In honor of Earth Day yesterday, Fox News ran a story about successful efforts to clean up our planet. They write, “Cleaner air, cleaner water and cleaner-burning gasoline — which means less brain-toxic lead in our blood — are the major achievements of the modern environmental movement, but global climate change looms as the elephant in the living room, experts say.”

The experts say…

“Of course, you can see the glass as half full and half empty, because there are many significant challenges that remain,” [Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council] told LiveScience. “And of course global warming is first and foremost, and the most critical. And despite the progress, there has also been increasing loss of species around the world, threats to the health of our oceans; there is water scarcity in many parts of the world and haphazard development patterns.”

Call in the sociologist…

A little-discussed downside: U.S. gains in clear air and water often come at the expense of other nations, Drexel University sociologist and environmental scientist Robert Brulle said. We export our toxin-producing manufacturing to places such as Canada, Mexico and China where there are looser environmental policies. We clean up our act, their air and water gets dirtier.

And lately?

Most of the above landmarks were primarily achieved starting in the 1970s, leaving some to ask, “What have you done for me lately?”

The hold-up in progress these days is that early tree huggers tackled the low-hanging fruit first, Brulle says. Now the harder stuff — global issues like global warming, biodiversity loss, deforestation — remains to be solved. Also, the grass-roots movement is less powerful and less empowering. It’s hard to get on the board of a lot of these organizations, other than say the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society or the Center for Health, Environment & Justice.

Nowadays, a lot of organizations — there were 1,339 that operated nationally and reported to the IRS in 2003, according to Brulle — give citizens a “free ride.” Just give money. No need to write a letter, attend a rally or lecture, or change one’s lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the environmental movement has a total annual income of $2.7 billion, Brulle said. And some of the organizations do good work by focusing on buying and preserving land to protect ecological habitats, but this does nothing today for the more pressing issue of global climate change, he says.

“You can buy an ecosystem, but shifts in climate change will destroy the ecosystem as it exists,” Brulle said.

As an example, Brulle points the finger at the Nature Conservancy, which commanded about 19 percent of all environmental income dollars in 2003 by his calculation.

“Do we want to be putting 19 percent of [donations] income on a strategy that is really about buying land?” Brulle said. “That is not going to address global climate change and biodiversity losses … the strategy has failed.”

Brulle’s picks for where to put your environmental dollars — the Sierra Club (for which he is an unpaid advisor; he likes how they effectively connect individuals with national concerns), Center for Health, Environment & Justice (he likes their highly local work) and 350.org.

And another sociologist…

Ohio State University sociologist J. Craig Jenkins also is guardedly optimistic for our environmental future.

“Trying to run a transportation system based on ‘Hummers” took a long time to develop and will take equally long to restructure,” he said.

He predicts significant changes in our energy use and patterns in the areas of transportation, home heating and industrial energy use, if only due to rising energy costs. The United States currently ranges from non-competitive to among the worst in the world in these areas (especially in transportation and domestic energy use).

New housing designs, new methods of generating electricity and new transportation methods are on the horizon, he said, also due to rising costs.

“These will also have global warming benefits,” he said. “The big unknown is whether the latter benefits will be enough to matter.”

Read more.

This week, Newsday ran a story about what might lead certain people to commit murder-suicide, drawing upon scholars’ expertise on identifying key traits of perpetrators. The article was specifically concerned with the practice of familicide, also referred to as ‘family annihilation,’ which is committed by men nearly 95% of the time according to the Violence Policy Center.

The psychological perspective…

Louis Schlesinger, forensic psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said there were two different types of familicidal offenders.

One takes a proprietorial view of his wife, gets angry, and attacks her and everyone around her. The second type is “the despondent male,” who feels he must kill his family and himself to spare them the humiliation or pain of what life will bring, Schlesinger said.

“It’s not rational, it’s not reasonable,” he said. “If he tries to kill himself and survives, he views the [slain] family with sympathy. . . . He feels tremendous regret.”

The sociological perspective…

But Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said there is almost always a “catastrophic loss that precedes a family annihilation.”

Triggers can be a loss of a job, money, a relationship or a loved one. Often, he said, there is a feeling of isolation.

“Most family annihilators, and typically it’s the husband and father, have been frustrated and depressed over a long period of time,” he said. “But they, unlike other depressed individuals, blame everybody else for their miseries.”

