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The article focuses on the awareness of sociology interest in community studies and community development. This set of papers is one of many attempts by the authors to reawaken Sociology's interest in community studies and community development. Community is a group of people who share a common territory or ecology. Communities share a common culture and set of institutions involved in the provision of daily needs. But, by far, the most important component of community is interaction among residents about that ecology, that culture, and those institutions. The implication then is that community is built through the promotion of interaction among residents and the elimination, or at least the reduction, of barriers to such interaction. It is through locally oriented interaction that residents work toward improvement of the local social institutions, culture, and ecology; this is how they alter the social forces that most directly affect them. This growth, however, is not due to tax incentives come manly assumed to affect local business climates and growth. The growth is more likely a response to the quality of life in a place and services they provide The paper makes links between these findings and what is commonly thought of as community development.

The changing manufacturing economy has received scant attention in research on environmental inequalities, even though manufacturing work in the United States has dropped precipitously since the mid‐20th century. I integrate manufacturing decline in metropolitan areas into the study of environmental inequality by using data on industrial air pollution in 1990, 2000, and 2010. I test to see if an indicator of change in the number of manufacturing workers in a metropolitan area from 1970 to each of the three study years is associated with more or less industrially produced toxic emissions. Findings show, somewhat counterintuitively, that metropolitan areas that have had a larger drop in manufacturing work are linked to greater industrial air pollution and that these findings hold in all U.S. regions except the West. Implications focus on how the indelible imprint of manufacturing history may condition contemporary pollution levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the intention of the author to publish issues in the journal "Sociological Inquiry," which was of importance to sociology in the 1980s. One of these topics was environmental sociology. The author hopes that the material contained in the special issue of the journal will bring its greater visibility and contribute to its future maturity. To the best of his knowledge this is the first time a major journal has featured an issue on environmental sociology. This is true despite the fact that the American Sociological Society has recognized a Section on Environmental Sociology since 1976. For the most part, what the author knows about environmental sociology he has gleaned from editing this special issue. For the special issue 9 of the 54 authors were female. For the general issues 31 of the 121 authors were female. The bulk of the articles submitted for the special issue were review and position papers. In contrast over 80 percent of those submitted for general issues were theoretical pieces and reports of empirical research. Less than one-quarter of the manuscripts submitted for the special issue were research reports.

There are widely divergent views on how science and technology are connected to environmental problems. A view commonly held among natural scientists and policy makers is that environmental problems are primarily technical problems that can be solved via the development and implementation of technological innovations. This technologically optimistic view tends to ignore power relationships in society and the political-economic order that drives environmental degradation. An opposed view, common among postmodernist and poststructuralist scholars, is that the emergence of the scientific worldview is one of the fundamental causes of human oppression. This postmodernist view rejects scientific epistemology and often is associated with an anti-realist stance, which ultimately serves to deny the reality of environmental problems, thus (unintentionally) abetting right-wing efforts to scuttle environmental protection. We argue that both the technologically optimistic and the postmodernist views are misguided, and both undermine our ability to address environmental crises. We advocate the adoption of a critical materialist stance, which recognizes the importance of natural science for helping us to understand the world while also recognizing the social embeddedness of the scientific establishment and the need to challenge the manipulation of science by the elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]