Environmental Sociology
All societies are simultaneously organized social systems and complex ecosystems. Each is intimately dependent upon the other; society cannot function without ecosystem capital and services and ecosystems cannot remain viable if societies are unmindful of their dependency on ecosystems. Environmental Sociology and modern Human Ecology seek to understand the interconnections between the social and biological features of society, between societies as functioning entities and the ecosystems upon which they are dependent for survival.
Environmental Sociology tends to focus on the social forces producing environmental change, especially untoward environmental impacts, and on the causes and consequences of threats to environmental sustainability. Contemporary Human Ecology typically provides an even broader scope for understanding society-biophysical interactions and threats to sustainability with its examination of the evolutionary context and its influence on the structure of human ecosystems—and its examination of the co-dependency between the social and environmental features of those systems.
The Sociology Department at Washington State University was both one of the founding institutions of the field of Environmental Sociology while concurrently contributing to the transformation of the field of Human Ecology to its modern orientation over a quarter of a century ago. The department continues to be a national and international leader in these fields, making significant contributions to the cumulative knowledge of these fields while training the top-flight environmental researchers of the next generation.
