Chapter 13 Learning Objectives

In this chapter, students should learn to do the following:

1. Understand how global populations have changed over time.
2. Explain how structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and feminist theory can be used to understand environmental problems.
3. Understand how structural functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and social constructionism can be used to examine urban life.
4. Understand the social consequences of environmental problems, including air pollution, ozone depletion, global warming, water pollution and scarcity, deforestation, waste disposal and pollution, and non-renewable resources. Also explain why and how these are considered social consequences, and their global impact.
5. Understand the health consequences of environmental problems, including where health is most impacted, and how they are affected.
6. Compare Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft with respect to their views on social relationships and urban life.
7. Explain possible resolutions to social problems related to the environment.
8. Explain the Malthusian perspective with respect to population change, and also understand how this perspective has been critiqued.