to observe significant variations in environmental and technological factors. The problem is illustrated with a study that deals with a relatively traditional social- psychological dependent variable-attitudes toward a proposed development The focus is on the apparent paradox of a form of industrial development that has been welcomed with open arms in one area of the country while virtually opening armed warfare in another, namely drilling for offshore oil. To explain the marked differences across regions, it is necessary to understand the influence of biophysical and technological variables, as well as the social and historical differences across the regions. Implications for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U S environmental law requires that environmental impact statements make "integrated use" of the social sciences in identifying the impacts of certain new developments, and requires that decisionmakers give "appropriate consideration" to the impacts which are identified. Despite this fact, sociological expertise is severely underrepresented in the impact statement process--not only in the final decisions, but in the impact statements themselves. This paper draws attention to the existing situation, and offers several suggestions for improving the sociological content of impact statements in the future. The paper's final section examines potential implications of increased sociological involvement in impact assessments, it concludes that there is a good deal that could be promising about improved (and genuinely "social") impact assessments. Not only could they exert an increased influence on policy outcomes, but they hold the potential to contribute to baste sociology as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author investigates the human factors of several environmental and societal problems in the Greater Yellowstone region in the U.S. The author cites the challenges encountered in several boomtowns in the country due to the prevalence of crimes, particularly sex-related offenses, as well as the changes in social and environmental structures. The author also denotes the essence conservation biology in alleviating these problems.

Concerns about global environmental change challenge long term ecological research (LTER) to go beyond traditional disciplinary scientific research to produce knowledge that can guide society toward more sustainable development. Reporting the outcomes of a 2 d interdisciplinary workshop, this article proposes novel concepts to substantially expand LTER by including the human dimension. We feel that such an integration warrants the insertion of a new letter in the acronym, changing it from LTER to LTSER, "Long-Term Socioecological Research," with a focus on coupled socioecological systems. We discuss scientific challenges such as the necessity to link biophysical processes to governance and communication, the need to consider patterns and processes across several spatial and temporal scales, and the difficulties of combining data from in-situ measurements with statistical data, cadastral surveys, and soft knowledge from the humanities. We stress the importance of including prefossil fuel system baseline data as well as maintaining the often delicate balance between monitoring and predictive or explanatory modeling. Moreover, it is challenging to organize a continuous process of cross-fertilization between rich descriptive and causal-analytic local case studies and theory/modeling-oriented generalizations. Conceptual insights are used to derive conclusions for the design of infrastructures needed for long-term socioecological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]