Why add more Climate Change content to your Social Problems course?
From its beginnings in the 19th Century, Sociology has been centrally concerned with what we might describe as a diagnosis of the problems of modernity.
Today, climate change is increasingly recognized as the most dire of such problems. As one popular Social Problems textbook puts it, rising concentrations of CO2 have “pushed the planet to a dangerous point where the future of our species is threatened.” (Macionis, Social Problems, 2015:477) Students now in college will live the rest of their lives in the shadow of this profound threat to global human society.
Given the seriousness of the threat, climate change should have priority, should be assigned a prominent location, covered early and in depth, in any course that surveys contemporary Social Problems. But, instead, judging from a content analysis of recent Social Problems textbooks, climate change is covered, typically, only very briefly, and late in the semester.
This website has all the resources one would need if one wanted to add a significant, week-long segment on climate change to one’s Social Problems course.