Comments on: Remembrances http://allanschnaiberg.net/2009/08/07/remembrances/ American environmental sociologist Wed, 16 Dec 2009 18:46:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Rohan de Silva http://allanschnaiberg.net/2009/08/07/remembrances/#comment-4 Rohan de Silva Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:52:06 +0000 http://allanschnaiberg.net/?p=51#comment-4 My gratitude for Allan’s wisdom, guidance, kindness, humor, and support cannot be expressed in words. Maybe he never did manage to teach a pig to fly, but what he did teach me, was just as amazing and wonderful. Nae va ta ha mu ve mu, Allan Schnaiberg. My gratitude for Allan’s wisdom, guidance, kindness, humor, and support cannot be expressed in words. Maybe he never did manage to teach a pig to fly, but what he did teach me, was just as amazing and wonderful. Nae va ta ha mu ve mu, Allan Schnaiberg.

]]> By: Ken Gould http://allanschnaiberg.net/2009/08/07/remembrances/#comment-3 Ken Gould Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:47:22 +0000 http://allanschnaiberg.net/?p=51#comment-3 Allan was a brilliant and incisive critical analyst. His contribution to the sociological understanding of the relationship between social systems and ecosystems was groundbreaking, prescient, and enduring. Although he never accepted the designation of “environmental sociologist” he was a founder of the field of environmental sociology, providing it with a deeply rigorous analytical foundation upon which it still rests today. His Treadmill of Production framework for understanding the social causes and consequences of environmental problems formed the first, and still the most comprehensive and influential sociological approach to understanding environmental problems. His 1980 book, The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity remains one of the most important works in the field, and a necessary point of departure for any student of environmental sociology. His intellectual work was motivated by a deep and sincere concern for people’s quality of life. He was convinced that we could do better by each other as a species, and dedicated his intellectual life to identifying how we might do so, and critiquing false promises that he viewed as a distraction from more fruitful paths. Allan was always unafraid to reach unpopular conclusions when solid analyses lead him there, and believed deeply that it was better to do good than to feel good when it came to the pursuit of social change. Allan produced a body of work that was essential to the intellectual development of environmental sociology, and remains central to intellectual debate in the sub-field. Many of his earliest insights have come to be accepted as basic premises of socioenvironmental analysis, although they were far from such when he first theorized them, such as: The degradation of the environment, and the degradation of people are part of the same systemic process, and deeply interrelated. The costs of environmental problems are distributed downward and thus borne disproportionately by the poor and disenfranchised, while the benefits gained in creating those problems are distributed upward, going disproportionately to the powerful and privileged. The causes of environmental problems are deeply structural, complex, and multifaceted, and not readily attributable to single factors such as “overpopulation”, “runaway technology”, or “overconsumption”. A politically activated and mobilized citizenry is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for environmental (and social) improvement. His unique insights into our human relationship with nature continue to be taught to students all over the world, and will no doubt influence the ways in which that relationship is renegotiated in the 21st century. The concern for the real lives of real people that drove Allan’s intellectual work was even more evident in his interactions with his students. Allan was a great and caring mentor. He was, as we say, a real mensch. For graduate students his office was a refugee camp, a sanctuary, a homeless shelter, and a safe harbor in an often-hostile academic sea. Some of my best memories of graduate school are of sitting in Allan’s office, him poised in his recliner amid stacks of academic papers that accumulated like geologic layers, sharing grand analyses and little insights. To his students, Allan was an awesome intellectual, a caring shoulder, a career advisor, and a friend. Allan insisted on dealing with us whole people, warts and all, rather than simply as students there to have knowledge and skills imparted to us. And in that approach, he was truly a rare find. In the nearly two decades since I left Northwestern I have listened in astonishment to my colleagues tales of their distant, unsupportive, and exploitative relationships with their graduate advisors. I always find myself alien to these discussions, as I had quite the opposite experience. Throughout my
 career, when I’ve shared my experience as Allan’s student, colleagues consistently use one word to describe their perception of my 
experience, and that word is “lucky”. I have to admit that it took me some time 
to realize just how lucky I was to have come to work with Allan. 
 Having no basis for comparison, I thought that his intellectual rigor, professional encouragement, humane treatment, and respect were the norm. If only that were the case, how much better would academic life be? Also unlike many of us in the academy, Allan was not driven by a need to reproduce himself in his students. He was a facilitator and supporter of students following their own heads, especially when others proved less willing to work with students whose own intellectual paths diverged from their own. The result is that the great majority of his graduate students over his decades long career as a mentor and teacher did not do work in his sub-field, but took the insights they gained from Allan into a wide range of sub-fields of his students own choosing. That is a clear marker of an all too rare selflessness, and an astoundingly wide-ranging intellect as well. Allan quite frankly set the standard for the role of graduate
 advisor, and if his model can be a source 
of encouragement for others to strive to treat the role as he did, it would certainly contribute to the improvement