Or, he said, in cases when the man may be described as a dedicated husband and devoted father, the motive may be “a perverted sense of altruism that they’d be better off dead than live in this miserable existence.”

In general, he said, most familicides are suicidal rampages, “but first the killer will take care of his loved ones.”

If the person is religious, “He may feel he can reunite with loved ones in the hereafter, or wants to spare his loved ones the humiliation of his suicide.”

Read more.

Early this week USA Today ran a story about last weekend’s Council on Contemporary Families conference in Chicago, during which experts discussed how topics such as sexual orientation, sexual labeling, and gender-bending were no longer “x-rated or adults-only topics, but rather subjects that young people talk about as they figure out how they fit in.” Psychologist Braden Berkey told conference attendees, “Youth are saying they don’t want to be defined by gender or orientation.” 

USA Today reports:

Berkey is founding director of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute at the Center on Halsted, which opened in 2007 to offer support services and programming for the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He talked about the evolution of sexual and gender labels and how young people today are trying to dissolve them. He says the terms created in the early days, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, are giving way to other descriptions, such as polygender or multisex. Young people, he says, reject narrow gender definitions and say they don’t want to be defined by their sexuality.

However, a presentation by sociologist Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that for the middle-schoolers she’s studied, attitudes about sexual orientation are less open-minded, especially for boys. She says these boys fear the label “gay.”

More from Barbara Risman…

Among boys, “homophobia in middle school is used to police gender,” she says. In-depth interviews with 43 students at an urban middle school in the Southeast found vast differences between the sexes.

“Today, girls are free to do sports and be competitive. No one thought they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. The women’s movement has done great things for middle school girls,” she says.

“It’s another story with boys. I feel like we’re in a time warp. We have not dealt with men and masculinity in a serious enough way,” she says.”Boys police each other. There’s no room not to do anything not traditionally masculine.”

Risman says it’s important not to generalize the findings to most American children, but she says the fact that boys are labeled quickly suggests that this is a developmental stage. The study, she adds, was limited by many rules requiring parental permission for contact with minors.

Risman says it’s the stigma of homosexuality that looms among young boys. Being emotional or caring too much about clothes or liking to dance are reasons that boys give for describing someone as “girlish,” she says.

Read more.

This past weekend Pink News, a UK-based media outlet, ran a story on a new study out of the University of Derby suggesting that lesbian women in abusive relationships may resist seeking assistance for fear of being outed. Findings from the study were presented at the British Sociological Association’s annul meetings last weekend in Cardiff and indicate that abusive relationships between gay women “can can include physical assaults, sexual coercion and emotional cruelty but victims are put off seeking help because of fear of being outed to friends, colleagues and family.”

The scale of the problem:

Forty women between the ages of 21 and 70 were chosen for the study, believed to the most detailed research into abusive lesbian relationships to date. All of those who took part had experienced abuse in some capacity.

Around 88 per cent of those questioned had suffered physical abuse such as punching, kicking and slapping. Forty five per cent reported had been bullied into performing unwanted sexual activities and ten per cent admitted to having been forced into having sex.

Thirteen per cent had been threatened with being outed by their partner to friends, family and colleagues or outed altogether by the abusive partner, while 18 per cent had felt suicidal or had attempted suicide during the abusive relationship.

The author’s comments:

Dr Rebecca Barnes, who led the study, said: “Only women who had been abused by a previous female partner were invited to participate in the study, with the aim being to examine these relationships in detail rather than trying to establish what proportion of lesbian relationships as a whole is abusive.

“The findings show that women in abusive same-sex relationships experience very similar challenges to women in abusive heterosexual relationships.

“However, being in a same-sex relationship poses additional barriers to seeking and receiving effective support. My findings also showed that abuse in lesbian relationships can involve wide-ranging forms of emotional, physical, financial and sexual abuse, as it can in heterosexual abusive relationships.”

“One of the key differences with same-sex abuse is the secrecy which surrounds many same-sex relationships – a few of my participants had had relationships lasting years which their family or colleagues knew nothing about or which only a few close friends were aware of. This particularly applied to women who were in their first same-sex relationship.”

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle ran a front page story earlier this week about how new numbers from the Pew Center indicate a shift in immigrant demographics. Nearly one in ten Texas children has an undocumented parent, while 73% of the children of illegal immigrants are U.S.-born citizens.

