A Tribute to William R. Freudenburg

This special section of Society & Natural Resources is intended to honor William R. (Bill) Freudenburg. Those who knew Bill, whom we lost to cancer at the end of 2010, know that there would be no better way to honor him than to publish a collection of works that was inspired by his scholarship. Bill had a tremendous influence on the field of natural resource and environmental sociology. While his career was cut short before he had turned 60, few in the field will surpass Bill’s productivity or creativity. Bill had an extremely inquisitive mind, tireless energy and enthusiasm for his craft, and a keen ability to draw insight and bring clarity out of seemingly jumbled and nonsensical data. Bill could spot the patterns. At a gathering in Santa Barbara in November 2010, a few dear friends and fans of Bill suggested that we organize some Freudenburg-inspired sessions at the International Symposium for Society and Resource Management in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2011. The hope was that those sessions would provide sufficient quality material that we could subsequently put together a special section of SNR from those presentations. The idea was to invite work that was informed by or inspired by Bill’s intellectual contributions to the field. The articles in this special section may appear to be all over the map and in a sense they are, but that is because Bill cast his gaze widely. His work includes major contributions to the Boomtown literature, and to social impact assessment more broadly. He wrote quite famously about resource-dependent communities (oil, mining, and forestry), and about polluters and the social and institutional relations around the production of pollution. Bill wrote about both government and corporate accountability, or more accurately the lack of it. His work touched on risk and disasters, both natural and unnatural, and anticipating a popular current trend, he often argued that so-called ‘‘natural’’ disasters have important human causal factors. Another of Bill’s special qualities is that he used and his work reflected and embodied the full breadth of sociological wisdom that came before him. He was