Barry Commoner, a biologist, counters that the primary cause of environmental ills is the increasing use of technological innovations

that are destructive to the worlds environment plastics, detergents, synthetic fibers, pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. Human Ecology Earlier, we noted that human ecology is concerned with interrelationships between people and their environment. As Barry Commoner has stated, Everything is connected to everything else. In an application of the human ecological perspective, sociologists Riley Dunlap suggests that the natural environment serves three basic functions for humans, as it does for many animal species. 1. The environment provides the resources essential for life. These include air, water, and materials used to create shelter, transportation and other necessities. 2. The environment serves as a waste repository. More so than other living species, humans produce a huge quantity and variety of waste products bottles, boxes, papers, sewage, and garbage, to name just a few. 3. The environment houses our species. It is our home, our living space, the place where we reside, work, and play. Dunlap (1993) points out that these three functions of the environment actually compete with one another. This tension between the three essential functions of the environment brings us back to the human ecologists view that everything is connected to everything else. A Conflict view of environmental Issues This process only intensifies the destruction of natural resources in poorer regions of the world. From a conflict perspective, less affluent nations are being to meet their mineral deposits, forests, and fisheries in order to meet their debt obligations to industrialized nations. Conflict theorists are well aware of the environmental implications of land use policies in the Third World, but they contend that focusing on the developing countries is ethnocentric.

Allan Schnaiberg (1994) refines this analysis by criticizing the focus on affluent consumers as the cause of environmental troubles. The capitalist systems Treadmill of Production is the real culprit. Environmental Justice Environmental Justice a legal strategy based on claims that racial minorities and the lower classes are subjected disproportionately to environmental hazards. In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order that requires all federal agencies to ensure that low-income and minority communities have access to better information about their environment as well as an opportunity to participate in shaping government policies that affect their communities health. Summary The size, composition, and distribution of the worlds population have an important influence on our communities, our health, and our environment. Demography the scientific study of population. 1. Thomas Robert Malthus suggested that the worlds population was growing more rapidly than the available food supply and the gap between two would increase over time. But Karl Marx saw capitalism, rather than rising population, as the main cause of the worlds social ills. 2. For obtaining vital statistics on the population of the United States and most other countries is Census. 3. Stable communities first developed when humans became farmers, and their surplus production allowed others to live in preindustrial cities. Industrial city, a large population center dominated by factories. In the 20th century, gave rise to the postindustrial city. 4. Urban Ecology is a functionalist view of urbanization that focuses on the interrelationships between city dwellers and their environment. Two theories of urban growth, the concentriczone theory and the multiple-nuclei theory. 5. New urban sociology, a conflict view of urbanization, focus on the interplay of local, national, and global economic forces and their effect on cities throughout the world according to Immanuel Wallersteins world-systems analysis. 6. Functionalists, conflict theorists, and labeling theorists all see medicine as an institution of social definition and control. 7. Social epidemiology is the study of the distribution of disease, disability, and health across a population. Lower class people have higher rates of mortality and disability than upper-class people. Racial and ethnic minorities have high rates of morbidity and mortality than Whites. 8. Human Ecology, the natural environment serves three basic functions: a. Essential Resources b. Waste Repository c. Houses our Species