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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]

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]

This paper focuses on bureaucratic slippage-the tendency for broad policies to be altered through successive reinterpretation, such that the ultimate implementation may bear little resemblance to legislated or other broad statements of policy intent. It is well known that policy enforcement can be constrained by funding limitations, or by the fact that an apparently strong statement of intent can be coupled with a level of funding that is too low to do the job. A clearer test, however, involves cases where clear policy statements are coupled with substantial levels of funding. The Environmental Studies Program (ESP) of the U.S. Minerals Management Service provides such a case. The program, which is explicitly required to study impacts of offshore development on "the human, marine, and coastal environments," has spent roughly $500 million on such studies over the past two decades. Independent evaluations, however, have found the studies to be lacking. The reasons go beyond mere difficulty, and instead include considerable bureaucratic slippage. The broad mandates of the law are whittled away at successive stages of translation, such that, by the time of the agency's actual "implementation," the ESP is virtually prohibited from fulfilling some of the law's clear requirements. The findings suggest the need to go beyond the analysis of policies and to devote far greater attention to the "details" of implementation. Those details have the distinct potential to be not just administrative, but effectively political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]