William Freudenburg
William Freudenburg is the Dehlsen Professor of Environment and Society at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on society-environment relationships, particularly on resource-dependent rural communities and on natural hazards and risks. Much of his recent work has focused on “disproportionality”— the tendency for environmental damage to be associated with a surprisingly small fraction of the overall economy. His latest book, with Robert Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai Erikson, is “Catastrophe in the Making” (Island Press, 2009), which analyzes the lessons to be learned from the "un-natural disaster" of Hurricane Katrina.
Freudenburg has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociology of Environment and Technology from the American Sociological Association (ASA), and Best Article awards from the Pacific Sociological Association and three different ASA sections. He won the Award of Merit from the Rural Sociological Society (RSS) Natural Resource Research Group, as well as winning the RSS's inaugural (2006) Award for the Best Article of the previous several years.
Freudenburg is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served as a panelist or member of five different committees of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council. He has also served numerous other scientific advisory committees, including those for the U.S. Departments of Energy and Interior. He was the first American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow to serve in the House of Representatives.
Related Resources from William Freudenburg
Organizing Hazards, Engineering Disasters? Improving the Recognition of Political-Economic Factors in the Creation of Disasters
Social Forces 2008