Lesson 3

Social inequality results from a society organized by hierarchies of class, race, and
gender that broker access to resources and rights in ways that make their
distribution unequal. It can maninfest in a variety of ways, like income and
wealth inequality, unequal access to education and cultural resources, and
differential treatment by the police and judicial system, among others. Social
inequality goes hand in hand with social stratification. Discrimination at
individual, community, and institutional levels is a major part of the process of
reproducing social inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. For example,
women are systematically paid less than men for doing the same work, and
sociologists have conclusively demonstrated that racism is built into the very
foundation of our society, and is present in all of our social institutions. Social
inequality linked to Economic inequality, usually described on the basis of the
unequal distribution of income or wealth, is a frequently studied type of social
inequality.

Chapter 8

Lesson 1

Ecology and conservation are guided and constrained by the social, cultural, and
political attitudes and agendas of a particular place and time. As conservation is
concerned with the effects of human actions on ecological systems and with
marshaling efforts to reduce those effects, it lies more directly at the crossroads
between science and society than does ecology, although both are ultimately
manifestations of culture and society. Laws, regulations, or cultural prohibitions
are developed by societies to resolve conflicts among values, or at least to
establish which values dominate and will govern individual or collective actions.
Changes in societal and political attitudes can affect how conservation is
implemented and what is conserved. The sociopolitical context of conservation
and ecology is an ever-changing tableau of attitudes, perspectives, interests, laws,
and agendas that is grounded on a changing base of population demographics.