Nature, Society and Environmental Crisis

The threat to the global environment has become a major political concern over the past decade. This concern has been sharpened by an awareness of the critical role played by human activity in this crisis – from rising levels of carbon emission and widespread disregard for ecological sustainability to GM crops and human cloning. The social dimensions of the current environmental crisis present a challenge to the discipline of Sociology: what role can it play in analysing the concerns of the contemporary world?
This volume brings together an unusually broad range of contributors who take up this challenge, exploring debates within social theory about the relationship between the natural and the social worlds. They consider the political and public policy engagement of sociologists in a profoundly unequal social world that faces the prospect of severe ecological degradation. Focusing specifically on climate change and the challenges this poses to human societies, the contributors both reveal and outline the significant part that Sociology has to play in understanding and shaping how human societies respond to the threat of ecological catastrophe.

Spis treści:
1. Society, nature and sociology (Bob Carter and Nickie Charles, both University of Warwick).
Part One: Changing Conceptions of the Natural and the Social.
2. Race, sex and the ‘earthly paradise’: Wallace versus Darwin on human evolution and prospects (Ted Benton, University of Essex).
3. Alienation, the cosmos and the self (Peter Dickens, University of Cambridge).
4. Normality and pathology in a biomedical age (Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics).
5. Sociology and climate change (John Urry, Lancaster University).
Part Two: Social Worlds, Natural Worlds: Sociological Research
6. The dangerous limits of dangerous limits: climate change and the precautionary principle (Chris Shaw, University of Sussex).
7. A stranger silence sti ll: the need for feminist social research on climate change (Sherilyn MacGregor, Keele University).
8. Broadcasting green: grassroots environmentalism on Muslim women’s radio (Daniel Nilsson DeHanas, University of North Carolina).
Part Three: Sociological Futures.
9. The ‘value–action gap’ in public attitudes towards sustainable energy: the case of hydrogen energy (Rob Flynn, Paul Bellaby and Miriam Ricci, all University of Salford).
10. Technologies in place: symbolic interpretations of renewable energy (Carly McLachlan, University of Manchester).
11. ‘Doing food differently’: reconnecting biological and social relationships through care for food (Elizabeth Dowler, Moya Kneafsey, Rosie Cox and Lewis Holloway, all University of Warwick).
12. Unnatural times? The social imaginary and the future of nature (Kate Soper, London Metropolitan University).
Notes on contributors.
Index.

Nota biograficzna:
Bob Carter lectures at the University of Warwick and is co–convenor of the MA in Race and Ethnic Studies. His research interests include language and social theory, and racism and ethnicity.
Nickie Charles is Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at Warwick University and Honorary Professor, School of the Environment and Society at Swansea University. Her research interests include gender divisions and the relation between paid and unpaid work, families and kin relationships, and gender, health and age

Okładka tylna:
The threat to the global environment has become a major political concern over the past decade. This concern has been sharpened by an awareness of the critical role played by human activity in this crisis – from rising levels of carbon emission and widespread disregard for ecological sustainability to GM crops and human cloning. The social dimensions of the current environmental crisis present a challenge to the discipline of Sociology: what role can it play in analysing the concerns of the contemporary world?
This volume brings together an unusually broad range of contributors who take up this challenge, exploring debates within social theory about the relationship between the natural and the social worlds. They consider the political and public policy engagement of sociologists in a profoundly unequal social world that faces the prospect of severe ecological degradation. Focusing specifically on climate change and the challenges this poses to human societies, the contributors both reveal and outline the significant part that Sociology has to play in understanding and shaping how human societies respond to the threat of ecological catastrophe.