The Chronicle reports:

The Pew Hispanic Center released a report Tuesday estimating that about 73 percent of the children of illegal immigrant parents were U.S.-born citizens in 2008, up from roughly 63 percent in 2003. During that time frame, the estimated number of children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents increased from 2.7 million to 4 million. The report estimates that at least one in 10 Texas school children has a parent in the country illegally.

Pew’s estimates were based largely on March 2008 Census Bureau survey data, which was adjusted to account for census undercounting and legal status.

The report’s findings highlight an emotional issue in the immigration debate: mixed status families of undocumented parents and U.S.-born children. High-profile immigration enforcement raids across the country in recent years have generated stories of American schoolchildren coming home to find out their parents had been picked up by immigration officials.

The demographic shift will have significant implications through the summer as the immigration reform debate heats back up. Last week, the Obama administration indicated it was gearing up to tackle reform, including creating a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.

The sociological commentary…

“These are American citizens, and we’re rounding up and deporting their parents,” said Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg, calling the overall immigration strategy “totally bankrupt,” and in need of repair.

Sociologist Katherine Donato elaborates…

Vanderbilt Sociology Professor Katharine M. Donato said the Pew Center’s findings highlight a marked shift in illegal immigration patterns, which in turn have changed the demographics of the nation’s undocumented population.

Donato said the U.S. immigration system used to be largely cyclical, with workers — legal and undocumented — returning to their home countries on a regular basis, until the massive buildup of agents and infrastructurealong the Southwest border in early 1990s.

Facing more dangerous treks and steeper smuggling fees, many illegal immigrants opted instead to bring their families to the U.S. and settle in here, which accounts for the growth in the share of births in the U.S., she said.

Read more.

Earlier this week USA Today ran several articles  on the tenth anniversary of the school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. They called upon several sociologists to talk about how the Columbine shootings changed the culture of American high schools.

The first featured work from sociologist Katherine Newman…

School shooters almost always tell classmates of their plans, so schools should provide “confidential avenues for reporting what they hear,” says Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, who co-authored Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. It’s tough to get teenagers to “tell,” since creating a social culture apart from adults is so important to adolescent development, Newman says. But if adults guarantee confidentiality, results can be dramatic. Examples:

•Colorado has a Safe2Tell anonymous tipline that covers any potential threat to safety. The program also includes anonymous and encrypted Web-tipping, says Susan Payne, special agent in charge of school safety and homeland security for the state. In the past 4½ years, the line has prevented 28 planned school attacks, she says. In one incident, there were 33 weapons found. About two-thirds of the calls come from kids, Payne says. “All of us have seen these unspeakable tragedies. I can’t think of one that could not have been prevented.”

•Safe School Ambassadors is a program created by the non-profit Community Matters in 2000. It has trained staff at more than 650 schools in 23 states on how to set up so-called ambassadors — influential student leaders of varied cliques who learn how to squelch minor fires of bullying and other behaviors, and to report potential rampages.

The second highlighted sociologist David Osher…

The Secret Service found that 71% of shooters they studied felt “persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others.” In several cases, they’d experienced school bullying and harassment that was “long-standing and severe.”

“These kids didn’t pick the local movie theater to blow people away, and there’s a reason they picked school,” says David Osher, a sociologist and vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

Schools that tolerate lots of bullying and look the other way from petty acts of violence are more vulnerable to escalating violence, including rampages from shooters, he says.

And where relations between teachers and kids with emotional problems are harsh or distant, violence becomes more likely.

“These are rage shootings,” he says, “kids suffering from depression largely creating public suicides in school environments where they feel alienated.”

Read more on how ‘Post-Columbine Programs Help Prevent Rampages.’

Read more on ‘Lessons from Columbine.’

The Wall Street Journal ran a story earlier this week about a new book from Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin. This new book, entitled The Marriage-Go-Round,  focuses on the culture surrounding marriage in the United States.

University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox writes (for WSJ):

Last week, Vermont became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage, setting off yet another round of celebration and hand-wringing in different quarters of American life. The debate over same-sex marriage — showing so much intensity on both sides — is but one sign that Americans take marriage very seriously indeed. From television specials featuring over-the-top Bridezilla weddings to the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, which spends $150 million annually marriage-related programs, no other Western nation devotes as much cultural energy, public policy or religious attention to matrimony as the U.S. And with approximately 90% of Americans marrying over the course of their lifetimes, the U.S. has the highest marriage rate of any Western country.

