Search results

Environmental sociology remains on the periphery of the discipline because its traditional moment focuses on the material rather than social world and its synthetic moment looks as much like geography, anthropology, science studies, and cultural studies as it does sociology. This article will review contemporary visions of the history of nature and the environmental movement and their consequences of environmental sociological pedagogy. In doing so, it will suggest using O'Connor's political ecological theory of environmental problems to teach the range of problems and approaches associated with the subdiscipline. Two strategies are stressed. The first combines social and environmental history in coursework, nonclass exercises, and writing. The second pursues undergraduate research into the social and ecological history of "natural" places, such as woods and parks, and "social" places, such as blocks of student rentals and campus buildings.

In 1998, a contract was signed between the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and Novartis in which the latter agreed to give UCB's Department of Plant and Microbial Biology US$25 million over a five year period. This Agreement was the foundation for debates that split the university over issues related to corporate control of the university, the environmental and social consequences of biotechnology, intellectual property rights, and academic freedom. This paper investigates the ways in which the Agreement was presented within the public relations office of UCB and the popular press, as well as reactions to that coverage. Data were collected through archival and web-based searches and interviews with individuals connected to the Agreement.

Cover -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Series Foreword -- List of Figures and Tables -- Publisher's Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction: The Socio-Ecological Imagination -- There is No Unitary "Anthropos" and Environmental Problems are Socially Mediated -- Nature-Cultures -- Realism, Constructionism and Beyond -- Material, Cultural and Political Ecologies -- Power and Socio-Ecological Entanglements -- Conclusion -- 1 Unnatural Social Theory? The Problem of Nature in Classic Social Theory -- Enlightenment and Social Theory -- Naturalistic Reductionism in Social Theory: Malthus, Spencer and Social Darwinism -- Social Reductionism: Durkheim -- Looking Beyond Mainstream Traditions in Social Theory -- Marx and Engels on Ecology and Environmental Questions -- Social Anarchism, Mutualism and Regionalism -- A.N. Whitehead, Gabriel Tarde and the Sociology of Associations -- Human Ecology -- Catton and Dunlap - Contesting Human Exemptionalism -- Ted Benton - Rejecting Human Exceptionalism but Defending the Specificity of the Ecologically Embedded Social Agent -- Haraway: A Relational View of Nature-Cultures -- Negotiating Hybrid Worlds -- Conclusion -- 2 Hybrid Histories: Historical Socio-Ecologies in the Age of "the Anthropocene" -- Noble/Ignoble Savages and Postcolonial Histories -- Environmental Histories of Small-Scale, Agricultural and Feudal Societies -- Collapse, Overshoot or Social and Ecological Resilience? -- Understanding the Landscape of the Pre-Columbian Americas: A Pristine World or a Worked and Populated Hybrid Landscape? -- Mobile Nonhuman Histories: Crosby's Ecological Imperialism -- The Rise of "the Anthropocene"? -- Anthropocene, Capitalocene or the Global Production of Multiple Socionatures? -- Conclusion -- 3 Limits/No Limits? Neo-Malthusians, Prometheans and Beyond -- The Rise of the Neo-Malthusians.