Navel Warfare? The Best of Minds, the Worst of Minds, and the Dangers of Misplaced Concreteness
2002
Freudenburg, William R.
Academic debates can be entertaining and even useful, but they can also have drawbacks. The present debate has at least three of them. First, despite our ability to discern differing central tendencies between ''environmental'' and ''resource'' sociology, the excitement of a debate can cause such modest differences to be exaggerated, potentially being reified into a ''divide.'' Second, only a limited number of social scientists are studying resource/environmental issues, even today, so any researcher attention that is focused on navel gazing or worse, navel warfare is being diverted away from the research topics themselves. Third and most disturbingly, as human impacts on the environment grow more pervasive, we are likely to see an increasing number of cases where problems involve both ''resource'' and ''environmental'' issues, simultaneously. The true need is thus not to argue about differences or to create them but instead to develop synergies across differing points of view.
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