On Cherlin’s new book…

But there is a darker side to this exceptionalism, as Andrew J. Cherlin notes in “The Marriage-Go-Round,” his incisive portrait of marriage in America. Virtually no other nation in the West compares with the U.S. when it comes to divorce, short-term co-habitation and single parenthood. As Mr. Cherlin documents, Americans marry and co-habit at younger ages, divorce more quickly and enter into second marriages or co-habiting unions faster than their counterparts elsewhere. In other words, Americans “step on and off the carousel of intimate relationships.”

The biggest problem with this aspect of American family life is that children often do not do well when parents and partners are whirling in and out of their lives. Children have difficulty adapting to changes in their routines or to step- parents who are not comfortable acting as authority figures or to nonresidential parents who see children only intermittently. The live-in boyfriend, who may well not have a child’s best interests at heart, is an even greater problem. Such a mix of hybrid forms, according to Mr. Cherlin, is part of the reason that family instability is linked to higher rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, teen drunkenness, truancy and behavioral problems in school.

By contrast, Mr. Cherlin writes, “stable, low-conflict families with two biological or adoptive parents provide better environments for children, on average, than do other living arrangements.” Unfortunately, the family changes of the past half-century have left millions of American children vulnerable to one or more dizzying spins on the family merry-go-round.

What is so bad about the marriage-go-round?

Family instability, Mr. Cherlin shows, has been increasingly concentrated in poor and working-class households in recent years. Divorce is much more common in less-educated circles: 23% of women with only a high-school degree will divorce or separate within five years of marriage, compared with 13% of women who hold a college degree. Thus children at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder are now much more likely to be doubly disadvantaged by poverty and family instability.

And Cherlin’s advice…

Because Mr. Cherlin is reluctant to challenge the individualistic ethos of our day, the strongest advice he can muster — when he steps back to consider the marriage portrait he has drawn so brilliantly — is that Americans who aspire to be parents should “slow down” when they are entering or exiting a marriage or a co-habiting relationship, bearing in mind that children do best in a stable home. It is not bad advice, certainly. But some of us may wish to do more than put a yellow light in the path of parents who are tempted to hop onto (and off of) America’s family merry-go-round. For the sake of the children, a red light may be better.

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle ran a book review with a rigorous critique of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA this weekend, highlighting some of the aspects of the book that were confusing to Chronicle reviewer Steven Alford, but raises some interesting concerns about how applicable Conley’s arguments are to a lay-reader, or any middle-class American. 

Alford writes: 

Conley claims, “changes in three areas of our lives—the economy, the family, and technology—have combined to alter the social world and give birth to a new type of American professional … the intravidual [who] has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.” (Isn’t he describing a mother of twins?)

This raises the question of exactly what and whom he is describing in the Elsewhere society—the wealthy or a much broader group. If the latter—and it seems he’s going for a larger reader demographic—then the terms of the argument he sets up at the beginning just don’t work, shuttling as it does between descriptions of the hard-working, high-flying Elsewhere class and “us,” constantly conflating the author/reader “us” with Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere.

This intravidual is a member of the Elsewhere class, the top third of earners, “lawyers with young kids at home, and investment bankers, and public relations consultants, and advertising executives, and yes, overpaid CEOs.” Apparently, the more these people earn, the more they work, upsetting the traditional idea of leisure-class elites. Also, they “change partners more than they change locations.”

They live in the Elsewhere society, “where not only have physical boundaries become less important, where not only do many of us function with split-screen attentions (becoming, in essence, a collection of intraviduals), but where social boundaries dissolve, leaving us in a new cultural landscape without a map or guidebook.”

Do you live here? Do I? I have no idea (lacking, I guess, the relevant map/guidebook). The reason I’m confused is that there is a fundamental problem with Elsewhere’s argument. After identifying the Elsewhere class in the introduction, in the first chapter he switches to “we,” “us,” and “Mr. and Mrs.” [!] Elsewhere, suggesting that he’s speaking to a broad swath of readers, not just those he earlier identified as earning more than $200K a year.

But has Conley’s written an ‘Encyclopedia of Sociology’ in this volume? 

To call the book’s prose “breezy” would be akin to calling a hurricane windy. On any given page, it seems that an Encyclopedia of Sociology has exploded and we are sifting through the remains. All the usual suspects appear — C. Wright Mills, Weber, Milgram, Goffman, Shills — but they are presented adrift from their important historical and social context, applied at will to the present moment, picked up and put down like so many discarded Legos.

