Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment.

Three questions underlie much environmental sociology research. Why do individuals, communities, and societies behave in environmentally destructive ways? What motivates environmentally sustainable behavior? And what would it take to get individuals, communities, and societies to behave in environmentally sustainable ways? Two approaches have been taken to answer these questions. One approach examines the relationship between pro-environmental attitudes, values, and behavior. The second focuses on societies' structural arrangements (the way societies are organized) and the ways in which these arrangements restrict individual and organizational choice, affect individual's attitudes, values, and beliefs, and shape the incentives individuals, communities, and organizations face. The first approach is problematic because research has shown that pro-environmental attitudes, values and beliefs are only weakly associated with pro-environmental behaviors. The second approach is problematic because it tends to be too abstract to be useful in many situations. This paper attempts to overcome the limitations of these two approaches by combining insights from economic, political and environmental sociology to (a) develop a new structural model of the relationship between humans and the environment and (b) identify elite-based organizations and networks that make positive environmental change difficult to implement. More specifically, this paper focuses on the role that economic and political inequality, organizational networks, and undemocratic decision making play in producing specific environmental outcomes, including global warming, topsoil loss, and agricultural pollution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]