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Discourses of expectation shape technology development and uptake in subtle and profound ways. While STS research tends to view discourses of expectation in aggregate, disarticulating expectation into distinct narratives of anticipation and legitimation offers insights into the contradictory symbolic forces that inform novel technological applicati...
Extreme weather events that may be associated with climate change drivers offer valuable opportunities for public discussion of climate change. Such events tend to draw a high level of public attention, and they represent acute and personal impacts of climate change, unlike most climate-related information to which members of the public are exposed...
New scientific findings cataloguing the need for a rapid renewable energy transition are most often met with calls for innovation. Our failure to address climate change and thereby avoid the socioeconomic crises it foretells will not be attributed to a lack of innovation, however, but rather to a lack of exnovation.
Since the 1990s, the tar sands enterprise has evoked a collision of worldviews.
At one extreme: proponents of the industry’s growth and the development of what
they perceive as a valuable energy source that creates investment, jobs, taxes and
royalties, with reparable or justifiable costs. At the other: critics alarmed at the
socio-ecological disru...
Despite low levels of agreement that climate change is caused primarily by humans, respondents to a survey of climate change beliefs and adoption of climate-mitigative practices among beef and grain producers in Alberta, Canada, indicate a high level of adoption of several agricultural practices with climate-mitigative benefits. Respondents' motiva...
Oil and gas producers have become increasingly reliant on the extraction of marginal and ‘non-conventional’ resources, like deep-sea deposits, bitumen, and shale gas, which are associated with lower economic returns, and higher social and environmental risks. In order to maintain development trajectories amidst a growing chorus of concerned citizen...
Understanding that climate change poses considerable threats for social systems, to which we must adapt in order to survive, social responses to climate change should be viewed in the context of evolution, which entails the variation, selection, and retention of information. Digging deeper into evolutionary theory, however, emotions play a surprisi...
Oil and gas producers have become increasingly reliant on the extraction of marginal and ‘non-conventional’ resources, like deep-sea deposits, bitumen, and shale gas, which are associated with lower economic returns, and higher social and environmental risks. In order to maintain development trajectories amidst a growing chorus of concerned citizen...
This introductory chapter presents the purpose of the book: to scrutinize existing core conceptualizations of environment-society relations, because such a critical gaze will allow for deeper reflection, help to confront denialism, engage sociological imagination, and lead to more fruitful communication and action within the environmental sciences...
This concluding chapter begins by elaborating on the importance of conceptual pluralization and reflexivity to confront contemporary tendencies of denialism and anti-reflexivity. It then offers critical reflections on the concepts explored in this volume, by returning to the three questions raised in the introductory chapter: What is the explanator...
In this chapter, the uptake of the concept of metabolism by the environmental social sciences is described, including attention to early theoretical treatments that continue to shape metabolic conceptualizations. This is followed by a review of empirical modelling efforts emanating primarily from industrial ecology, and the metabolic critiques of c...
We comment on the recent comprehensive review “Barriers to enhanced and integrated climate change adaptation and mitigation in Canadian forest management” by Williamson and Nelson (2017, Can. J. For. Res. 47: 1567–1576, doi:10.1139/cjfr-2017-0252). They employ the popular barriers analysis approach and present a synthesis highlighting the numerous...
Reflexivity is an important sociological lens through which to examine the means by which people engage in actions that contribute to social reproduction or social elaboration. Reflexivity theorists have largely overlooked the central place of emotions in reflexive processing, however, thus missing opportunities to enhance our understanding of refl...
This book offers a critical analysis of core concepts that have influenced contemporary conversations about environment-society relations in academic, political, and civil circles. Considering these conceptualizations are currently shaping responses to environmental crises in fundamental ways, critical reflections on concepts such as the Anthropoce...
Trauma, the experience of sudden, dangerous, overwhelming events that render victims powerless, is an apt description of many experiences with toxic contamination. Toxic contamination events nonetheless often have a number of characteristics in common that render such events unique forms of trauma, including the invisibility and ambiguity of threat...
While tackling interdependencies among food, energy, and water security is promising, three fundamental challenges to e ective operationalization need addressing: the feasibility of science-policy integration, cross-scale inequalities, and path-dependencies in infrastructure and socio-institutional practices.