For example, Conley explains Marx’s four types of alienation — no doubt helpful to many readers — and claims that intraviduals are alienated. But then it’s on to the next topic. Wait: If a postmodern person is alienated, how does that compare to the modernist figure who was the object of Marx’s analysis? And apparently one of the marks of an intravidual is his/her internationalism: Identity is no longer a function of place and space. But what of Marx’s proletariat, which was international by definition? What’s the difference in the two types of internationalism? Apparently “nowhere men” are “the necessary, dialectic complement to the Elsewhere class,” an observation not made until page 131, and dropped again without elaboration. The author then talks about rational taxation schemes, the monetization of the Internet and other bubbly topics only peripherally, if at all, related to his subject.

Read more.

The Baltimore Sun reported this weekend on how, after years of straining to reach recruitment goals, the National Guard has raised entrance standards. In Maryland and around the country, recruiters now demand higher test scores an a minimum of a high school degree (no longer accepting GEDs). And although months ago the National Guard was accepting new recruits as old as 42, they have now set a cut-off age of 35. 

This seems a sharp turnaround for the National Guard, once a collection of sleepy neighborhood “camping clubs for men” intended to be used, if at all, in case of World War III.

The Sept. 11 attacks and the growing combat requirements of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars swiftly changed that. Guard units were spruced up with hard training and new gear, and deployed at a wartime pace, serving with distinction in some of the hardest fighting seen in a generation.

It was widely predicted, however, that these part-time soldiers – sent off to war for a year at a time while trying to hold on to full-time jobs and families back home – would quit in droves. 

Anticipating the worst, the Guard hired battalions of new recruiters and relaxed some of its standards, raising the maximum age, lowering minimum acceptable scores on entrance exams and bending rules to accept those with minor criminal and drug violations.

But the anticipated exodus never happened. Nationwide, the Guard is brimming with soldiers – it has about 10,000 more than its authorized limit of 358,200.

The sociological commentary…

Why the change? Even though the Guard is essentially a part-time job, it has “definitely benefited from the economy going down the toilet,” said David R. Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

Especially for midcareer soldiers, even a part-time paycheck can help make ends meet, he said.

Read more. 

A New York Times Style-section column by Michelle Slatalla caught my eye this morning, declaring that I should be a patriot and hire a housekeeper(???) I decided to peruse the column and saw that it was mostly devoted to Slatalla’s musings on ‘spring cleaning’ with her family. But I read on, and was pleased to learn that Slatalla had consulted a sociologist when she became exasperated trying to get herself and her family in gear for cleaning the house. She writes:

And that [cleaning grease from the stove and noticing the filthy baseboards] was when I finally gave up. I couldn’t do this on my own anymore. I needed the help of an expert to motivate my family.

“How am I going to get the rest of them to help me keep the house clean?” I asked Pamela J. Smock, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies how housework affects family relationships.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Are you still able to afford to hire someone to clean your house?”

“ ‘Afford’ is a state of mind,” I said. “My household hasn’t lost income — yet — but my husband and I are journalists, the most endangered species there is outside of Detroit.”

I’m superstitious: Maybe if I appease the God of the Bad Economy with this offering — cutting my discretionary spending — I can ward off a worse fate.

That’s the wrong way to think, Professor Smock said.

“Right now, the bad economy is hurting people who clean houses for a living much more than it’s hurting the middle class,” she said. “So anybody who is solidly in the middle class or above should hire the cleaners back. Absolutely. Immediately. You’ll be serving your country.”

I stopped to consider this argument, which sounded, frankly, like the exact opposite of the old conventional wisdom.

“I used to feel guilty about hiring housecleaners,” I said. “Like I was selfishly relying on the hard labor of poorly paid workers to make it easier to pursue my own career without sacrificing my comfort.”

Forget that claptrap, said Professor Smock, who pays $110 for housecleaning twice a month.

“If I got a raise, I’d do it every week, and also hire the cleaning lady’s husband to install the underground sprinklers,” she said. “Right now, people need jobs. It’s a bad idea to cut back on things you used to do normally. Don’t do your own hedging. Don’t start mowing, either.”

Put that way, I saw she had a point. How could I have been so selfish? I called the cleaners right away, of course, and that made me feel so patriotic that I decided to do more.

Read more.