Introduction: Issue
Environmental concerns have been present and actively discussed both within local and global communities for several decades. However, the concept of environmentalism and the associated issues have always been actively viewed in opposition to societal ones. Specifically, a very distinct line has been drawn between society and the environment (Lockie 140). Arguably, the specified perspective has partially facilitated the neglectful attitudes that have led to the current state of the environmental threat and the rise in the rates of climate change (Misiaszek 4). By failing to view the environment as one of the critical parts of human life and, instead, approaching it from the perspective of an alien phenomenon, most people have been underestimating the significance and severity of the problem of the observed change (Lockie 142). Therefore, connecting the environment to the social and the societal could be regarded as one of the major problems in modern sociology. By changing the current discourse about the issue of environmentalism and the related concerns in social media toward the environment–society relations instead of representing the two as the distinct categories that exist outside of each other, one will be able to change the current social landscape, thus, developing social responsibility.
Case
A closer look at the social aspects of the current attitudes toward the problems of environmentalism and the management of environmental issues will show that most people prefer to distance themselves from it by drawing a distinct line between social concerns and environmental ones. In fact, the observed trend has also been noticed in academia, where environmental concerns have rarely been seen in conjunction with social ones up until recently (Misiaszek 17). Therefore, although research has been gradually turning toward the acknowledgment of the need for integrating the two fields in a single research, convincing the general audience to view social issues in conjunction with environmental ones is going to be quite complicated. The described task should be seen as one of the major issues in contemporary sociology.
Opposition
Although the idea of interpreting environmental problems as a part of a larger societal issue has been becoming a trend in sociology, some questions can be raised about the legitimacy of the specified change. For example, some the studies have pointed out that it would be more reasonable to connect sociology and genetics to sociogenomics as a way of considering the relationships between the social and the biological aspects of people’s lives (Canan and Reichman 2). In contrast to the environmental sociology perspective, sociogenomics focuses excessively on the issues that are directly linked to individuals, whereas the connection between the social and the environmental is defined excessively loosely (Lockie 145). The specified stance is justified by the fact that the environmental issues as the amalgam of concerns defined by the existence of millions of species and thousands of ecosystems cannot possibly be tied to social concerns altogether. Moreover, in some cases, there is the need to consider societal concerns separately from the environmental ones in order to locate the impact of other issues, including economic, political, and financial ones (Canan and Reichman 5). Therefore, the promotion of the environmental sociological perspective as the crucial point of the learning curve that citizens across the globe must experience in order to understand their impact on the global community might be seen as unnecessary.
Proof
Despite the attempts at dispersing the focus of social studies across other areas, the necessity to connect environmental issues to the current sociological body of work can be considered quite obvious. In order to understand the changes in people’s attitudes and behaviors, and the social trends within the contemporary global community, as well as those of local ones, it is important to consider the shifts in the environmental concerns and people’s attitudes toward it. The perspectives on the environmental issues will help to discover the key social trends and the major problems that the target community faces. Likewise, changes in the environment and the related economic, political, technological, and financial trends will help to embrace the complexity of relationships on different levels within modern global society (Misiaszek 6). Therefore, the issues of environmentalism and sociology are interrelated and nearly interlocked, hence the necessity to focus on exploring the issues within environmental sociology.
Conclusion
The present social discourse regarding the issue of environmentalism must be shaped so that the narrative could be transformed into the consideration of the overlaps between societal and environmental issues as opposed to viewing them as disjointed categories. The resulting change in the perception of the global community and the role that each individual plays in it will lead to the development of social responsibility across communities. Moreover, the described change will allow shaping the process of managing environmental concerns by promoting a more responsible attitude toward it and connecting it to the concepts of social justice, social responsibility, the problem of power imbalance, and the use of social media as the means of promoting education about the problem at hand globally. As a result, the levels of environmental well-being and, therefore, the quality of social conditions within a range of states is expected to improve.
Works Cited
Canan, Penelope, and Nancy Reichman. Ozone Connections: Expert Networks in Global Environmental Governance. Routledge, 2017.
Lockie, Stewart. “What Is Environmental Sociology?” Environmental Sociology, vol. 1, no. 3, 2015, pp. 139-142.
Misiaszek, Greg William. Educating the Global Environmental Citizen: Understanding Ecopedagogy in Local and Global Contexts. Routledge, 2017.