Читать книгу Sociology - Anthony Giddens - Страница 249

This chapter has explored some of the environmental consequences of industrialization and the increasingly global human footprint. Taking a long-term view, we can see that the spread of industrialization produces more widespread and potentially serious side effects in the form of environmental risks. But is modern life really more risky, or are we just more ‘risk aware’? Are we worrying unnecessarily about environmental problems? The German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1944–2015) has been the foremost sociological theorist of risk, which he understood as much more significant than sociologists previously thought.