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Approximately 12,000 years ago, people began to domesticate grain in what we now call the Middle East. This involved a process that slowly spread around the world over the next 6,000 to 7,000 years. In 1984, 8 percent of U.S. households had a computer, but that number was above 70 percent in 2008. How do these two things relate to social change?

A government continues to privatize once-public environmental resources, such as forests. This government does so to grow its revenue stream while the private companies who gain ownership of the forest continue deforestation at exponentially higher levels, permanently eliminating most of the country’s trees, all in the name of greater profit margins. What is this an example of?

From a Marxist perspective, one might see minor forms of corporate social responsibility as

Randall Collins argues that the true function of schools is that they

Earth First describes itself as a global organization, but its website contains links to local chapters in Montreal, the Netherlands, and Humboldt and Santa Cruz, California. What does this suggest about the organization?

Garrett Hardin believes that “a ‘just’ sharing of the world’s wealth among all the inhabitants, without coercive control of individual reproduction, would result in a continual, exponential growth of the human population” and much more suffering. This means Hardin is a

Two part question: Why do new things make us sad? What is the term for always adding new items to our lives?

The Environmental Defense Fund hires scientists, economists, and lawyers to lobby the government and to educate the public about the environmental consequences of modern life. They claim to have had a part in passing important elements of the Clean Air Act, California’s emissions rules, and a treaty to phase out CFCs. With what era of the environmental movement is this sort of organization most commonly associated?

According to Georg Simmel, city dwellers relate to one another

According to Randall Collins, our educational system is much like a “tribal initiation rite,” a “secret society,” or a “closed occupational caste.” For Collins, it is not a rational system that produces more efficient production but a mechanism for