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"In March 2020, when most of the world stayed locked inside their homes, the environmental benefits were substantial and drove an environmental change that put society on a much more sustainable trajectory. Rapid change in policies and behaviors are in stark contrast to the slow and ineffective ways that the world has responded to the climate crisis before and after the spring of 2020. When world leaders finally met at the COP-26 climate negotiations in Glasgow in November 2021, they were expected to coordinate a global response to the climate crisis. The outcome, however, was disappointing - countries were unable to agree to the emissions reductions needed and after two weeks of muddled negotiations, countries punted, deciding to meet back in another year to finalize their plans for climate action that would limit global warming below the 1.5 degree threshold that scientists have determined will keep the most dire effects of climate change at bay"--

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- 1 The Man, the Message, and the Members -- 2 Institutionalizing Activism -- 3 Making a Difference as a Canvasser -- 4 Outsourcing Activism -- 5 Laying Sod versus Cultivating the Grass -- 6 Where Do We Go from Here? -- Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- Chapter One. HOW DID WE GET HERE? -- Chapter Two. RESISTANCE IN THE STREETS -- Chapter Three. ORGANIZING THE RESISTANCE IN THE DISTRICTS -- Chapter Four. RESISTANCE IN THE DISTRICTS -- Chapter Five. LOOKING BACK WHILE MARCHING FORWARD -- METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX -- NOTES -- INDEX

AbstractThis article is derived from my 2024 ESS presidential address. I discuss my new book and how a sociological lens helps us to understand the process through which we can save ourselves from the climate crisis. After explaining why the state and the market have struggled to implement sufficient policies to address the climate crisis, I present the AnthroShift as a theory that explains how social actors reorient after risk pivots to open windows of opportunity for social change. I discuss why civil society is most likely to mobilize after there is a generalized sense of climate risk and summarize how climate activists are currently engaging in non‐violent civil disobedience as a first step in an expanded civil society sector that is likely to put pressure on the state and the market to help us save ourselves. I conclude by presenting three steps that can be taken to help us save ourselves from the climate crisis.

In this paper, I look at how subnational policies in the United States are interacting with policy making at the federal level to address the issue of global climate change. I focus on a coordinated attempt to get the national government to fund local efforts to address climate change. Although local climate initiatives in the US were successfully translated into a national policy to support these local efforts, their implementation through hybrid arrangements that are being formed between business and local governmental actors will potentially create additional challenges to federal policy making. I introduce the notion of boomerang federalism, which builds on the extant research on federalism and vertical policy integration, to explain the process through which local efforts mobilize initiatives at the national level that, in turn, provide support for the local initiatives themselves. Reviewing the implementation process of this effort, I discuss the ways that businesses are working alongside local governments to address climate change.

What is the relationship between social movements and electoral politics? Although the empirical reality of American politics has increasingly blurred the lines between activism and electoral politics, sociology has yet to explore these changes and provide theoretical and methodological tools to understand them. Focusing on the experience of young Americans, this review explores this relationship and outlines opportunities for future research. It is broken down into three sections. First, I review the main themes in the study of youth political participation in America. Second, using examples from the 2008 election, the article examines recent increases in youth participation. Third and finally, this article discusses the case of the Obama campaign, its transition into the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America, and aspects of the 2012 election to highlight the complex relationship between movements and electoral politics in America today. The paper concludes by highlighting opportunities for sociologists to bridge the connections between activism and electoral politics in new and meaningful ways.

What happened to non-governmental organizations' participation at the COP-15 round of climate negotiations in Copenhagen? Although the climate regime has been seen as relatively open to civil society, everything changed in Copenhagen and civil society became increasingly disenfranchised. This article discusses the three main forces that led to civil society's disenfranchisement at this round of the climate negotiations: increased registration, poor planning by the Danish organizers and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the merging of movements. I conclude by discussing implications of the increase in civil society disenfranchisement to the climate regime and to the study of global environmental politics more broadly.

This paper presents the theory of the global environmental system to explain the different climate change regimes emerging from advanced industrialized nations. Using data collected regarding the formation of domestic climate change regimes in the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands, the specifics of the theory are outlined. I begin by analyzing the expectations of some of the more prominent sociological theories about the society‐environment relationship in the advanced world finding that they do not explain the disparate responses to the regulation of greenhouse gases in these countries. The theory of the global environmental system is proposed as an alternative to the rather extreme expectations of the sociological literature on society/environment relationships. Through this proposed theory, we can better understand successful cases of global climate change regimes within the context of the interrelations among domestic and international actors.

Abstract Although rural residents often expect resource extraction to lead to local prosperity, much of the recent research finds that resource extraction is associated with poverty. This paper tests these results by examining whether the findings may be due to methodological factors such as the tendency to focus on extreme cases, particular extracting sectors, and certain periods of time. By comparing two localities that have followed very different developmental trajectories—the state of Wisconsin and Hokkaido Prefecture in Japan—during the period from 1970 to 1990, this paper addresses these issues. The results do not clearly support either the expectation that resource extraction will lead to poverty or that it will lead to economic prosperity. Instead, like a handful of studies on resource dependency, the results indicate that the relationship between extraction and poverty is unique to location. Despite the many differences between the United States and Japan, the strongest correlates of poverty in each country involve the proportion of land in an area that is forested. Particularly because these results mirror the findings from the one previous study that included this variable, future research must give greater attention to this explicitly environmental variable, as well as examining some of the possible reasons for the relationship.