Call it a participatory sound. Call it the sensibilities of the folk musician, which is where I began my musical life, singing and playing in a family band with my father, two brothers, and an older cousin. Or call it what I prefer to term it. Not modern. Not postmodern. Not anti-modern. Rather, call it dialogic music—that is, music which is in conversation with performer and audience about our future pasts and past futures.
The topic of this course, it could be said, is the study of community in the largest possible sense. Land, water, air, people, and other animals--all of these are closely interconnected. Together, they form a kind of solidarity, what we have come to call “ecology” and the “environment.” And like any real community—any real interconnected solidarity—there is also much conflict here. This course studies this largest of communities from a sociological perspective, with an eye to understanding the origins of, and solutions to, these all-too-real social and biophysical conflicts.
The course falls into four parts:
The Moral: the mess we're in and why we should care about it;
The Material: the roles played by material desire, the profit motive, technology, population, the body, and biophysical resources;
The Ideal: the influence of culture, ideology, and social experience on how we think about the environment;
The Practical: solutions to environmental conflicts that take all three of the above into account.
In short, this is a class on the sociology of how to save the world!
Environmental Sociology
“The real issues in sustainability aren’t technical,” an agronomist said to me a few years ago, “they’re social.” An over-statement perhaps—sustainability certainly also involves many real, and often difficult, technical issues. But this agronomist’s words are indicative of how researchers from across the disciplines are increasingly coming to value the importance of a sociological perspective in the study of the environment. This seminar presents a graduate-level introduction into that important perspective.