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Despite strong scientific consensus that global climate disruption is real and due in significant part to human activities, stories in the U.S. mass media often still present the opposite view, characterizing the issue as being “in dispute.” Even today, the U.S. media devote significant attention to small numbers of denialists, who claim that scientific consensus assessments, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are “exaggerated” and “political.” Such claims, however, are testable hypotheses—and just the opposite expectation is hypothesized in the small but growing literature on Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods, or SCAMs. The work on SCAMs suggests that, rather than being a reflection of legitimate scientific disagreement, the intense criticisms of climate science may reflect a predictable pattern that grows out of “the politics of doubt”: If enough doubt can be raised about the relevant scientific findings, regulation can be avoided or delayed for years or even decades. Ironically, though, while such a pattern can lead to a bias in scientific work, the likely bias is expected to be just the opposite of the one usually feared. The underlying reason has to do with the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge, or ASC—so named because certain theories or findings, such as those indicating the significance of climate disruption, are subjected to systematically greater challenges than are those supporting opposing conclusions. As this article shows, available evidence provides significantly more support for SCAM and ASC perspectives than for the concerns that are commonly expressed in the U.S. mass media. These findings suggest that, if current scientific consensus is in error, it is likely because global climate disruption may be even worse than commonly expected to date. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the discovery of oil well drilling, energy policy (particularly offshore petroleum policy over the past three decades) has led the United States, and indeed the industrialized world, into a cycle of dependency, profit, and risk taking that made a Macondo-like blowout likely, if not inevitable. This article examines the broad political, economic, technological, and environmental contexts surrounding the growth and development of both our ability to obtain petroleum and our dependency on it. The authors use the tools of environmental sociology, environmental history, and political ecology to trace the path to the current situation in which the myth of “energy independence” is used to justify practices that are counter to the very concept. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the author's views concerning the evolution of environmental sociology. The author relates that in 1978, environmental sociology does not exist, until subsequent development of the field began to develop through the publication of Doctor Riley Dunlap and Doctor William Catton's articles. The author notes that these human ecologists have moved forward helping to change the entire field of sociology by actively giving attention to environmental variables as part of the sociological work. The author suggests that works on environmental problems and variables should be credited to Dunlap and Catton.

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.

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 article provides a basic historical background for understanding the nature of contamination, corrosion and social order. The history of disaster research started when military planners began to wonder about the ways in which communities might respond to something as disastrous as a sneak nuclear attack, and as technological prowess and post-war prosperity combined to offer at least some prospect for managing the wildest of nature's moods, rather than merely responding to them. The professional community studying technological disasters has gone through a substantial shift in viewpoints over the past several decades. By the mid-1980s, a growing number of researchers were beginning to wonder, whether the systematic differences between natural and technological disasters might most reasonably be traced to causes that include but go beyond the kinds of obvious death and destruction that were the major preoccupation of the field during its early decades. If the aftermath of a natural disaster is typified by volunteers who come in to offer a hand, the aftermath of a technological disaster is perhaps best typified by lawyers who offer instead the back of a hand.

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.

The author, in this article, comments on balance and bias in boomtown research. Detailed and critical scrutiny has a time-honored place in scientific research; critiques, however, should be able to withstand the same degree of scrutiny as any other form of scientific reporting. The failure to deal with the available evidence may actually be as severe in the critique as it is in the boomtown literature more generally. The underground or fugitive nature of much of the boomtown literature would make it understandable that a researcher might not be familiar with every single relevant work. The failure to consider the relevant data is particularly unfortunate, in that it could serve to divert attention away from a valid point. While increasing confidence can be gained from a series of independent findings that all point to the same general conclusion, it is not appropriate to assume in advance that all presumed social pathology indicators will be positively correlated. This problem is a real one in the boomtown literature--notably with respect to child abuse problems and divorce rates and particularly with respect to the latter.

When adolescents from a rapidly growing community are compared to counter- parts in three nearby communities that are expecting growth of their own, the young persons in the rapidly growing community have significantly lower evaluations of their community, more negative attitudes toward growth, lower levels of satisfaction, and higher levels of alienation. None of these differences are found when adults from the growing community are compared to adults in the same three control communities, and none can be explained by sociodemographic background factors (including length of community residence). The study's ethnographic data strongly suggest that the reasons for the anomalous findings are predominantly social and cultural in nature and are not strongly affected by the types of economic and logistical factors that have been the focus of most analyses to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was not merely the result of the actions taken on a single tanker on a single evening; the full range of causal factors included ac tions not just of the tanker crew and the Exxon corporate hierarchy, but also of governmental institutions. Over time, government "ownership" of mineral re sources led to a situation where governmental agencies came effectively to have a profit motive, not vastly different from the profit motives of private firms, in promoting oil extraction. In addition, military interests wished to encourage domestic, rather than international petroleum-extraction activities, further in creasing the attractiveness of Alaskan reserves. As would be predicted by Stone's model of "systemic power" (1980), while powerful pro-development interests faced opposition during the period when pipeline issues were publicly salient, the pro-development interests subsequently eroded the safeguards that had ini tially been implemented, ultimately increasing the probability of an accident of the sort that actually occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses irrational fears about risk and society. Understanding of public reactions to technological risks; Riskiness of relying on the risk numbers; Technological risk crossover.