Sociology has been slow in responding to the challenge of climate change. In this conversation, we advocate adding more climate change content to Introduction to Sociology courses. To support our arguments, we present data from a content analysis of the top 11 best-selling introductory textbooks in the United States, demonstrating that environmental concerns are usually relegated to the end of books, which provide little (and sometime errant) content. Climate change gets even less attention, and there has been little change to textbook content over time. To correct such deficiencies, we suggest instructors free climate change from its current position as “a subfield of a subfield” and interweave the issue with all content areas in the curriculum. Our conversation concludes by considering how climate change can be featured in the curriculum of introductory courses as well as in the pedagogies presented at the introductory level.
In this paper, we explore how principles of economics courses prepare undergraduate students to think about climate change. We collected a comprehensive list of twenty-seven introductory economics textbooks in the United States and analyzed their coverage of climate change. Our finding shows that not all texts touch upon climate science, and a small subset deviates from the scientific consensus on the human causes of climate change. All texts conceptualize climate change as a problem of carbon emission’s negative externalities and the preferred market-based solutions, such as emission trading and Pigouvian tax. Besides externality, some authors include various useful points of engagement through GDP (Gross domestic product) accounting, economic growth, collective action problems, cost–benefit analysis, and global inequality. In the end, we provide suggestions for economics educators to innovate the current introductory curriculum to better cope with the climate crisis.
From demand for natural resources to sustainability initiatives, everything seems to hinge on China. China’s environmental entanglements call out for the analysis and understanding that environmental sociologists practice. Environmental sociologists from within and beyond China have begun to explore how society, polity, and ecology intersect, but we have yet to fully take on the challenges that China’s environmental struggles pose. This article focuses on four domains in which China’s experience compels us to rethink our theories: environmental ideology, political economy, civil society and environmental justice, and international environmental politics. In each domain, China’s institutions, discourses, and place in the world-system reframe major currents of thought in environmental sociology. These points challenge us to decenter environmental sociologists’ focus on how things happen within liberal polities in the global North; they likewise push us to reconsider arguments about the South. Together, these challenges present an opportunity to extend our theory and practice, fashioning a more global environmental sociology.
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