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Sustainability Through the Lens of Environmental Sociology

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Sustainability Through the Lens of Environmental Sociology Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology Edited by Md Saidul Islam Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Sustainability www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology Special Issue Editor Md Saidul Islam MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade Special Issue Editor Md Saidul Islam Nanyang Technological University Singapore Editorial Office MDPI AG St. Alban-Anlage 66 Basel, Switzerland This edition is a reprint of the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050) in 2015–2017 (available at: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special issues/EnvironmentalSociology). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: Lastname, F.M.; Lastname, F.M. Article title. Journal Name. Year. Article number, page range. First Edition 2018 ISBN 978-3-03842-660-8 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03842-661-5 (PDF) Articles in this volume are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles even for commercial purposes, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book taken as a whole is c 2018 MDPI, Basel, Switzerland, distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Table of Contents About the Special Issue Editor ...................................... v Preface to ”Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology” ............ vii Md Saidul Islam Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology: An Introduction doi:10.3390/su9030474 . 1 Stefano B. Longo, Brett Clark, Thomas E. Shriver and Rebecca Clausen Sustainability and Environmental Sociology: Putting the Economy in its Place and Moving Toward an Integrative Socio-Ecology doi:10.3390/su8050437 . 12 Manuel Arias-Maldonado The Anthropocenic Turn: Theorizing Sustainability in a Postnatural Age doi:10.3390/su8010010 . 29 Mark Brown Managing Nature–Business as Usual: Resource Extraction Companies and Their Representations of Natural Landscapes doi:10.3390/su71215791 . 45 Sing C. Chew and Daniel Sarabia Nature–Culture Relations: Early Globalization, Climate Changes, and System Crisis doi:10.3390/su8010078 . 68 Md Saidul Islam, Yap Hui Pei and Shrutika Mangharam Trans-Boundary Haze Pollution in Southeast Asia: Sustainability through Plural Environmental Governance doi:10.3390/su8050499 . 97 Hui-Ting Tang and Yuh-Ming Lee The Making of Sustainable Urban Development: A Synthesis Framework doi:10.3390/su8050492 . 110 Aryn Lisitza and Gregor Wolbring Sustainability within the Academic EcoHealth Literature: Existing Engagement and Future Prospects doi:10.3390/su8030202 . 138 Julius Alexander McGee and Camila Alvarez Sustaining without Changing: The Metabolic Rift of Certified Organic Farming doi:10.3390/su8020115 . 160 Anya M. Galli and Dana R. Fisher Hybrid Arrangements as a Form of Ecological Modernization: The Case of the US Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grants doi:10.3390/su8010088 . 172 iii Arthur P. J. Mol and Peter Oosterveer Certification of Markets, Markets of Certificates: Tracing Sustainability in Global Agro-Food Value Chains doi: 10.3390/su70912258 ........................................191 Chua Yuhan and Md Saidul Islam Capitalism with a Human Face: Debates on Contemporary Globalization and Sustainability ...........................................208 Md Saidul Islam and Chua Yuhan Towards an Environmental Sociology of Sustainability .......................226 iv About the Special Issue Editor Md Saidul Islam is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Coordinator of the Environment and Sustainability Research Cluster, School of Social Sciences and Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He also taught at York University in Canada and the College of William and Mary in the United States. Dr. Islam’s key interest is environmental sustainability focusing on global agro-food system and climate change. He published five books, and over three dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. In 2015, the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) awarded him the Early Investigator Award/Prix jeune chercheur that translates into the top emerging sociologist of the year. He’s currently working on, among other projects, Climate change and food security in the Asia-Pacific: Response and Resilience, a tier-1 project supported by a financial grant from the Ministry of Education, Singapore. v Preface to ”Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology” Twenty years after the Rio summit in 1992, world leaders met in Rio once again in 2012 to discuss the environmental challenges facing the humanity. It was a time for them to reflect on how successful and effective the international community has been over the past two decades in managing the major identified environmental problems. Are we still facing the same environmental problems? Have there been improvements in the situation or are we worse off? Environmental and social vulnerabilities will continue to exist twenty years from now and beyond. The question is what kind of steps can and should be taken to manage these vulnerabilities? Have they been taken? Do countries across the globe experience the same type and degree of vulnerabilities? Or is the distribution of these vulnerabilities uneven? How is the distribution of these vulnerabilities decided and by whom? What are the prospects for a sustainable planet? Given these critical questions of our time, there is an urgent need to explore and examine environmental sustainability from both local and global contexts. Environmental sociology provides a prowerful lens to understanding, managing and achieving a sustainable planet. Our planet is undergoing radical environmental and social changes. Environmental sustainability has now been put into question by, for example, our consumption patterns, loss of biodiversity, depletion of resources, and imbalanced and exploitative power relations. On a global scale, every day humans: Consume over 54% of the accessible runoff water on earth Mine more materials from the earth than the natural erosion of all earths rivers Add over 100 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere Destroy over 180 square miles of tropical rain forest Create over 60 square miles of desert Eliminate at least 74 animal or plant species Erode over 80 million tons of topsoil and Add over 1400 tons of CFCs to the stratosphere. With apparent ecological and social limits to globalization and development, the current levels of consumption are unsustainable, inequitable, and inaccessible to the majority of humans. Understanding the environmental sustainability is a crucial matter at a time when our planet is in peril - both environmentally and socially. This edited collection will hopefully show some possible pathways for a sustainable earth. Along with global environmental politics with an aim of a sustainable earth, we need to generate and inculcate new consciousness within the new social media generations about the environment and sustainability. We must develop a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth, new models of behavior and a new set of values for the planet. In closing, I would like to thank the editorial team of Sustainability journal for inviting me to guest- edit the special issue on Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology which has, with some additional chapters, subsequently been transformed into this edited collection. I also thank all the authors and reviewers for their crucial contributions. Md Saidul Islam Special Issue Editor vii sustainability Editorial Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology: An Introduction Md Saidul Islam Division of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332, Singapore; [email protected]; Tel.: +65-6592-1519 Academic Editor: Marc A. Rosen Received: 10 March 2017; Accepted: 15 March 2017; Published: 22 March 2017 Abstract: Our planet is undergoing radical environmental and social changes. Sustainability has now been put into question by, for example, our consumption patterns, loss of biodiversity, depletion of resources, and exploitative power relations. With apparent ecological and social limits to globalization and development, current levels of consumption are known to be unsustainable, inequitable, and inaccessible to the majority of humans. Understanding and achieving sustainability is a crucial matter at a time when our planet is in peril—environmentally, economically, socially, and politically. Since its official inception in the 1970s, environmental sociology has provided a powerful lens to understanding the challenges, possibilities, and modes of sustainability. This editorial, accompanying the Special Issue on “sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology”, first highlights the evolution of environmental sociology as a distinct field of inquiry, focusing on how it addresses the environmental challenges of our time. It then adumbrates the rich theoretical traditions of environmental sociology, and finally examines sustainability through the lens of environmental sociology, referring to various case studies and empirical analyses. Keywords: environmentalism; environmental
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