Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 247

Natural scientists have been at the forefront of debates on environmental issues. As the examples above of pollution, genetic modification and global warming show, environmental issues are different from most sociological subjects because they involve getting to grips with natural scientific research and evidence. However, the hybrid character of environmental issues means that natural scientists can never have a monopoly on them. Our brief introduction to the problem of global warming is the most striking example of this.

The IPCC scientists acknowledge that global warming is largely the product of human activities – industrialization, urbanization and globalization processes, for example – and the experts in these areas are sociologists and other social scientists, such as political scientists, human geographers and all of those studying development and international relations (Urry 2011). If environmental problems are to be successfully understood and tackled, then social and natural scientists will have to try to understand each other rather better than they have done so far.

The rest of this section will explore some of the main sociological theories linking social development with environmental damage, along with some of the major approaches to solving global environmental problems.