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The majority of the literature on contaminated communities indicates that environmental hazards lead to conflict and dissension. In this paper we examine the salient dimensions of conflict and factionalism in a rural Oklahoma community. The community is heavily contaminated from 80 years of commercial mining operations and was one of the first sites designated on the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund List in 1983. Despite two decades of remediation efforts, the community remains polluted with lead and other heavy metals. Based on in-depth interviews with community residents, observation, and document analysis, we find that the community has splintered into two competing groups over the environmental controversy. One faction of the community supports a federally sponsored relocation campaign, while the other has organized to oppose relocation. The results of our study indicate that the contentious split is centered around the ambiguity of harm associated with the contamination, conflicting economic concerns, and variations in community attachment.

Wealth production within a “risk society” typically depends on production technologies that expose citizens to dangerous substances. Knowledge of such exposure is, more often than not, hidden from the public. Empirical analyses show that citizens' claims of illnesses caused by risky exposures are frequently contested by the institutions that select production technologies and control information: the government, corporations, and physicians. In this article, we use the risk society thesis as a framework for addressing gaps in the environmental illness literature—specifically, the basis for authorities' contestations of illness claims for which the exposure–illness link is scientifically confirmed. Using case methods, including in-depth interviews with 124 citizens, analyses center on the contested illness claims of nuclear weapons workers at the federal Oak Ridge Nuclear Reservation. Results highlight how institutional and organizational resources provided authorities with tactical leverage, and allowed them to manufacture an ambiguous climate for public discourse. This discourse focused on the exposure—illness link for a particular individual and their specific symptoms rather than the established exposure—illness links in general. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for analyses of environmental exposure specifically, but also the seemingly contradictory tension between the risk society's need to restrict information to experts and democracy's need for open discourse.

We use in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to examine women's involvement in the Gulf War Illness movement. 1 % find that women's cumulative grievances of health concerns, financial hardships, and emotional problems opened them to movement recruitment as they surfed the Internet for information and support.The movement's division of labor was influenced not by gender but by health status. Women used the Internet to provide medical information and emotional support to geographically disperscd veterans. Activism transformed women activists by endowing them with a sense of empowerment and a somewhat broadened concern for social justice. Although their transformations disposed the women to become active on related issues, it did not extend to concerns about gender discrimination. We suggest that the next research step is to investigate gender differences in movement processes by surveying activists across a variety of movements to test propositions and to identify the characteristics of other social contexts that structurally instigate a departure from traditional gender roles.

Abstract:The vague, yet undoubtedly desirable, notion of sustainability has been discussed and debated by many natural and social scientists. We argue that mainstream conceptions of sustainability, and the related concept of sustainable development, are mired in a "pre-analytic vision" that naturalizes capitalist social relations, closes off important questions regarding economic growth, and thus limits the potential for an integrative socio-ecological analysis. Theoretical and empirical research within environmental sociology provides key insights to overcome the aforementioned problems, whereby the social, historical, and environmental relationships associated with the tendencies and qualities of the dominant economic system are analyzed. We highlight how several environmental sociology perspectives-such as human ecology, the treadmill of production, and metabolic analysis-can serve as the basis for a more integrative socio-ecological conception and can help advance the field of sustainability science.