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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]

Abstract: Mass media in the U.S. continue to suggest that scientific consensus estimates of global climate disruption, such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are “exaggerated” and overly pessimistic. By contrast, work on the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge (ASC) suggests that such consensus assessments are likely to understate climate disruptions. This paper offers an initial test of the competing expectations, making use of the tendency for science to be self-correcting, over time. Rather than relying in any way on the IPCC process, the paper draws evidence about emerging science from four newspapers that have been found in past work to be biased against reporting IPCC findings, consistently reporting instead that scientific findings are “in dispute.” The analysis considers two time periods — one during the time when the papers were found to be overstating challenges to then-prevailing scientific consensus, and the other focusing on 2008, after the IPCC and former Vice-President Gore shared the Nobel Prize for their work on climate disruption, and before opinion polls showed the U.S. public to be growing more skeptical toward climate science once again. During both periods, new scientific findings were more than twenty times as likely to support the ASC perspective than the usual framing of the issue in the U.S. mass media. The findings indicate that supposed challenges to the scientific consensus on global warming need to be subjected to greater scrutiny, as well as showing that, if reporters wish to discuss “both sides” of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate “other side” is that, if anything, global climate disruption may prove to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster studies have made important progress in recognizing the unequally distributed consequences of disasters, but there has been less progress in analyzing social factors that help create "natural" disasters. Even well-known patterns of hazard-creation tend to be interpreted generically - as representing "economic development" or "capitalism" - rather than through focusing on the more specific dynamics involved. We illustrate this point with two recent and well-known cases of flooding - those in the upper Mississippi River Valley and in the Katrina-related devastation of New Orleans. In the former case, damage was caused in part by building the very kinds of higher and stronger flood walls that were shown to be inadequate in the latter. In the New Orleans case, a more important factor in the death and destruction was the excavation of a transportation canal. In both cases, and many more, the underlying causes of damage to humans as well as to the environment has involved a three-part pattern, supported by the political system - spreading the costs, concentrating the economic benefits and hiding the real risks. In very real senses, these have been floods of folly, created not just by extreme weather events, but by deadly and avoidable patterns of political-economic choices. Comparable patterns appear to deserve greater attention in other contexts, as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At least since the time of Popper, scientists have understood that science provides falsification, but not “proof.” In the world of environmental and technological controversies, however, many observers continue to call precisely for “proof,” often under the guise of “scientific certainty.” Closer examination of real-world disputes suggests that such calls may reflect not just a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science, but a clever and surprisingly effective political-economic tactic—“Scientific Certainty” Argumentation Methods, or SCAMs. Given that most scientific findings are inherently probabilistic and ambiguous, if agencies can be prevented from imposing any regulations until they are unambiguously “justified,” most regulations can be defeated or postponed, often for decades, allowing profitable but potentially risky activities to continue unabated. An exploratory examination of previously documented controversies suggests that SCAMs are more widespread than has been recognized in the past, and that they deserve greater attention 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]

The United States may well have spent more money in the effort to develop nuclear waste sites than any other nation on earth, but save for the case of a facility in New Mexico that handles only military wastes, every single effort to site a new repository in the last several decades has ended in failure. Given that the siting efforts to date have generally ignored the advice of social scientists, this track record makes it difficult to know whether that advice could lead to outcomes that affected parties would consider 'successes' in the US context, but there are important opportunities to learn from what nearly all parties consider to have been 'failures'. One particularly telling case involves efforts to develop a repository for lower-level radioactive wastes in New York State. There, as in many other US cases, the relevant officials chose to focus on an arbitrarily narrowed subset of work on socio-economic impacts that the agency considered 'credible', ignoring social science findings on stigma, public controversy, and so-called 'special' impacts related to the radioactive character of the wastes. The officials also appear to have erred in insisting on a top-down, 'technical' approach to screening, and in ignoring the very real impacts created by their own actions. Ultimately, the process led to a degree of outcry that was remarkable even in the context of nuclear waste facilities; the citizen blockades and round-the-clock outposts at the boundaries of the selected areas were sufficiently well-organized to prevent even preliminary on-site analyses, meaning that the socio-economic impacts that were excluded from consideration proved to be not just 'credible' but vivid, bringing the entire process to a halt, while none of the 'credible' biophysical impacts ever took place. The case suggests that essentially universal patterns should be relatively easy to predict, but that unfortunate choices can make the problems of siting even worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extractive industries such as logging and mining are generally expected to bring significant economic benefits to rural regions, but a growing number of findings have now challenged that common expectation. Still, it is not clear whether the findings of less–than–desirable economic outcomes are isolated or representative. In this article, we assemble literally all of the relevant quantitative findings on mining that we have been able to identify in published and/or technical literature from the United States. In the interest of rigor, we limit the assessment to cases in which strictly nonmetropolitan mining regions are compared against other nonmetropolitan regions and/or against those regions’ own experiences over time. Overall, 301 findings meet the criteria for inclusion. Contrary to the long–established assumptions, but consistent with more recent critiques, roughly half of all published findings indicate negative economic outcomes in mining communities, with the remaining findings being split roughly evenly between favorable and neutral/indeterminate ones. Positive findings are more likely to be associated with incomes than with poverty or (especially) unemployment rates, and they are more likely to come from the western United States, where much of the mining involves relatively large, new coal strip mines. Over half of all positive findings come from the years prior to 1982. In virtually all other categories, the plurality or majority of findings have been negative. When the patterns of findings are subjected to one–sample means tests, the only way to produce a significantly positive outcome is by combining all neutral/indeterminate findings with the positive ones, while focusing exclusively on incomes; by contrast, in the case of poverty or unemployment rates—as well as for the overall body of findings—the results are consistently and significantly negative, whether the neutral/indeterminate findings are combined with negative ones or omitted from the equations altogether. Until or unless future studies produce dramatically different findings, there appears to be no scientific basis for accepting the widespread, “obvious” assumption that mining will lead to economic improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the proposal of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) regarding the importance of external perturbations in policy change in the U.S. Information on the strategies used by the ACF in dealing with policy change; Application of the proposal of the ACF to federal policies for offshore oil leasing; Discussion on the autogenic succession theory for policy change.

