Hazardous Wastes, Industrial Disasters, and Environmental Health Risks
The sociology of hazardous waste, risk, and disasters is a relatively new discipline. This book focuses on hazardous and toxic wastes releases, industrial toxic disasters, contamination of communities and the environment, and the subsequent
- PDF / 109,550 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 450.058 x 648.058 pts Page_size
- 4 Downloads / 216 Views
Background Social scientists did not pay adequate attention to the toxic and hazardous wastes generated in the course of industrial production in the United States during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There was a general failure to closely examine the interaction among the social, technological, and natural processes that often produce hazards and major disasters. Although systematic studies of disasters in the United States can be traced back to the 1940s-1950s (e.g., Lemons, 1957; Fritz and Williams, 1957), it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the issue of toxic waste began to command the attention of many sociologists and other social scientists. In 1984, James F. Short particularly challenged sociologists to get involved in the study of risks, risk analysis, and disasters.1 A series of catastrophic events during the period, involving extensive contamination and disruption of communities, loss of lives, and destruction of properties directed scholarly interest into the study of disasters and risks. Much of the emergent sociological research on disasters focused on short-term social responses to disasters of natural or human etiologies (Kreps, 1985; Kreps and Drabeck, 1996; Quarantelli and Dynes, 1977). From the 1940s through the 1960s, the quest for capitalist expansion and rising affluence fueled the culture in which production and disposal of hazardous and nonhazardous by-products of industrial activities were viewed as unavoidable aspects of the capitalist system. Nature or the environment was viewed as capable of absorbing industrial effluents and replenishing itself without any long-term harm. Of course, the prevailing ideology then was the dominant Western worldview (DWW), according to which humans are fundamentally distinct from other creatures on earth by virtue of their culture,
10.1057/9780230339538 - Hazardous Wastes, Industrial Disasters, and Environmental Health Risks, Francis O. Adeola 9780230118218_02_ch01.indd 3
9/13/2011 9:42:08 PM
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Utrecht University - PalgraveConnect - 2014-06-09
1
H a z a r d ous Wa s t e s , D i s a s t e r s , H e a lt h R i s k s
people are masters of their own destiny, the biosphere is vast and capable of providing unlimited possibilities for humans, and the history of humanity is one of progress that will continue with the invention and application of technologies (see Catton and Dunlap, 1980). Consequently, there was no stringent regulatory control of hazardous waste either at the federal or at the state level during this period. Before stringent regulatory measures were implemented, an estimated 5 billion metric tons of highly toxic chemicals had been improperly disposed of in the United States between 1950 and 1975 (Cunningham, Cunningham, and Saigo, 2007). Understandably, much of the hazardous and toxic wastes grew in an exponential fashion in the United States during the period. Man-made disasters involving severe contamination of communities by previously unregulat
Data Loading...
