Search results for ""author william r. freudenburg""

Around the time of the first 'Earth Day', on April 22, 1970, the academic world joined in a virtual explosion of societal interest in a topic that inherently lies in the confluence between 'social problems' and 'public policy' - the ways in which humans use and abuse the natural environment. In the worlds of social movement organizations and policy, that newfound interest showed up in dramatic growth of environmental organizations and a stream of powerful new environmental laws. In the academic world, echoes of the explosion showed up in equally dramatic growth of interdisciplinary 'environmental' programs with an explicit focus on the fact that 'environmental problems' are inherently social problems as well. Over the past decade, a growing body of research has shown that equity issues need to receive greater attention in academia - not just among activists, and not just as the focus of courses on environmental ethics, but as topics that deserve careful academic study and that in many ways are at the core of what we call 'environmental' problems. As David Orr (1992) noted, 'the symptoms of environmental deterioration are in the domain of the natural sciences, but the causes lie in the realm of the social sciences and humanities'. This volume is intended to call this research to attention, but also to encourage its further expansion; far from being the kind of topic that ought to be relegated to a small pigeonhole, issues of equity and inequality deserve to be absolutely central to the study of connections between humans and the habitat that we share with all other life on earth. This volume brings together the leading research on equity and the environment. It features contributions from academics and researchers in the field. This book series is available electronically at website.

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For a long time in industrialized countries the state occupied a comfortable and unquestioned position in dealing with environmental problems. Since the 1960s we have witnessed the rather smooth institutionalization of environmental tasks in state policies and politics, leading to the emergence of the "environmental state". In the 1980s, the ideologies of deregulation and privatization formed the start of the debate on the environmental state and the 1990s left the debate facing new challenges. First, the debate became broader and more sophisticated, moving away from simple deregulation and privatization arguments and toward the issue of political modernization and reinventing government. Second, in addition to the ongoing debate on the environmental state within national boundaries, the processes of and political debates on globalization led to new challenges in the viability of the (nationally ordered) environmental-regulatory state. Third, the debate widened geographically, from Europe and the North American continent to the central and East-European countries undergoing transition away from centrally planned economies with all-dominating states, and to states in the so-called South. Various analytical frameworks and social theories are now being applied to understanding and evaluating the nature of these social processes, transformations and continuities related to the environmental state. This text provides a thorough examination of these issues with particular emphasis on the treadmill-of-production and the ecological modernization perspectives. The volume draws upon case studies and evidence from environmental states in the North American continent, Western Europe, Africa, Southeast and East Asia and Central and Eastern Europe.

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