User:Zoe Mara Talamantes/sandbox

The ideologies, fields and paradigms in environmental social science aim to conceptualize issues of the environment as embedded in societal relations, institutions and human activities that continually reconfigure the environment or are themselves shaped by environmental process. For example, political ecology is based on the premise that the environment is not “A-political” therefore the way it is managed, who has access to the environment, how environmental resources are distributed are reconfigured through political structures, power relations, economic institutions and social processes. Paul Robbins, conveys this in his differentiation of “A-political verse political ecologies”. According to Robbins political ecologies place emphasis on identifying “broader systems rather than blaming proximate and local forces; between viewing ecological systems as power-laden rather than politically inert; and between taking an explicitly normative approach rather than one that claims the objectivity of disinterest”. Therefore human environmental relations reverberate through “the system”  (politics, economics, power relations) moving through an entire web of human relations and structures that are intertwined ecological relations.Environmental social scienctists stress human - environmental relationships. Another idea that has risen to prominence in environmental social science is is the idea of environmental justice which connects issues in the field of social justice with issues related to the environment  In describing environmental justice the concepts emphasized by Shoreman-Quimet and Kopnina include "equity equality, and rights issues in relation to both social and ecological actors" This pans out in debates about environmental vulnerability and the unequal distribution of resources. In here lies the idea that certain groups are made more vulnerable to "environmental burdens" while others gain more access to "environmental benefits" as defined in terms of environmental resources and services.