As the COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives globally, the world continued to heat up in 2020, contributing to wildfires, droughts, floods, and ravenous locust swarms, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. The loss of nature to agriculture, infrastructure, and human settlements continues to escalate, the UNEP’s Annual Report 2020 says. Pollution of the air, land, and sea is still claiming lives and damaging crucial ecosystems. “Violations of the environmental and land rights of local communities—often indigenous people and women—are on the rise, with hundreds of people killed each year,” the report says.
As the world continues to face and grapple with serious environmental challenges, in this issue of Footnotes titled “Why the Environment Needs a Course Correction Now,” sociologists delve deep into some of these issues, from the structure and culture of climate change denial to the efforts to obstruct action on climate change; from the connection between pollution, poverty, and environmental suffering to power and race in Brazil’s Labor-Environment Nexus.
Articles also focus on ways to thrive in a malfunctioning global economy and in nation-states whose primary raison d’être is to support that economy to the detriment of their own inhabitants; the American Jobs Plan which recognizes that the issues of energy, employment, and social inequality are linked, and that the process of transforming our energy system presents an opportunity to simultaneously reduce both unemployment and social inequality; the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion to be a part of every environmental organization’s mission; and the need to comprehend our present global realities in order to create a sustainable global society in a sustainable global ecosystem.
The authors have approached their essays with different lenses and methodologies and offer ways in which public policy can be deployed to address these environmental challenges.
