Health
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Environmental health is increasingly a topic of international sociological research. Although the environment and human health are inextricably connected, the social and environmental contributors to population health, disease, and wellness are too often ignored in the social and medical sciences in favor of a more individualized focus on behaviors and illnesses. This represents a shift from previous modes of inquiry that emphasized environmental links to public health. As early as the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels connected population health with harsh labor conditions, unfettered industrialization, and capitalist oppression. In the United States in the early twentieth century, urban public health practitioners and activists highlighted the health problems associated with urban environmental conditions and chemical exposure (Gottlieb 1993). During the 1960s, environmental and antitoxics activists brought health more directly into the consciousness of environmental movements and researchers. The mainstream environmental movement was inspired by increased scientific knowledge about environmental problems linked to industrial activity, including industrialized agriculture and the widespread use of petrochemicals, attention to ecological limits, and economic growth and increased affluence (Dunlap and Mertig 1992). Environmental justice activism changed the face of environmentalism in the 1980s, growing out of the civil rights and labor movements, black religious...
This essay may be found on page 130 of the printed volume.