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August 29, 2005
The Sociology of Ecology
There are few more interesting things for a sociologist to do than to go into an alien social structure and watch the interactions between groups. Saturday was a perfect such occasion for me to do just that. I tend to get an environmentalist world view quite regularly at home so it was exciting for me to hear some of the other ideas running around. It became readily apparent within seconds of getting there that the entire system was filled with conflicts. I'm going to breakdown the interest groups as I saw them.
First there were the environmentalists. Much like Dianne their primary goals are to protect the environment itself. The second major groups were the eco-engineers. They seemed to be more interested in field testing their new technologies, while the environment seemed to be a more unintended result of their cool work. Third there were the Pragmatic environmentalists who will help, but they see it more as a cost benefit analysis formula. The next group appears to be the profiteers. They are the eco-engineers that could care less about the environment except in the ways they can exploit other people's concerns about it to make a buck. They seemed willing to destroy the environment to get paid to restore it. Luckily there was only one of the latter there and everyone seemed to be angry about it, but evidently environmentalism makes strange bedfellows.
One of the most hilarious things said at the event of course was the comment by one of the eco-engineers that this was not a political event. Yeah right!!! Most Republicans and pretty much all Neo-cons hate every aspect of the environment. In fact they work daily to destroy, undermine and damage the environment through action or omission. After the eco-engineer got done with his comedy routine about it not being political, the real work began. I'm always amazed and amused how these things work. There are ultimately three classes of people in every population of people. The over-prepared, the adequately prepared and the clueless and disorganized. I received a list of supplies that we would need to bring with us. So we collected them together the night before. Then I thought through the entire work process that they would be doing and asked other people that had been involved with such events and I created a revised list with additional supplies that I might need depending on the situation we found. I'd rather bring too much and not get to use it all than to bring too little and be useless. The overly prepared are easy to see. They have everything they need at their finger tips. The adequately prepared bring what they were told as they are able. Not everyone has tools for a lot of projects hanging around the house. Dianne does so much gardening so we have just about anything you would need for anything like that, but a lot of people live in apartments don't have need of any of this stuff. As long as they come to work, all this is forgivable. The worst of all and in the real world these people are the vast majority are the clueless and disorganized. I attribute most of this to laziness. These are the kind of people that don't wear the right kind of clothes to work in, they don't bring any tools at all, they don't have much desire to put in much effort. They pretty much take up space and slow projects down.
All in all it was a good and productive day. The work got done within the time required. More people showed up to do their part than I was expecting. As always it could be done better. This sure seems like the perfect kind of project for prison work crews to be doing everyday if they were really super serious about saving the environment. I think I'm going to see if I can convince Dianne that we need to suggest that they fulfill at least part of their man power requirements especially during the week with prison labor. I think it would be a great set of skills for prisoners to develop for the future. They should be training them full time on such technologies and techniques so that they are more educated about the place they live and maybe become more connected to the community and the environment.
Posted by ManDrake at August 29, 2005 8:47 AM
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