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Rather than seeking ivory-tower isolation, members of the Rural Sociological Society have always been distinguished by a willingness to work with specialists from a broad range of disciplines, and to work on some of the world's most challenging problems. What is less commonly recognized is that the willingness to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries can contribute not just to the solution of real-world problems, but also to the advancement of the discipline itself. This point is increasingly being illustrated in studies of environment-society relationships. Most past discussions of humans' roles in environmental problems have focused on overall or average human impacts, but rural sociologists have played leading roles in identifying what I have come to call ''the double diversion.'' First, rather than being well-represented by averages, environmental damages are often characterized by high levels of disproportionality, with much or most of the harm being created by the diversion of environmental rights and resources to a surprisingly small fraction of the relevant social actors. The disproportionality appears to be made possible in part through the second diversion, namely distraction—the diversion of attention, largely through the taken-for-granted but generally erroneous assumption that the environmental harm ''must'' be for the benefit of us all. There are good reasons why rural sociologists would have been among the first to notice both of these ''diversions''—and why they will give even greater attention to both in the future. [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]

In comparison with urbanites, rural residents live in environments that are less heavily modified by human activity. They also depend more directly on the extraction or use of natural resources and are more likely to suffer the kinds of economic weaknesses that could lead them to favor economic development even at the expense of environmental protection. Yet while some studies have found rural residents to express lower levels of environmental concern than do urbanites, other studies have found that low levels of rural environmental concern may actually reflect lower concerns among farmers in particular. These varied results may be affected by methodologies, including the degree of focus on local environmental concern and the need to separate living in polluted areas from working for polluting industries. Drawing on rural areas with significant employment both in agriculture and in mining, this paper presents data on more specific local concerns about the environment and technological development. The findings show persons in agriculture express higher levels of concern than do other rural persons in the same communities. The results suggest that widespread support for environmental protection may make it difficult to isolate groups having low levels of environmental concern unless greater attention is devoted to the specific environmental issues having the greatest local salience. [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 National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) is the law that created the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The law also led to a legal anomaly. While federal agencies are given broad discretion over the use of information contained in EISs, the EISs are explicitly required to make "integrated use" of social science expertise. Yet most EISs to date have contained little or no evidence of social science input. This article begins with a brief introduction to the legal requirements for the use of social science expertise in EISs. Next, synthesizing the existing literature, we identify six major factors that appear to account for the major part of the discrepancy. Third, we explore possibilities for dealing with the situation. Three propositions drawn from the theories and insights of political sociology suggest that what appears to be problems "of the field" may actually result from the specific structural situations in which social scientists have found themselves to date. Thus, improvements may be dependent on social scientists' willingness to explore new roles-roles that entail important risks as well as important opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper briefly outlines the origins and contributions of environ- mental sociology to date, going on to propose ways in which the existing research can be used as a foundation for a new generation of research into the 21st century. It argues that environmental sociologists need to avoid the omphaloskepsis that sometimes afflicts other fields of sociology, but that there is a real opportunity to do so. Three options appear particularly promising: (a) broadening the now-established base of sociological research that deals systematically with environmental variables; (b) devoting greater attention to the ways in which socially constructed "definitions of the situation" may contribute to (and not simply permit the evading of) the environmental problems that societies face; and (c) beginning more fine-grained analyses of the connections between specific human activities (particularly economic activities) and specific components of the physical environment. Contributions to date have clearly established the fact that such connections exist; the work of a much broader range of sociologists will be needed, however, to help develop an improved understanding of the nature, causes, and extent of those connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]