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]

U S environmental law requires that environmental impact statements make "integrated use" of the social sciences in identifying the impacts of certain new developments, and requires that decisionmakers give "appropriate consideration" to the impacts which are identified. Despite this fact, sociological expertise is severely underrepresented in the impact statement process--not only in the final decisions, but in the impact statements themselves. This paper draws attention to the existing situation, and offers several suggestions for improving the sociological content of impact statements in the future. The paper's final section examines potential implications of increased sociological involvement in impact assessments, it concludes that there is a good deal that could be promising about improved (and genuinely "social") impact assessments. Not only could they exert an increased influence on policy outcomes, but they hold the potential to contribute to baste sociology as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human beings have a dualistic relationship with the environment, being subject to physical and biological limits and yet being unique in the capacity for culture and symbolic communication. Sociology reflects this context and adds another dualism, drawing heavily from the concepts and perspectives of biological ecology, but reacting almost violently against ‘reductionism’ of any sort, specifically including social Darwinism and environmental determinism. During much of the twentieth century, the predominant trend within sociology was for scholars to downplay or even ignore the importance of the environment, particularly in the United States. This trend was ultimately counterbalanced by sociological responses to the environmental movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and by the efforts of selected sociologists—particularly Riley Dunlap and William Cation—who helped bring together the field of ‘environmental sociology’ Given the finite nature of many natural resources and the ways in which human activities depend upon and affect the environment, the field of environmental sociology is likely to be an increasingly important one in the years to come. [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]

Particularly when discussing the effects of large-scale industrial projects, the existing community literature exhibits a curious duality about relationships between local communities and outside forces. While explicitly noting the external origins of large-scale industrial projects, the literature shifts to a focus on local planning when discussing the management of any resultant disruptions. Little attention is devoted to the possibility that the magnitude of external boom-bust forces may be so great as to overwhelm even the best-prepared communities. This exploratory study examines the extent of external influences on two resource-dependent parishes (counties) in coastal Louisiana with long histories of offshore oil and gas development-one a predominantly blue-collar area and the other an administrative center. The drop in oil prices since 1981 created differently structured but equally devastating impacts on the two. Simple indices suggest that the parishes experienced four-to-ten times as much instability over the past two decades as the nation as a whole. In both parishes, simple regression equations using commodity-related variables that are completely outside the control of local communities are found to explain over 90 percent of the variation in total employment and over 70 percent of the change in employment that cannot be explained by pre-existing conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on energy boomtowns includes numerous statements that women are more severely "impacted" than men (if the same communities. It is possible to draw hypothesis from other literatures. however, that imply that women may do less poorly than men, or even that the women may do less poorly than men, or even that the women could benefit from rapid growth. The present paper examines data on social integration, alienation, and overall social-psychological adjustment from a sample of four western Colorado energy communities, one of which has become a boomtown. the paper finds very little support for the proposition that the women would perceive themselves as being more negatively affected than the men of the boomtown: nor, however, does it discover evidence that the energy boom has led to a net personal benefit for the women. The boomtown women were highly unlikely to receive a direct economic benefit from development, and the data from one scale total suggest that the hypothesis of negative impacts among newcomer women (as well as among newcomer men) may deserve further attention. Particularly among long-time residents, however, the present study's data suggest that women may actually be adapting more successfully to boomtown living than are men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the role of social science in environmental management, we must explore the institutional settings within which such contributions take place. In the United States, much of this work is done in the context of environmental and social impact assessments, and is shaped by the legal requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969. The issues of technological risk and waste management are likely to provide increasingly important contexts for social science input in the future. This article discusses the concepts of "socioeconomic impact assessment," and of managing and "mitigating" impacts. it then examines the role actually played by social and behavioral scientists in the NEPA context—a role that has been quite paradoxical. Drawing from waste management experiences, the closing sections of the paper provide a brief analysis of some of the reasons behind this paradox and discuss implications for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author investigates the human factors of several environmental and societal problems in the Greater Yellowstone region in the U.S. The author cites the challenges encountered in several boomtowns in the country due to the prevalence of crimes, particularly sex-related offenses, as well as the changes in social and environmental structures. The author also denotes the essence conservation biology in alleviating these problems.