Socioenvironmental Factors and Development Policy: Understanding Opposition and Support for Offshore Oil.

One of the difficulties of integrating environmental variables into sociological analyses is that societies have a dualistic relationship with the biophysical environment. Humans are like other species in depending on the environment, yet humans are also unique among all species in the potential for altering and sometimes evading environmental constraints. A second and related difficulty results from the degree to which humans incorporate the environment into their everyday views of reality; the process often seems so automatic that the biophysical realities can be forgotten, taken for granted, or ignored, both by residents and by those who study them. This problem is particularly significant for studies that fail to be sufficiently comparative to be able to observe significant variations in environmental and technological factors. The problem is illustrated with a study that deals with a relatively traditional social- psychological dependent variable-attitudes toward a proposed development The focus is on the apparent paradox of a form of industrial development that has been welcomed with open arms in one area of the country while virtually opening armed warfare in another, namely drilling for offshore oil. To explain the marked differences across regions, it is necessary to understand the influence of biophysical and technological variables, as well as the social and historical differences across the regions. Implications for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]