Social Problems
Darryl Hall
Department of Sociology
University of Nevada, Reno
The Environment
• Environmental problems are not confined within political borders. The oceans, rivers, lakes, and air are shared by the world’s inhabitants. If a corporation or a nation pollutes, the world’s citizens are the victims. If the tropical forests are destroyed, we are all affected. If a country wastes finite resources or uses more than its proportionate share, the other nations are shortchanged.
• Ecology refers to the study of the interaction of living organisms and the natural environment.
• The natural environment refers to the earth’s surface and atmosphere, including various living organisms, as well as the air, water, soil, and other resources necessary to sustain life.
Environmental Issues
1) Land Pollution
• Increasingly, humans are polluting the land with toxic and nuclear waste, solid waste, and pesticides.
• In 1960, each U.S. citizen generated 2.7 pounds of garbage on average every day; by 1996, this figure increased to 4.3 pounds. The U.S. discards nearly 160 million tons of solid waste each year, enough to bury 2,700 football fields in a layer ten stories high. Some of this waste is converted into energy by incinerators, but more than half is taken to landfills.
• In the U.S., about 500,000 tons of 600 different types of pesticides are used annually. Pesticides contaminate food, water, and air and can be absorbed through the skin, swallowed, or inhaled.
2) Water Pollution
• Our water is being polluted by a number of harmful substances, including pesticides, industrial waste, acid rain, and oil spills. In 1993, there were more than 9,000 oil spills in and around U.S. waters alone, totaling more than 1.5 million gallons of spilled oil.
• 500 million pounds of toxic waste are absorbed by our water supply each year. About 1.2 billion people lack access to clean water. In developing nations, as much as 95 percent of untreated sewage is dumped directly into rivers, lakes, and seas that are also used for drinking and bathing.
3) Air Pollution
• Air pollution levels are the highest in areas with both heavy industry and traffic congestion, such as Los Angeles and Mexico City. Motor vehicles, fuel combustion, industrial processes (such as the burning of coal and wood), and solid waste disposal have contributed to the growing levels of air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxides, and lead.
• The use of human-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCc), which are used in refrigerators, cleaning computer chips, hospital sterilization, solvents, dry cleaning, and aerosols, has damaged the ozone layer of the earth’s atmosphere. The depletion of the ozone layer allows hazardous levels of ultraviolet rays to reach the earth’s surface. Ultraviolet light has been linked to increases in skin cancer and cataracts, declining food crops, rising sea levels, and global warming.
4) Acid Rain
• Acid rain – the mixture of precipitation with air pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide
• Acidic precipitation destroys plant and animal life and ends up contaminating water systems.
• In the U.S., western states have polluted eastern states via acid rain.
5) Destruction of Rain Forests
• Now less that 7% of the Earth’s surface (2 billion acres), yet this small portion is home to half the world’s plant and animal species
• Only half of all rain forests are left
• 65,000 square miles are lost each year; a plot of land the size of a football field is destroyed every second of every day
• Global warming is just one of the consequences
5) Global Warming
• The greenhouse effect refers to the collection of increasing amounts of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases in the atmosphere, where they act like the glass in a greenhouse, holding heat from the sun close to the earth and preventing the heat from rising back into space.
• Evidence for the greenhouse effect lies in the increasing temperatures recorded around the world. Heat and drought caused by the greenhouse effect has at least three negative consequences: 1) it threatens crops and food supplies; 2) it accelerates the extinction of numerous plant and animal species; and 3) it threatens to melt polar ice caps and other glaciers, resulting in a rise in sea level (and the flooding of many countries, such as Egypt and Bangladesh).
Cultural Sources of U.S. Environmental Problems
• The dominant ideologies of U.S. society have tended to legitimize or at least account for the wastefulness of Americans and their acceptance of pollution:
1) The Cornucopia View of Nature – Most Americans conceive of nature as a vast storehouse waiting only to be used by people. They regard the natural world as a bountiful preserve available to serve human needs. In this view, nature is something to be used; it is free and inexhaustible.
- Americans have disproportionately consumed the resources of the world. For example, although they constitute 4.6 percent of the world’s population, people in the U.S. use 25 percent of the world’s oil output each year. This is because we own 200 million cars and trucks and drive about 1.6 trillion miles annually, almost as much as the rest of the world.
2) Faith in Technology – Most Americans regard human beings as having mastery over nature. Rather than accepting the environment as given, they have sought to change and conquer it (e.g., damning rivers, cutting down timber, digging tunnels, plowing up prairie land, conquering space). Most Americans view nature as something to be subdued and used.
- From this logic proceeds a faith in technology; a proper application for scientific knowledge can meet any challenge. If the air and water are polluted, then science will save us. We will find a substitute for the internal combustion engine, find new sources of energy, and develop new methods for extracting minerals. We are beginning to realize, however, that technology may not be the solution and may even be the source of the problem. While scientific breakthroughs have solved some problems, new technologies create unanticipated problems.
3) Growth Ethic – The American value of progress (typically defined to mean either growth or new technology) has had a negative effect on contemporary U.S. life. The logic of capitalism is that each company needs to increase its profits from year to year. It is presumed that we all benefit if the gross national product increases each year. For these things to grow, there needs to be a concomitant increase in population, products (and the use of natural resources), electricity, highways, and waste. Continued growth will inevitably throw the tight ecological system out of balance, for there are limited supplies of air, water, and places to dump waste materials, and these supplies diminish as the population increases.
4) Materialism – The U.S. belief in progress is translated at the individual level into consumption of material things as evidence of one’s success. If the population is more or less stable, then growth can only be accomplished through increased consumption by individuals. The function of the advertising industry is to create a need in individuals to buy a product that they would not buy otherwise. Consumption is also increased if products must be thrown away or if they do not last very long. The policy of planned obsolescence (i.e., when existing products are given superficial changes and marketed as new, making the previous product out of date) by many U.S. companies accomplishes this goal of consumption very well, but it overlooks the problems of disposal as well as the unnecessary waste of materials.
5) Belief in Individualism – Most people in the United States place great stress on personal achievement. The belief that private property and capitalism should not be restricted has led to several social problems: 1) unfair competition (monopolies, interlocking directorates, price fixing); 2) an entrepreneurial philosophy of caveat emptor (i.e., “let the buyer beware”), whose aim is profit with total disregard for the welfare of the consumer; and 3) the current environmental crisis, which is due in large part to the standard policy of many people and most corporations to do whatever is profitable while ignoring conservation of natural resources.
- As long as people hold a narrow self-orientation rather than a group orientation, this crisis will steadily worsen. The use people make of their land, the water running through it, and the air above it has traditionally been theirs to decide because of the sanctity of private property.
Environmental Racism
• Environmental racism refers to the overwhelming likelihood that toxic-producing plants and toxic waste dumps are located where poor people, especially racial minorities, live.
• The irony of the poor having to sacrifice to the most harmful environmental problems is that they are not the polluters—the affluent are. The wealthy drive excessively; travel in jet planes; have large, air-conditioned homes; consume large quantities of resources (conspicuous consumption); and have the most waste to dispose.