Reflexivity theory can contribute in important ways to our understanding of how societies contend with climate change. Avoiding the catastrophic effects of “dangerous climate change” will require substantial change, yet emissions continue to rise. Social scientific research on climate change mitigation is dominated by a relatively small number of m...
The value of the social sciences to climate change research is well recognized, but notable gaps remain in the literature on adaptation in agriculture. Contributions focus on farmer behaviour, with important research regarding gender, social networks and institutions remaining under-represented.
Although the recent Perspective by Eisenack et. al. attempts to move the discussion on barriers to climate change adaptation forwards, in our view it still does not address a key challenge that has hampered this line of research since its beginnings. http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n6/full/nclimate2615.html
A key focus for agri-food scholars today pertains to emerging “alternative food movements,” particularly their long-term viability, and their potential to induce transitions in our prevailing conventional global agri-food systems. One under-studied element in recent research on sustainability transitions more broadly is the role of disruptive event...
This chapter assesses literature on observed and projected impacts, vulnerabilities, and risks as well as on adaptation practices and options in three North American countries: Canada, Mexico, and the USA. The North American Arctic region is assessed in Chapter 28: Polar Regions. North America ranges from the tropics to frozen tundra, and contains...
This paper explores processes of adaptation to food safety crises, and raises questions about what can be understood as success and failure in a crisis response. It presents the outcomes of a qualitative research study of Canada’s beleaguered beef industry, and investigates institutional learning and adaptation following an outbreak of BSE (bovine...
Alternative beef production in the Province of Alberta, Canada is evaluated in the context of recent discussions of sustainability transitions. By combining the insights of Archer’s sociological Reflexivity/Morphogenesis Theory with Sustainability Transitions Theory, we analyze the findings of a qualitative case study comparing the interviews of co...
Human interference with the climate system is occurring. [WGI AR5 2.2, 6.3, 10.3-6, 10.9] Climate change poses risks for human and natural systems (Figure TS.1). The assessment of impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (WGII AR5) evaluates how patterns of risks and potential...
Concern for the increasing impact of human activities on Earth's ecosystems has generated a growing effort to monitor those impacts and measure the success, if any, of mitigation measures. This contribution argues that ecological impact assessments that tend to rely primarily on the volume of natural resources produced and subsequently consumed ove...
The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into technological innovation and investment for CO2 reduction with focusing on the concepts of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and CO2 direct air capture (DAC) technology. The paper initially argues the necessities and motivations for technology innovation as an effective approach for addressing cl...
This chapter examines similarities in government policies that have accelerated and privatized the extraction of offshore oil, coal, and oil sands on public lands in the United States and Canada, as well as the arguments used to justify those policies. Sociologist William Freudenburg argued that the diversion of public resources into private hands...
Resource exploitation can lead to increased ecological impacts even when overall consumption levels stay the same.
If we wish to understand how our species can adapt to the coming tide of environmental change, then understanding how we have adapted throughout the course of evolution is vital. Evolutionary biologists have been exploring these questions in the last forty years, establishing a solid record of evidence that conventional, individual-based models of...
Sociologists are increasingly directing attention toward social responses to climate change. As is true of any new field of inquiry, theoretical frameworks guiding the research to date have room for improvement. One advance could be achieved through closer engagement with Reflexivity Theory, particularly the work of Margaret Archer, who asks just h...
This paper presents results from a survey on attitudes toward climate change in Alberta, Canada, home to just 10% of Canada’s population, but the source of 35% of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions (Environment Canada 2011). Results show high levels of awareness, but much lower levels of perceived climate change impacts for one’s self or region...
For much of the history of Alberta’s tar sands, a series of visual conventions have shaped Canadian imaginaries of the resource, the emergence of the non-conventional oil industry, and the mining of oil. We introduce a series of archival images dating from 1880 until the opening of Great Canadian Oil Sands (Suncor) in 1967, to analyze how visual re...
Several conceptual models have served as the mainstay of attitudinal and behavioural research on environmental risks, including climate change for several decades. While important findings have accumulated, this largely empirical project has not incorporated several theoretical advances in sociology, particularly renewed interest in agency, as expr...
William Freudenburg’s double diversion framework, describing tandem political processes of privileged access and privileged accounts, has been receiving growing attention in environmental sociology and environmental studies more broadly, warranting a close look at the evolutionary development of this framework in Freudenburg’s record of scholarship...
