1.

What are the three broad positions that has emerged concerning population-
environment relations and how it affects human survival and quality of life? Give an
outline of the positions taken by each perspective.
 The three broad positions that has emerged concerning population-environment
relations are The Pro-Growth Perspective, The neo-Malthusian Perspective and The
Political Economy Perspective. These three broad positions can affects in human survival
and quality of life in terms of the impact of the interlocking crisis of overpopulation,
resource depletion, and environmental degradation, issues of sustainability and survival
have come to occupy center stage.

I. Pro-Growth Perspective
a) Hawley believes that industrial systems have no known upper
limits on either the number of specialization or the size of the
populations that can be supported.
b) Herman Kahn views population increase as a necessary stimulus
to economic growth and believes the earth can easily support
fifteen billion people at twenty thousand dollars per capita for a
millennium.
c) Roger Revelle believes the Earth can actually support nearly thirty
times the present population in terms of food supplies, and that it
would take almost 150 years to hit that mark
d) Dunlap presents evidence to show that the effects of pollution
and the costs of cleaning the environment are borne
disproportionately by the poor and may actually serve to
reinforce class inequalities.
II. neo-Malthusian Perspective
a) The disparity between the two growth rates poses a perpetual
threat to the human prospect and serves as a natural brake on
unlimited population increase by triggering war, widespread
famine, disease, and death.
b) The carrying capacity for humans is the maximum population that
can be supported in definitely by a particular environment under
exploitation by specified technology and organization.
c) Compounding the environmental effects of the poverty-stricken
and food hungry populations of the world are the impacts of
massive consumption and population of the enemy hungry
nations.
 d) Tragedy of numbers is compounded by the free rider who derives
personal benefits from the collective efforts of others, and the
more serious tragedy of the commons, where each herdsman will
add cattle without limit, ignoring the costs imposed on the others
and must therefore, degraded the land held in common.
III. Political Economy Perspective
a) Barry Commoner, the problem in his view, is the result of gross
distributive imbalances between the rich and the poor, and requires a
massive redistribution of wealth and resources to abolish poverty and
raise standards of living in order to wipe out the root cause of
overpopulation.
b) Susan Stonich, her conclusion is that the environmental degradation
arises from fundamental social structure and is intricately connected to
problems of land tenure, unemployment, poverty, and demography.

2. Illustrate how population growth affects the balance between population number and
sustenance resource via the Malthusian population paradox. What possible
checks/measures were offered to address this population situation?
 In responding to the concern of the neo-Malthusians about population outrunning
resources, Hawley points to inherently expansive nature of populations, technology, and
organization, which through resources substitutions, intensive use and exploitation of
land and resources, and the exploration and discovery of new frontiers and new
resources, can allay concerns regarding environmental finitude. In his view, the problem
of food and resource shortages is really rooted in poverty rather than in resource
scarcity.
Malthus then argued that because there will be a higher population than the availability
of food, many people will die from the shortage of food. He theorized that this
correction would take place in the form of Positive Checks (or Natural Checks) and
Preventative Checks. These checks would lead to the Malthusian catastrophe, which
would bring the population level back to a ‘sustainable level.’
He believed that natural forces would correct the imbalance between food supply and
population growth in the form of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes and
human-made actions such as wars and famines. To correct the imbalance, Malthus also
suggested using preventative measures to control the growth of the population. These
measures include family planning, late marriages, and celibacy.
3. Illustrate the process of demographic transition via the American experience of baby
boom and the Japanese case of a “dying culture”. In that ways do they vary in terms of
 the effect (of demog trans) on their population characteristics and on their economy?
Explain elaborately.
 The existence of some kind of demographic transition is widely accepted in the social
sciences because of the well-established historical correlation linking dropping fertility
to social and economic development. The five stages of demographic transition.
A typical consequence of the demographic transition—a population’s shift from high
mortality and high fertility to low mortality and low fertility—is a period of robust
population growth. This growth occurs once survival has improved but before fertility
has fallen to or below replacement level, so that the birth rate substantially exceeds the
death rate.
The demarcation between any two stages is arbitrary, and we could just as easily have
divided the continuum into more stages or fewer. Because no national population today
remains untouched by improvements in survival, we do not observe any countries in
stage 1 of demographic transition. There are, however, many contemporary examples
of populations in each of the four later stages.
Our five stages are (1) pre-transition, with high crude death and birth rates leading to
low rates of natural increase and fertility high but roughly at replacement; (2) falling
death rates with mostly unchanged birth rates, leading to moderate rates of natural
increase and fertility above replacement; (3) falling birth and death rates, but with birth
rates greatly exceeding death rates, so that fertility is substantially above replacement;
(4) low mortality and falling fertility, with fertility slightly above or roughly at
replacement; and (5) low birth and death rates, with sub-replacement fertility.
What we call stage 5 of the demographic transition has also been called the “second
demographic transition”
Japan are unlike those of any other developed country. This is partly because data
collection in Japan begins so much later than it does in Europe, so that we observe
Japan only in what may be the last stages of its demographic transition, with moderately
high but falling stable momentum and rising nonstable momentum. Following World
War II, Japan has also shown the most severe fertility collapse of any of the developed
countries reviewed here, with persistently low and falling fertility rates throughout the
last decades of the twentieth century. This leads to total momentum well below 1 in
2005–10. Momentum below 1, of course, means that if fertility were to rebound to
replacement immediately, total population size would still decrease before becoming
constant.
The Demographic transition or the change from high fertility and high mortality, to low
fertility and low mortality, took place in a short period after the War. The large surplus
population of the generation of many siblings and few premature deaths, born in the
middle of the demographic transition, was present in rural areas in the 1950's and
 1960's and most of this population migrated into big cities. This was the drastically
increased migration from non-metropolitan areas to metropolitan areas in the 1960's. In
addition to this change in age structure the demographic transition, we cannot overlook
another factor in regard to the population concentration in cities in the 1960's: the high
growth rate of the economy generated a great demand for labor force in metropolitan
areas, thereby providing jobs for those migrants.

