Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 221
CONTENTS
Оглавление1 Nature, environment and society
3 Sociology and the environment
4 Theorizing the society–nature nexus
9 Food shortages and biotechnology
10 The environment in sociological theory
11 Living in the global ‘risk society’
12 Consumerism and environmental damage
13 Limits to growth and sustainable development
Environmental campaigners call on governments to declare a ‘climate emergency’ and to take radical action to reduce CO2 emissions to combat global warming.
In April 2019, key roads in the centre of London were effectively blocked for several days by activists from an environmental group, Extinction Rebellion (XR). This was part of an international protest across at least thirty-three countries, including Australia, India, the USA and a number of European states. The campaigners aimed to raise awareness of the seriousness of climate change and to push governments to do much more to bring down carbon dioxide emissions more quickly. The London protest had an immediate impact. On 1 May, the UK Parliament passed a motion to declare an ‘environment and climate emergency’, becoming the first to do so. But what is the emergency?
The XR protest made direct reference to a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group of scientists monitoring climate change (IPCC 2019). This report said that the risks posed by climate change for both natural ecosystems and human societies would be more manageable if global warming did not exceed 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels. On present trends that 1.5ºC limit would be reached between 2030 and 2052, but it could be stabilized at that level if global carbon emissions from human activities were radically reduced to ‘net zero’ as soon as possible (ibid.: 6). The XR protests castigated governments for dragging their feet on achieving this goal. For instance, the UK, France and New Zealand have a target to reach zero net CO2 emissions by 2050, Scotland and Sweden by 2045, and Iceland by 2040 (Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit 2018). And though all of these targets are compatible with the international climate agreement made in Paris in 2015, which set 2050 as the net zero target date, campaigners want to see faster progress.
Climate change or global warming (sometimes called global heating) has been widely described as the defining issue of our time, with young people becoming increasingly active in campaigns to tackle the problem. Yet, despite notable exceptions, sociology can also be said to have ‘dragged its feet’, failing to integrate environmental issues such as this into the mainstream of the discipline. Arguably the main reason for this is that ‘the environment’ appears to be something that natural scientists, rather than social scientists, are trained to deal with. What do sociologists know about the changing climate, oceanic pollution or biodiversity loss?
Although this point seems pertinent, a moment’s reflection tells us that, if climate change is largely anthropogenic or ‘human caused’, then the discipline that focuses on the human societies and economic regimes that bring it about is sociology. Similarly, plastic pollution in the world’s rivers and oceans and the destruction of habitat that leads to large-scale species extinctions are the consequence of the material ways of life that human societies have created. Indeed, without sociological knowledge of capitalist economies, consumer culture, collective action and behavioural change, it is unlikely that we can reach a realistic assessment of which mitigation strategies and government initiatives are likely to be successful in solving environmental problems.
We will return to global warming and relevant sociological theories and perspectives later in the chapter. But we must start with shifting ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ and what constitutes an ‘environmental issue’ before outlining sociological approaches to their study. From here we discuss some important environmental issues and sociological theories of consumerism and the risk society, together with proposals aimed at dealing with environmental dilemmas such as sustainable development and ecological modernization. The chapter ends with an investigation into how justice and citizenship may be extended to take in natural environments, and we look ahead to the future of society–environment relations.
