Korean Envrionmental Sociology: History and Characteristics

This article aims to analyze the history and characteristics of Korean environmental sociology since the 1990s. Korean environmental sociology has been developed since the 1990s when environmental movements and environmental awareness started to proliferate nationwide. The Korean Association for Environmental Sociology which was founded in 2000 has organized theoretical and empirical research and has published Academic Journal ECO since 2001. Seejae Lee summarized that Korean environmental sociology is participation, problem solving, and field research oriented. Sun-Jin Yun analyzed that sustainable development, ecological democracy, oil-spill disaster, nuclear waste dump site, environmental justice, and so on are key issues in Korean environmental Sociology.

Korean environmental sociology has the following theoretical and empirical achievements. Firstly, it introduced ecological paradigm and tackled the limitations of anthropocentric sociology. Secondly, environmental sociologists raised environmental justice and inequality issues and accumulated research of environmental and ecological movements. Thirdly, they tried to develop theory and policies of ecological democracy beyond anthropocentric democracy. Fourthly, they tackled the limitation of nation state and economic growth model and tried to develop alternative state, local community, global governance and development model. Korean environmental sociologists have focused on not only analyzing environmental problems, awareness, movements, and policies status quo but also suggesting new theoretical framework and alternative society model.