4. What are the main features of the brundtland report? Compare with that of the
Ghandian view of ecological crisis. Which view do you think could be applicable by
SMART analysis?
 At the heart of the 1987 Brundtland Report of the World Commission on Environment
and Development is the idea of sustainable development that has become the rallying
point for diverse agendas linking poverty, underdevelopment, and overpopulation to
environmental degradation and environmental security. Its popularity lies in its ability to
accommodate the opposing idea of limits to growth within the context of economic
expansion, but with a new twist. As pointed out by Gro Brundtland the central pivot of
the notion of sustainable development remains progress growth the generation of
wealth and the use of resources while in Ghandian view the patterns of human social
organization, and technology use reflect the vision a people have of themselves. Behind
the fading fabric of competitive capitalism there looms the portent of an industrial
civilization with its paralyzing division of labor, standardization of life, supremacy of
mechanism over organism, and organization over spontaneity. The high powered
techno economic structures driven by the insatiable demand for energy, resources and
markets is inherently anti ecological. Its immensity of scale and utilitarian thrust not
only destroy traditional socioeconomic structures but also set in motion irreversible and
ecologically damaging global processes whose attempted solutions greatly magnify the
problems.

5. What are the areas of concern in the environmental movement and proactive
environmental sociology? Comment on the “alternative development model” of David
Mahar. Which do you think can be subject to SMART test? Support you answer.
 The overriding emphasis of the environmental movement has been reformist. Concern
with conservation and efficiency in resource and energy use, rather than with
reallocating the production surplus among social classes, has dominated its agenda. One
of the major public concerns with the environment follows the same issue attention
cycle that is characteristic of most social movements. Environmental sociologists have
explored the charge of elitism leveled against the environmental movement. Overall the
environment has had a significant worldwide impact on the way people and politicians
look at the environment and its problems, this change has not yet been translated into
comprehensive and effective policies to promote and protect environment interest.
A proactive environmental sociology concern itself with the dynamics out of which
problems arise, anticipating potential problem areas and their alternative solutions as
the means to translate desired values into effective policy. This will involve identifying
possible futures and the consequences of action or inaction for their attainment, a
policy dimension ignored by sociologists, despite their belief that this may make all the
difference in a fast changing and turbulent world in which the ability to handle and
manage change requires the ability to anticipate change and to adapt social cultures to
changing requirements.
The proactive can be subject to SMART test, because on this basis, a systematic concern
with the application of knowledge would lead to a proactive environmental sociology
that would prompt the sociologists to formulate alternative policies with respect to the
set of environmental values or goals that are to be implemented. This will also ensure
that the applied aspects of environmental sociology will flourish within the discipline
and not become detached from sociology, as has been the fate of industrial sociology
and many other areas in the past.