More About Professor Freudenburg
William R. Freudenburg is the Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies at UCSB. Although he stresses that he is not opposed to “traditional” forms of environmentalism, which emphasize recycling and reducing one’s impact on the environment, Freudenburg's work has a different emphasis. He focuses not so much on the role of individual consumers as those of organized producers, emphasizing the socially structured sources of environmental impacts. He has devoted most of his career to the study of environment-society relationships. He is particularly well-known both for his work on coupled environment-society systems in general and for his work on more specific topics, including resource-dependent communities, the social impacts of environmental and technological change, and risk analysis.
Over the past several decades he has worked in the areas of risk, disaster, and natural resource development, and most critically the political forces that define such events, has offered multiple seeds that warrant further development by others in the sociology and environmental discipline.
Dr. Freudenburg has held official positions with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Sociological Association, and the National Academy of Sciences, among others. He is the winner of Awards from the American Sociological Association, Rural Sociological Society, Pacific Sociological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as being listed in numerous reference works, including Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in America, and Who's Who in the World. He is the President-Elect of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS).
Some of his latest book publications include:
- Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America by William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling
- Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow by William R. Freudenburg, Robert B. Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai Erikson
- Oil in Troubled Waters: Perceptions, Politics, and the Battle over Offshore Drilling (Suny Series in Environmental Public Policy) by William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling