A Sociological Implication of Environment in Social Development

Abstract

The environment consists of, at least, three components - the natural, the human-made, and the social. They exist in a mutual causal relationship, and function as a determinant of human life. Thus, the environment should be researched in terms of such a causal mechanism among the components, in relation to human life. The importance of the environment lies in that its crisis is the crisis of human beings. Nevertheless, the natural environment and its problems produced by the human-made physical environment has been emphasized, even with disregard for its impact on or relationship to human life. The social environment and its problems should also be included in the research. Industrialization as a social development is the direct and main cause of the emerging natural and social environmental problem. This means that human beings are the beneficiaries and sacrificers of social development, and that a self-contradiction lies between industrialization and the preservation of the environment. One of the ways to solve the self-contradiction is to change the value of social development from quantitative growth to qualitative environmental amenity. For this, sociology should develop a new set of indicators of social development, measuring the degree of natural and social developmental amenity.