How Climate Change Is Taught – Poorly, If at All – in Introduction to Sociology Courses; An Empirical Investigation

In the United States, each year, about 900,000 college students take an Introduction to Sociology course. That is far greater than the number of students who take a college’s Environmental Sociology course. For example, at UC/Santa Cruz over 500 undergraduates take Sociology 1 every year; fewer than 50 take “Society and Nature.”

Introduction to Sociology courses are, then, potentially important sites where Sociologists can teach undergraduates about our understanding of climate change, its causes, its likely societal and ecological impacts, how the public and how political systems have dealt (or have failed to deal) with the threat.

How is climate change actually taught in Intro courses?

I analyze the discussion of “environment” and of “climate change” in the top 10 bestselling textbooks, both the most recent edition of each textbook and, where available, earlier editions of the same textbooks, so that I could answer the question: has the discussion of climate change improved, deepened, changed in any significant way in the past decade?

I find that discussion of the “environment” is always relegated to the back (or close to the back) of the book. It does not get its own chapter but is combined with other topics (most often “population” and “urbanization”). Even then, it gets only a few pages. “Climate change” gets even less coverage, mostly a page or less, sometimes only one paragraph. Climate change is acknowledged to be real and is said to be serious, perhaps catastrophic, but the fact that it is discussed so briefly, and so late in the semester, conveys the opposite message – that it is not all that important. Discussions of all aspects of climate change, causes, impacts and responses, are woefully incomplete.

I conclude that environmental sociologists should campaign to reform how climate change is taught in Intro courses.