Equity and the environment: a pressing need and a new step forward

Abstract

To date, the limited level of attention devoted to equity issues has perhaps been clearest in work done outside of the social sciences, but in our view, even social science work on environmental issues has devoted too little attention to the importance of equity and inequality. In an chapter that proved particularly influential in spelling out approaches for analyzing relationships between society and environment, for example, Dunlap and Catton (1983); see also Dunlap (1993) noted the importance of recognizing three “analytically distinguishable functions” of the biophysical environment, reflecting the fact that humans tend to use the environment as (1) a dwelling place, (2) a source of supplies, and (3) a repository for wastes. The typology has been influential in part because it is so simple and so useful. In addition, as noted in later work by Dunlap (1993) and Dunlap and Catton (2002), for example, one factor behind rising awareness of environmental problems, particularly in the context of the social problems literature, is that these three functions tend to be incompatible with one another. In present-day homes, for example, we tend to separate bathrooms from bedrooms from eating places, and more broadly, across many of the world's cultures, the pressure to devote more and more of the finite space available to one such function – for example, waste disposal – is in fact increasingly running into competing demands to use the same spaces for resource supplies or living spaces.

Citation

Freudenburg, W.R. and Wilkinson, R.C. (2007), "Equity and the environment: a pressing need and a new step forward", Wilkinson, R.C. and Freudenburg, W.R. (Ed.) Equity and the Environment (Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, Vol. 15), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0196-1152(07)15011-0