 of the academy as a whole. In smoothing an easy transition in our own relationship, from teacher-student to colleagues and collaborators, Allan again exceeded all expectations. Allan was always a generous and reliable collaborator. In 1991 I encouraged him to write and publish a second edition of The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity, as it had unfortunately been out of print for a few years. He expressed little interest in revisiting that solo work. Instead, he offered to write a new book, if I would write it with him. I had just completed my PhD and taken my first academic position, and I think his offer was as much intended to sustain our dialogue long-distance as anything else. That work became Environment and Society: The Enduring Conflict. One of the great joys and rare privileges of my life was Allan’s willingness to sustain a dialogue with me on the environment, politics, life, and the human dilemma for over a quarter of a century, first mostly in his office and restaurants, and then mostly by email and phone. It is strange to grapple with the sociological issues that I do without that dialogue. Allan truly enjoyed the “life of the mind”, and took great pleasure in the play of ideas. In intellectual agreement and opposition, he was a terrific partner. He took the issues his work addressed seriously, and could be effectively combative in debate. But he also knew not to take himself, or others, too seriously. He had a deep appreciation of irony, and paradox, the stuff of which real life is constructed. While many experience paradox as cognitive dissonance, Allan saw a good paradox as a marker for the place to drill down. The truth may lie deep in the nexus of the paradox, and if not, it was at least worth a good ponder, and a source of ironic humor. Allan’s love of words and ideas was by no means limited to the academic realm. Allan was a great storyteller and lover of jokes. Good jokes, bad jokes, Yiddish jokes, off-color and inappropriate jokes. No doubt many of us have rolled our eyes at one of Allan’s puns. His sense of humor carried him through many a difficult moment, and carried me as well. When I saw one email marking his passing with the subject line “A Huge Loss to Environmental Sociology”, I could hear his voice remarking in a typically self-deprecating manner “I would have preferred to have been a Great loss rather than a Huge loss, but I did enjoy my food”. When others characterized his intellectual work as Marxist, he always refuted that label saying, with a Cheshire grin, “If I’m a Marxist it’s more Groucho than Karl”. And in all honesty, there were times in professional situations when he would launch into his jokes that I would think to myself, “can you go for Harpo not Groucho right now?” but he insisted on having his fun. Like the year he bought Adam Weinberg, himself and me Marx Brothers ties to wear to our ASA presentation. An inside joke in public. And then there is LUNCH! Anyone who ever had the pleasure of having lunch with Allan can appreciate that in addition to being a world-class eater, he was a world-class locator of gastronomic hidden urban treasures. He was a talented finder of high quality low-end eateries, with a specialization in Asian cuisines. Between the two of us, the word “lunch” came to stand for joie d’ vivre, a raison d’etre, a reliable path to quality of life. Grad school for me will always be associated with 3 hour lunches at the Pine Yard Chinese restaurant in Evanston, discussing social theory and dumplings. Our best times together were spent over lunch. I remember vividly Adam Weinberg, Allan and I sketching out the outline for our book, Local Environmental Struggles, on a paper placemat at a Chinese restaurant during an ASA meeting, and Allan having the ASA business center make photocopies so we could each have one to work from. Then later trying to read the chapter titles through photocopied hoisin sauce. One of our oddest and last lunches was when I was flying back from a research trip to New Orleans through O’Hare, Airport. I had told Allan I would have a brief layover between flights, so he meets me at the airport so we can visit for an hour, and he brings pastrami sandwiches. There we were sitting in the middle of bustling O’Hare chatting away and dropping pastrami down the fronts of our shirts. You couldn’t ask for a better friend than that, or a better lunch partner. As a person, Allan was also easily hurt, and often disappointed, qualities born in part from early deprivations, both emotional and material, and his experience of anti-Semitism in Quebec, and later elsewhere. As all comedians do, he covered his hurt with his humor when he could. Although he often told me “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”, they sometimes ground him down, and lunch was not always sufficient comfort. Despite, or maybe because of his own struggles, he was inclined to come to the rescue of others in their struggles. In my own bad moments, he routinely offered support of every kind. I deeply miss Allan’s great and open heart. In the end, the world is a much better place for having had Allan in it, and the field of environmental sociology is unimaginable without his contributions to its development. He rests in peace. Ken Gould Brooklyn, NY July 27, 2009 Allan was a brilliant and incisive critical analyst. His contribution to the sociological understanding of the relationship between social systems and ecosystems was groundbreaking, prescient, and enduring. Although he never accepted the designation of “environmental sociologist” he was a founder of the field of environmental sociology, providing it with a deeply rigorous analytical foundation upon which it still rests today. His Treadmill of Production framework for understanding the social causes and consequences of environmental problems formed the first, and still the most comprehensive and influential sociological approach to understanding environmental problems. His 1980 book, The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity remains one of the most important works in the field, and a necessary point of departure for any student of environmental sociology. His intellectual work was motivated by a deep and sincere concern for people’s quality of life. He was convinced that we could do better by each other as a species, and dedicated his intellectual life to identifying how we might do so, and critiquing false promises that he viewed as a distraction from more fruitful paths. Allan was always unafraid to reach unpopular conclusions when solid analyses lead him there, and believed deeply that it was better to do good than to feel good when it came to the pursuit of social change. Allan produced a body of work that was essential to the intellectual development of environmental sociology, and remains central to intellectual debate in the sub-field. Many of his earliest insights have come to be accepted as basic premises of socioenvironmental analysis, although they were far from such when he first theorized them, such as:

The degradation of the environment, and the degradation of people are part of the same systemic process, and deeply interrelated.

The costs of environmental problems are distributed downward and thus borne disproportionately by the poor and disenfranchised, while the benefits gained in creating those problems are distributed upward, going disproportionately to the powerful and privileged.

The causes of environmental problems are deeply structural, complex, and multifaceted, and not readily attributable to single factors such as “overpopulation”, “runaway technology”, or “overconsumption”.

A politically activated and mobilized citizenry is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for environmental (and social) improvement.

His unique insights into our human relationship with nature continue to be taught to students all over the world, and will no doubt influence the ways in which that relationship is renegotiated in the 21st century.

The concern for the real lives of real people that drove Allan’s intellectual work was even more evident in his interactions with his students. Allan was a great and caring mentor. He was, as we say, a real mensch. For graduate students his office was a refugee camp, a sanctuary, a homeless shelter, and a safe harbor in an often-hostile academic sea. Some of my best memories of graduate school are of sitting in Allan’s office, him poised in his recliner amid stacks of academic papers that accumulated like geologic layers, sharing grand analyses and little insights. To his students, Allan was an awesome intellectual, a caring shoulder, a career advisor, and a friend. Allan insisted on dealing with us whole people, warts and all, rather than simply as students there to have knowledge and skills imparted to us. And in that approach, he was truly a rare find. In the nearly two decades since I left Northwestern I have listened in astonishment to my colleagues tales of their distant, unsupportive, and exploitative relationships with their graduate advisors. I always find myself alien to these discussions, as I had quite the opposite experience. Throughout my
 career, when I’ve shared my experience as Allan’s student, colleagues consistently use one word to describe their perception of my 
experience, and that word is “lucky”. I have to admit that it took me some time 
to realize just how lucky I was to have come to work with Allan. 
 Having no basis for comparison, I thought that his intellectual rigor, professional encouragement, humane treatment, and respect were the norm. If only that were the case, how much better would academic life be?

Also unlike many of us in the academy, Allan was not driven by a need to reproduce himself in his students. He was a facilitator and supporter of students following their own heads, especially when others proved less willing to work with students whose own intellectual paths diverged from their own. The result is that the great majority of his graduate students over his decades long career as a mentor and teacher did not do work in his sub-field, but took the insights they gained from Allan into a wide range of sub-fields of his students own choosing. That is a clear marker of an all too rare selflessness, and an astoundingly wide-ranging intellect as well. Allan quite frankly set the standard for the role of graduate
 advisor, and if his model can be a source 
of encouragement for others to strive to treat the role as he did, it would certainly contribute to the improvement
 of the academy as a whole.

