Abstract
This book started as a collection of conference papers, celebrating the work of Eugene A. Rosa. The meetings at Washington State University (W.S.U.) were to honor Gene Rosa’s receiving the Boeing Professorship of Environmental Sociology at W.S.U., shortly before his untimely death.
The book begins with a short Preface by Paul Ehrlich, who acknowledges the role of Gene and his collaborators in realizing the critical need for the interpenetration of the social and environmental sciences to understand the growing complex problems of the human dimensions of environmental degradation and change. Ehrlich thanks Gene for building on the Ehrlich/Holdren ‘IPAT’ formulation (where environmental [I]mpact is a function of main effects and interactions involving [P]opulation processes, inequality and consumption patterns under the rubric of [A]ffluence, and [T]echnology), and alludes to Gene’s stochastic, or ‘STIRPAT’ variation. Ehrlich acknowledges Gene’s key role in the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, and in the field more generally.
The book then is situated with an opening essay by Thomas Dietz and Andrew Jorgenson, which serves as an Introduction to Structural Human Ecology. They start off by acknowledging that Human Ecology has been defined in many ways in different contexts, and that the overarching theme of human ecology can be seen as ‘the study of interrelations among humans and their biophysical environment’.
In the opening essay, Dietz and Jorgenson set the foundation for an emerging paradigm of Structural Human Ecology, which they envision moving beyond the older Human Ecology of Amos Hawley and the Chicago School. Dietz and Jorgenson identify an intellectual community characterized by three themes: (1) an interest in meta-theory, (2) attention to risk and uncertainty, and (3) a rapidly growing body of macro-comparative research, particularly of the quantitative sort. They cite Gene Rosa’s frequent admonitions about method: context matters, theory must be disciplined by data, and progress requires careful thought about concepts and premises. The sections of the book are organized around these themes. There are sections on risk and macro-comparative research. These are book-ended by an opening section on theory and conceptual issues, and a closing section on possible directions for future research.
In the opening section, there are then essays on metatheoretical foundations by Richard York, and epistemological, ontological, and practical issues by Tom Dietz. York focuses his metatheoretical piece around risk in times of uncertainty and post-normality. How, for example, is the scientific method, which bases itself in replicability, to maintain validity when it seeks to understand singular events such as global climate change and unprecedented degrees of marine and air pollution? Yet many pressing contemporary problems in Human Ecology are precisely of this sort.
Tom Dietz picks up on issues of replicability as well. Embedding his argument in the pragmatism of John Dewey, he grapples with questions in the nexus between fact and value. The content of scientific understanding, he points out, is virtually never free from the influence of values. Dietz then makes a crucial distinction, articulated in earlier work by Allan Schnaiberg (1980) in developing Treadmill of Production Theory, between production science based in capitalist growth, and impact science which studies the problems caused by the first. Dietz correctly points out the historical (and growing) mismatch between these two, warning of the potentially dire consequences.
The section on risk has articles by Ortwin Renn and colleagues about perspectives on risk and concerns with climate engineering, an article by Roger Kasperson on managing risk and uncertainty, and a piece by Paul Stern on risk associated with emerging technologies. Renn et al. weigh such factors as the random nature of significant ecological events, estimates of maximum catastrophic impacts of those events, and the time span for risk control measures.
While the importance of the Precautionary Principle is underscored in many of the essays in the volume, Kasperson examines it in light of decision stakes and system uncertainties, in a milieu of post-normal science. He also makes a case that uncertainty and variability should be kept conceptually separate in risk scenarios.
Stern delineates insights from high-risk endeavors of the recent past, including the development of nuclear energy, radioactive waste management, and DNA manipulation. He finds, for example, that while scientists tend to focus on the probability of risk, the public attends more to consequences, and that public concerns tend to be more conditioned by institutional factors.
The section on national-level analysis has a piece on energy and electricity in industrial nations by Allan Mazur, an article on population, affluence, and greenhouse gas emissions using the STIRPAT (or STochastic, Iterative Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology) model by Andrew Jorgenson, and the section closes with work by Sandra Marquart-Pyatt on the implications of Structural Human Ecology for environmental concern in a global context.
Mazur organizes his essay around two interrelated themes: the impact of energy in general, and electricity in particular, on the quality of life in nation-states; and the relationship between population change and energy consumption. Energy can and does help pull nations up quickly in terms of the quality of life. This effect is far from linear, however. In rich nations, increasing energy consumption, in some cases to extravagant levels, does little to improve the quality of life. Here again, the importance of context cannot be overstated.
Andrew Jorgenson synthesizes earlier quantitative, cross-national work and presents statistical models predicting national emission levels of greenhouse gases. Consistent with earlier work (e.g. Burns et al., 1997; York et al., 2003), Jorgenson finds significant effects of urban and overall population, as well as affluence measures, on greenhouse gas emissions. Jorgenson extends the analysis, highlighting the importance of regional and temporal dynamics.
Sandra Marquart-Pyatt looks at contextual factors influencing environmental concern around the globe. Building on prior work (e.g. Givens and Jorgenson, 2012), she deftly integrates nation-level and individual-level variables, finding that the macro forces such as demographics do indeed have an effect on individuals within countries. Age structure has significant effects on threat awareness and environmental efficacy. Urban population, overall population density, as well as democracy affect environmental efficacy (but they do not, it turns out, significantly influence threat awareness).
Net of the macro forces, individual-level variables of gender (as in virtually every study that examines it, ceteris paribus, women tend to favor the environment more than men) and age are robust across models, with income, environmental knowledge, and living in urban areas having effects as well. Marquart-Pyatt ends by building the case that future researchers will do well to attend to models drawing on both individual- and institutional-level indicators, and to account for contextual factors.
Tom Dietz then synthesizes and wraps up the book with an article on Gene Rosa’s influence on, and lessons for, Structural Human Ecology. One of the overarching lessons of Gene’s work is that context matters. While much of the work in Structural Human Ecology has tended to have a macro-orientation, Dietz warns that researchers must still be careful not to lose sight of the crucial micro-level theory that underpins it.
Dietz then concludes with a summary of lessons of the work of Gene Rosa: context is important; progress comes through long conversations rather than short monologues; get the ontology and the epistemology right; theory and research have a dialectical relationship – the purpose of theory is to be tested, while the purpose of data is to test theory; if the field has important things to say, then it is important to go beyond the boundedness of talking to ourselves, and to reach out to broader communities; there is a delusion, but it is functional: important work virtually always takes longer than researchers originally think it will – but that in turn leads people to take on projects they might otherwise never begin.
This book accomplishes two goals, and does both admirably. First and foremost, it serves as a Festschrift for Eugene A. Rosa, honoring Gene and his life’s work. It also reviews and contextualizes prior research, setting a foundation for work to come in Structural Human Ecology. The book deserves a careful reading by people who seek to understand the pressing problems of the human interface with the natural environment, and by Environmental Sociologists and Human Ecologists in particular.