Environmental Sociology: the Early Years

In this lecture, Dr. Riley Dunlap presents the history and early development of environmental sociology. He defines environmental sociology as the broad study of society-environment interactions and notes that, historically, this study was focused on modern industrialized societies. He highlights the early focus of environmental sociology on the social construction of environmental problems, and explains that in the 1970s, there were several theoretical schools of thought about human relationships to the natural environment. He contrasts the dominant western worldview with human exemptionalism and new ecological paradigms and he links these paradigms to underlying sociological theories about human motivation and decision-making. He concludes by noting that environmental sociology is both expanding and being complemented by related frameworks that highlight the interdisciplinary nature of human-environment interactions.