The nature of linkages between international trade and environmental wellbeing has been debated for several decades, with no resolution in sight. Environmental critics of neo-liberal trade policies warn of over-consumption, drains on resource supplies, increases in pollution and the energy-intensive nature of international trade. These concerns hav...
To convince others that something is right or wrong, we need a language of ends, not means. We don’t have to believe that our objectives are poised to succeed. But we do need to be able to believe in them. Ill Fares the Land, 2010:180
The consequences to the ecological foundations of human (and non-human) life from climate change, losses in biological diversity, trans-boundary waste movements, rising sea levels, changes in weather and food production, and so on are of a magnitude not previously experienced and pose not just a threat but also a certainty of changes to our collect...
Since the 1990s, the tar sands enterprise has evoked a collision of worldviews. At one extreme: proponents of the industry’s growth and the development of what they perceive as a valuable energy source that creates investment, jobs, taxes and royalties, with reparable or justifiable costs. At the other: critics alarmed at the socio-ecological disru...
The Athabasca tar sands may have been born virtually overnight in the international media, but only after a decades-long incubation period during which the maternal side of Albertans shone. This incubation is captured – the baby itself in fact constructed – in discourse as much as in industriousness. And within this discourse, it is the images that...
Society’s short 100-year love affair with oil has been replete with regional supply concerns, heated contests over access to the globe’s more substantial pools, price roller coasters, and nasty environmental disasters. Today, however, the political discourse on oil has ever so hesitantly ventured into entirely new terrain – the End of Oil. As with...
Canada’s boreal forest ecozone is a major part of the global boreal region that encircles the Earth’s northern hemisphere, serving as a significant storehouse for the world’s freshwater supplies, and carbon, contained in its trees, soil, and peat (http:// pubs. pembina. org/ reports/ 1000-cuts. pdf, 2006). The boreal is also home to a rich array of...
Human history has often been described as a progressive relinquishment from environmental constraints. Now, it seems, we have come full circle. The ecological irrationalities associated with industrial societies have a lengthy history, and our purpose is not to catalogue this litany of horrors. Collectively, however, we have crossed certain literal...
Incumbent Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach (2006–) says that he “doesn’t need to tell” the Fort McMurray business community how their support for the Athabasca oil sands is key to the economies of Alberta and Canada. He then announces to citizens of the city and the province that it is their responsibility to supply energy to the world. Much government...
Much research attention regarding climate change has been focused on the macrophysical and, to a lesser extent, the macrosocial features of this phenomenon. An important step in mitigation and adaptation will be to examine the ways that climate change risks manifest themselves in particular social localities. Certain social groups may be at greater...
This article presents an inquiry into prospects for application of the conceptual lens of resilience to social systems. The dominant paradigm of sustainability in its current form is likely to be of limited utility for aiding scholars to contribute to our understanding of past and current global environmental crises, and for planning for such event...
The potential for reflexive modernization is defined by multiple factors, but the acknowledgment of risk is crucial, particularly among social groups that play a key role in risk minimization. This study offers an examination of the role of local media in response to the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in beef-producing communiti...
The basis of environmental-resource conflicts is often at-tributable to heterogeneous values systems between user groups that share particular landscapes and accompanying resources. A strong case can be made for the construction of these values through a dialectic between the physical land-scape and lived experiences within that landscape i.e. envi...
This article presents the findings of a case study of paper consumption behavior at the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta. Using methods of social research such as survey, focus groups, and behavioral experimentation, we tested explanations of pro-environmental behavior with respect to paper consumption in academia. Our behaviora...
Nous passons en revue la politique intégrée de gestion des ressources de l'Alberta pour mettre en lumière la compétence du gouvernement provincial pour refaçonner de manière discursive la relation entre un développement des ressources naturelles et une protection de l'environnement pour conserver sa légitimité tout en évitant une restructuration in...
Oil, Water, and Climate: An Introduction BY GAUTIERCATHERINE xxi + 366 pp., 25 × 18 × 2.5 cm, ISBN 978 0 521 70919 4 paperback, GB£ 24.99/US$ 49.00, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008 - Volume 36 Issue 1 - DEBRA J. DAVIDSON
The challenges for sociology posed by global environmental crisis are two-fold. First, the growing prevalence of environmental dilemmas in global society demand that a globalizing sociology must also be an environmental sociology. This requires the need for the discipline to refine its ability to integrate into its conceptual frameworks environment...
