
Erik, W. Johnson, Washington State University
I am a sociologist who has been interested in US environmental movements since my days as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s. Over the course of my career, case studies documenting local conflicts over the siting of hazardous facilities and the unequal distribution of environmental harms across racial and economic categories have been the dominant theme in sociological research on the US environmental movement. I took a different approach for my dissertation research, completed in 2004. I assembled information spanning 1960-2000 for a sample of roughly 1,000 national environmental organizations to assess what the population of environmental organizations does. This “population” based approach to research is common in studies of other social movements, but rare in the case of US environmentalism.
What struck me in my early professional research and what has continued to do so, is the strong disjuncture between sociological studies of the US environmental movement and what environmental organizations actually do.
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