An Invitation to Environmental Sociology Michael Mayerfeld Bell

It is a delight to offer to readers this fourth edition of An Invitation to Environmental Sociology indeed, it is many delights. I am gratified that the book remains of sufficient usefulness to warrant a new edition. But far more satisfying is that environmental scholarship has continued to deepen within sociology and related social sciences, and that interest in environmental sociology has continued to broaden within society at large. Each year, the flow of scholarly books and articles increases. So, too, does the volume of texts oriented to students and the number of courses in which students can encounter the field. Environmental sociology has more to say now, and more people who want to hear and contribute to what it has to say.

Amid the continuing indications of alarming and accelerating stress on the sustainability, justice, and beauty of our environment, we should remember to appreciate good and hopeful signs like these. There is care and concern out there-lots of it.

But even if environmental sociology has more to say, it is important that we scholars don’t drone on about it. With that caution in mind, in this edition, I have focused on integrating new scholarship without lengthening the book. I’ve achieved this goal for the most part. This edition is only very slightly longer than the previous, and does not contain any new chapters.

The wonderful production people at Pine Forge Press have also worked to keep the same inviting feel of the third edition, retaining the evocative artwork of Matthew Raboin and Matthew Robinson, which readers admired. But there is new material in ali the chapters, and quite a bit in a few of them, as well as sorne reorganization.

Michael Mayerfeld Bell is professor of coÍnmunity and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For his day job, Mike is principally an environmental sociologist and a social theorist, focusing on dialogics, the sociology of nature, and social justice. These concerns for the world have led him to studies of agroecology, the body, comrnunity, consumption, culture, developrnent, food, democracy, economic sociology, gender, inequality, participation, place, politics, rurality, the sociology of music, and more.

Mike likes books and is the author or an editor of eíght, three of which have won national awards: Farmingfor Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation ofSustainabilíty (2004; winner of a 2005 Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association); Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village (1994; co-winner of the 1995 Outstanding Book Award of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association); and The Pace of Connecticut: People, Geology, and the Land (1985; also a winner of an American Library Association award).