À une époque où l'enthousiasme se manifeste pour une gouvernance environnementale plus délibérative et participative, des études critiques sur ces activités s'avèrent grandement nécessaires. Un forum très en vue sur la gouvernance, le Comité de consultation publique, en est venu à jouer un rôle d'une importance capitale dans la réglementation légis...
Many scientific agency decisions are made on the basis not of solid scientific findings but of pervasive scientific uncertainty. This uncertainty space creates rich opportunities for gaming the system. As such, a strategy called the Scientific Certainty Argumentation Method or SCAM has been sought. SCAM's success comes from the fact that scientific...
Rapid industrial development can have unplanned consequences for the landscape and lead to conflicts among stakeholders. Impacts to traditional and subsistence-based land users can be significant, but have gone largely unexamined. We studied marten trapper attitudes toward industrial development and how these perceptions coincide with measurements...
At least since the time of Popper, scientists have understood that science provides falsification, but not “proof.” In the world of environmental and technological controversies, however, many observers continue to call precisely for “proof,” often under the guise of “scientific certainty.” Closer examination of real-world disputes suggests that su...
This timely collection will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and agriculturalists throughout North America and beyond. It offers both a comprehensive collection of recent research on the vulnerability of Canadian farming systems to climate change and a thorough and articulate presentation of the breadth of concepts and methods currently em...
The relationship between the environment and society is an increasingly prevalent theme in the study of contemporary social systems, with research often focused on the interactions between capital, environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and the state. Ecological Marxist and ecological modernizationist lines of enquiry, for example, bo...
Abstract Studies of reactions to nuclear facilities have found consistent male/female differences, but the underlying reasons have never been well-clarified. The most common expectations involve traditional roles—with men focusing more on economic concerns and with women (especially mothers) being more concerned about family safety/health. Still, w...
One of the most effective sources of legitimation for privileged access to the environment and its natural resources comes in the form of hegemonic ideologies, such as private property rights. The concentratiosn of ownership and control over land and natural resources is rarely contested, because to question the rights of an industrial actor's prop...
A growing literature considers how the forest management community will have to adapt to future climate change impacts. Recently in this journal, Spittlehouse and Stewart presented a framework for planning adaptive actions to address forest-related climate change issues. This paper expands on that framework by discussing five policy process approac...
This article presents an historical sketch of the insights and applications provided by social science scholars on environmental governance. The authors begin with a review of the conceptual developments during the past 50 years characterized in terms of six conceptual perspectives: pluralism, agency capture, ecological Marxism, ecological moderniz...
This article examines factors that predict perceptions of risk associated with global climate change. The research focuses on the perceptions of those associated with climate change policy making in the prairie region of Canada. The data are from an online survey (n=851) of those policy actors. The analysis integrates several dominant approaches to...
This article explores the potential for nation-states to become substantial contributors to sustainability governance. This potential resides in the ability of nation-states to make environmental protection a basic goal, in part by committing institutional resources toward the formation and implementation of substantive actions perceived necessary...
This article explores the potential for nation-states to become substantial contributors to sustainability governance. This potential resides in the ability of nation-states to make environmental protection a basic goal, in part by committing institutional resources toward the formation and implementation of substantive actions perceived necessary...
We review Alberta's integrated resource management policy to highlight the provincial government's ability to discursively reframe the relationship between natural resource development and environmental protection to maintain legitimacy while avoiding institutional restructuring. This study indicates that Ecological Modernization consists of two in...
This paper presents a case study of a landslide that devastated a small rural community in the redwoods of northern California. This seemingly mundane event is used to explore several insights offered by recent literature on environmental risk, and illustrate the extent to which our reliance on modern, technologically complex industrial systems as...
Current debates regarding the degree to which centralization or decentralization of environmental bureaucracies promotes more effective management of natural resources suggest the need for employing new methodologies to empirical analysis, in a variety of political and ecological settings. In this paper, recent state synergy scholarship is adopted...
Accumulated research findings show that women tend to express higher levels of concern toward technology and the environment than do men, but that the tendency is not universal. The findings are particularly clear-cut for local facilities and/or nuclear and other technologies that are often seen as posing nisks of contamination; findings appear to...