Some of my sense of why environmental issues are so urgent comes from growing up in Cleveland, where pollution from the hulking steel mills and chemical plants darkened the sky and caused the infamous Cuyahoga River to catch fire in June of 1969. I was 8, and I saw mercury-contaminated fish washing up on the Lake Erie beach near Cleveland where my family used to go for delightful lazy summer retreats. Soon we all stopped eating the fish, stopped swimming in the lake, and turned away from the lake to other things.

Some of my hopefulness, however, also flows from those waters. Lake Erie is now a veritable eco-tourist destination (especially for sport fishing), and my family recently built a summer house there. The water is rather clean, and the fish are back. The rebirth of Lake Erie was not foregone or inevitable: The problems of industrial and household pollution were addressed because an effective social movement with widespread citizen support demanded it. Local, state and federal governments quickly built agencies full of environmental scientists, and industries and consumers were forced to substantially change their ways. Suddenly everyone was calling themselves environmentalists, and nature, ecology, and environment became part of our days in classes and camp.

Twenty-five years after my first ecology course in high school, environmental issues continue to fascinate and motivate me. They turn out to be delightfully complex and linked to everything. Most obvious are the interactions of humans with their natural systems of energy, soil and atmosphere. But I increasingly appreciate how they are deeply rooted in the seemingly intractable issues of economy, social justice, community, and democracy.

Though I was not too sure how viable a career the new field of environmental science held out for me, I had some teachers, research jobs and internships that encouraged me to follow my passion for the subject. I was a biology major at Kenyon College, where I was treated like a graduate student by Professor Ray Heithaus. His joy in research was a gift I want to pass on to my students. After camping for weeks in the mountains of West Virginia and collecting data on seeds, ants and mice, we’d come back to campus to input the data and draft up articles. It was a natural science model of collaboration with students I’ve had great luck translating into sociology, and William and Mary students have responded with great enthusiasm.

I’ve worked on a number of environmental issues and I find it difficult to decide which is most urgent since they are all related. After spending a semester of my junior year in college doing field research in a national park in Costa Rica, I did my graduate work at Johns Hopkins on development in the Brazilian Amazon. While I was teaching at Tulane University I worked on toxic pollution and environmental justice in Louisiana.

The environmental justice perspective has proven repeatedly useful in my work. This sociological theory and social movement by the same name tie social inequality (by race, class, or ethnicity) to unequal exposure to the environmental risks, while material benefits are themselves unequally distributed. To put it most plainly, some people systematically get few of the goods while facing a lot of the bads, like fear of cancer and other health risks at home and at work.

The problem is that in dealing with our own environmental issues like air and water pollution, we have often inadvertently polluted other people’s “backyards.” After two decades of this approach the environmental justice movement came along and protested that the very effective “Not In My Back Yard” (NIMBY) efforts of the white middle class had unintentionally resulted in pattern described by some as PIBBY -- “Put It in Blacks’ Back Yard.” New research shows now that this is precisely what occurred in the 1980s. Awareness is growing that the pattern is in fact global: while the Great Lakes or Chesapeake Bay are cleaner than they were 30 years ago, water and air in many industrial regions in Mexico and China are terribly worse.

So a pivotal realization for me after two decades of work in the area has been that we cannot fully address environmental issues without addressing social inequality. Waste flows downhill, including in the social sense. This is as true for tropical deforestation as it is for toxic pollution and global warming. The implications are clear: the only way to have the problems actually solved, instead of just displaced, is to empower those at the bottom of society’s ladder to fight them. There can be no “away.”

Even as we attempt to address issues of land use and sprawl -- one of Williamsburg’s most pressing issues -- we are forced to deal with the entire range of urban and political issues. This makes the topic of watersheds and development in the region a wonderful case for student research. In addition to all the biology and geology of streams and watersheds and narrow policies of land use and zoning, addressing sprawl requires we deal with transportation, crime, housing, schools, energy policy, consumerism, and property rights.