ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY

Catalog description

(Slashed with SOC 42565 ) This course provides students with an overview of how environmental problems and patterns interact with social systems. The course grounds students in an interdisciplinary range of theories through which environmental problems may be made more visible, and solutions more readily imagined. Topics include the intellectual and activist origins of the environmental justice movement; sustainability and economic development; climate change and population/immigration dynamics; the history of environmental regulatory frameworks and institutions at the local, regional and global level; and inequalities in the experience and consequence of environmental problems. Students are encouraged to pair the course with an internship or other volunteer opportunity with an area environmental, media or policy-making organization to encourage a public sociology orientation for student projects.