Environmental Sociology

This program stresses the analysis of the political ecology and political economy of environmental processes, particularly those involving natural resource extraction and use. Environmental and resource sociology students and faculty focus on topics that range from technological risks to the broader institutional influences that shape the processes of resource exploitation and conservation. The environmental and resource sociology training program also delves into individual-level variables such as environmental attitudes and values and the ways in which these variables translate into environmentally relevant behaviors, and stresses the role of environmental movements in shaping environmental policy and environmental quality outcomes. Many of the students in environmental and resource sociology participate with ecological scientists in one or both of two National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary projects on the Madison campus: the Long-Term Ecological Research Project (LTER) and the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program.