In smoothing an easy transition in our own relationship, from teacher-student to colleagues and collaborators, Allan again exceeded all expectations. Allan was always a generous and reliable collaborator. In 1991 I encouraged him to write and publish a second edition of The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity, as it had unfortunately been out of print for a few years. He expressed little interest in revisiting that solo work. Instead, he offered to write a new book, if I would write it with him. I had just completed my PhD and taken my first academic position, and I think his offer was as much intended to sustain our dialogue long-distance as anything else. That work became Environment and Society: The Enduring Conflict. One of the great joys and rare privileges of my life was Allan’s willingness to sustain a dialogue with me on the environment, politics, life, and the human dilemma for over a quarter of a century, first mostly in his office and restaurants, and then mostly by email and phone. It is strange to grapple with the sociological issues that I do without that dialogue.

Allan truly enjoyed the “life of the mind”, and took great pleasure in the play of ideas. In intellectual agreement and opposition, he was a terrific partner. He took the issues his work addressed seriously, and could be effectively combative in debate. But he also knew not to take himself, or others, too seriously. He had a deep appreciation of irony, and paradox, the stuff of which real life is constructed. While many experience paradox as cognitive dissonance, Allan saw a good paradox as a marker for the place to drill down. The truth may lie deep in the nexus of the paradox, and if not, it was at least worth a good ponder, and a source of ironic humor.

Allan’s love of words and ideas was by no means limited to the academic realm. Allan was a great storyteller and lover of jokes. Good jokes, bad jokes, Yiddish jokes, off-color and inappropriate jokes. No doubt many of us have rolled our eyes at one of Allan’s puns. His sense of humor carried him through many a difficult moment, and carried me as well. When I saw one email marking his passing with the subject line “A Huge Loss to Environmental Sociology”, I could hear his voice remarking in a typically self-deprecating manner “I would have preferred to have been a Great loss rather than a Huge loss, but I did enjoy my food”. When others characterized his intellectual work as Marxist, he always refuted that label saying, with a Cheshire grin, “If I’m a Marxist it’s more Groucho than Karl”. And in all honesty, there were times in professional situations when he would launch into his jokes that I would think to myself, “can you go for Harpo not Groucho right now?” but he insisted on having his fun. Like the year he bought Adam Weinberg, himself and me Marx Brothers ties to wear to our ASA presentation. An inside joke in public.

And then there is LUNCH! Anyone who ever had the pleasure of having lunch with Allan can appreciate that in addition to being a world-class eater, he was a world-class locator of gastronomic hidden urban treasures. He was a talented finder of high quality low-end eateries, with a specialization in Asian cuisines. Between the two of us, the word “lunch” came to stand for joie d’ vivre, a raison d’etre, a reliable path to quality of life. Grad school for me will always be associated with 3 hour lunches at the Pine Yard Chinese restaurant in Evanston, discussing social theory and dumplings. Our best times together were spent over lunch. I remember vividly Adam Weinberg, Allan and I sketching out the outline for our book, Local Environmental Struggles, on a paper placemat at a Chinese restaurant during an ASA meeting, and Allan having the ASA business center make photocopies so we could each have one to work from. Then later trying to read the chapter titles through photocopied hoisin sauce. One of our oddest and last lunches was when I was flying back from a research trip to New Orleans through O’Hare, Airport. I had told Allan I would have a brief layover between flights, so he meets me at the airport so we can visit for an hour, and he brings pastrami sandwiches. There we were sitting in the middle of bustling O’Hare chatting away and dropping pastrami down the fronts of our shirts. You couldn’t ask for a better friend than that, or a better lunch partner.

As a person, Allan was also easily hurt, and often disappointed, qualities born in part from early deprivations, both emotional and material, and his experience of anti-Semitism in Quebec, and later elsewhere. As all comedians do, he covered his hurt with his humor when he could. Although he often told me “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”, they sometimes ground him down, and lunch was not always sufficient comfort. Despite, or maybe because of his own struggles, he was inclined to come to the rescue of others in their struggles. In my own bad moments, he routinely offered support of every kind. I deeply miss Allan’s great and open heart.

In the end, the world is a much better place for having had Allan in it, and the field of environmental sociology is unimaginable without his contributions to its development.

He rests in peace.

Ken Gould
Brooklyn, NY
July 27, 2009

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