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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]

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]