Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environments. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and defined as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
Environmental sociology emerged as a subfield of sociology in the late 1970s in response to the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s.
Definition
Environmental sociology is typically defined as the sociological
study of societal-environmental interactions, although this definition
immediately presents the problem of integrating human cultures with the
rest of the environment. Although the focus of the field is the relationship between society and environment in general, environmental sociologists
typically place special emphasis on studying the social factors that
cause environmental problems, the societal impacts of those problems,
and efforts to solve the problems. In addition, considerable attention
is paid to the social processes by which certain environmental
conditions become socially defined as problems. Most research in
environmental sociology examines contemporary societies.
History
Ancient Greeks idealized life in nature using the idea of the pastoral. Much later, Romantic writers such as Wordsworth took their inspiration from nature.
Modern thought surrounding human-environment relations can be traced back to Charles Darwin. Darwin’s concept of natural selection
suggested that certain social characteristics played a key role in the
survivability of groups in the natural environment. Although typically
taken at the micro-level, evolutionary principles, particularly
adaptability, serve as a microcosm of human ecology. Work by Craig Humphrey and Frederick Buttel (2002) traces the linkages between Darwin's work on natural selection, human ecological sociology, and environmental sociology.
Sociology developed as a scholarly discipline in the mid- and late-19th and early 20th centuries, in a context where biological determinism
had failed to fully explain key features of social change, including
the evolving relationship between humans and their natural environments.
In its foundational years, classical sociology thus saw social and
cultural factors as the dominant, if not exclusive, cause of social and
cultural conditions. This lens down-played interactive factors in the
relationship between humans and their biophysical environments.
Environmental sociology emerged as a coherent subfield of inquiry after the environmental movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. The works of William R. Catton, Jr. and Riley Dunlap, among others, challenged the constricted anthropocentrism
of classical sociology. In the late 1970s, they called for a new
holistic, or systems perspective. Since the 1970s, general sociology has
noticeably transformed to include environmental forces in social
explanations. Environmental sociology has now solidified as a respected,
interdisciplinary field of study in academia.
Concepts
Existential dualism
The
duality of the human condition rests with cultural uniqueness and
evolutionary traits. From one perspective, humans are embedded in the ecosphere
and co-evolved alongside other species. Humans share the same basic
ecological dependencies as other inhabitants of nature. From the other perspectives,
humans are distinguished from other species because of their innovative
capacities, distinct cultures and varied institutions. Human creations
have the power to independently manipulate, destroy, and transcend the
limits of the natural environment (Buttel and Humphrey, 2002: p. ,47).
According to Buttel (2005), there are five basic epistemologies in environmental sociology (kindly mention them). In practice, this means five different theories of what to blame for environmental degradation,
i.e., what to research or consider as important. In order of their
invention, these ideas of what to blame build on each other and thus
contradict each other.
Neo-Malthusianism
Works such as Hardin's the tragedy of the commons (1968) reformulated Malthusian
thought about abstract population increases causing famines into a
model of individual selfishness at larger scales causing degradation of common pool resources
such as the air, water, the oceans, or general environmental
conditions. Hardin offered privatization of resources or government
regulation as solutions to environmental degradation caused by tragedy
of the commons conditions. Many other sociologists shared this view of
solutions well into the 1970s (see Ophuls). There have been many
critiques of this view particularly political scientist Elinor Ostrom, or economists Amartya Sen and Ester Boserup.
Even though much of mainstream journalism considers Malthusianism
the only view of environmentalism, most sociologists would disagree
with Malthusianism since social organizational issues of environmental
degradation are more demonstrated to cause environmental problems than
abstract population or selfishness per se. For examples of this
critique, Ostrom in her book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
(1990) argues that instead of self-interest always causing degradation,
it can sometimes motivate people to take care of their common property
resources. To do this they must change the basic organizational rules of
resource use. Her research provides evidence for sustainable resource
management systems, around common pool resources that have lasted for
centuries in some areas of the world.
Amartya Sen argues in his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
(1980) that population expansion fails to cause famines or degradation
as Malthusians or Neo-Malthusians argue. Instead, in documented cases a
lack of political entitlement to resources that exist in abundance,
causes famines in some populations. He documents how famines can occur
even in the midst of plenty or in the context of low populations. He
argues that famines (and environmental degradation) would only occur in
non-functioning democracies or unrepresentative states.
Ester Boserup argues in her book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure
(1965) from inductive, empirical case analysis that Malthus's more
deductive conception of a presumed one-to-one relationship with
agricultural scale and population is actually reversed. Instead of
agricultural technology and scale determining and limiting population as
Malthus attempted to argue, Boserup argued the world is full of cases
of the direct opposite: that population changes and expands agricultural
methods.
Eco-Marxist scholar Allan Schnaiberg
(below) argues against Malthusianism with the rationale that under
larger capitalist economies, human degradation moved from localized,
population-based degradation to organizationally caused degradation of
capitalist political economies to blame. He gives the example of the
organized degradation of rainforest areas which states and capitalists
push people off the land before it is degraded by organizational means.
Thus, many authors are critical of Malthusianism, from sociologists
(Schnaiberg)to economists (Sen and Boserup), to political scientists
(Ostrom), and all focus on how a country's social organization of its
extraction can degrade the environment independent of abstract
population.
New Ecological Paradigm
In
the 1970s, The New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) conception critiqued the
claimed lack of human-environmental focus in the classical sociologists
and the Sociological priorities their followers created. This was
critiqued as the Human Exceptionalism Paradigm (HEP). The HEP viewpoint
claims that human-environmental relationships were unimportant
sociologically because humans are 'exempt' from environmental forces via
cultural change. This view was shaped by the leading Western worldview
of the time and the desire for Sociology to establish itself as an
independent discipline against the then popular racist-biological environmental determinism
where environment was all. In this HEP view, human dominance was felt
to be justified by the uniqueness of culture, argued to be more
adaptable than biological traits. Furthermore, culture also has the
capacity to accumulate and innovate, making it capable of solving all
natural problems. Therefore, as humans were not conceived of as governed
by natural conditions, they were felt to have complete control of their
own destiny. Any potential limitation posed by the natural world was
felt to be surpassed using human ingenuity. Research proceeded
accordingly without environmental analysis.
In the 1970s, sociological scholars Riley Dunlap and William R. Catton, Jr.
began recognizing the limits of what would be termed the Human
Exemptionalism Paradigm. Catton and Dunlap (1978) suggested a new
perspective that took environmental variables into full account. They
coined a new theoretical outlook for Sociology, the New Ecological
Paradigm, with assumptions contrary to HEP.
The NEP recognizes the innovative capacity of humans, but says
that humans are still ecologically interdependent as with other species.
The NEP notes the power of social and cultural forces but does not
profess social determinism.
Instead, humans are impacted by the cause, effect, and feedback loops
of ecosystems. The Earth has a finite level of natural resources and
waste repositories. Thus, the biophysical environment can impose
constraints on human activity. They discussed a few harbingers of this
NEP in 'hybridized' theorizing about topics that were neither
exclusively social nor environmental explanations of environmental
conditions. It was additionally a critique of Malthusian views of the
1960s and 1970s.
Dunlap and Catton's work immediately received a critique from
Buttel who argued to the contrary that classical sociological
foundations could be found for environmental sociology, particularly in
Weber's work on ancient "agrarian civilizations" and Durkheim's view of
the division of labor
as built on a material premise of specialization/specialization in
response to material scarcity. This environmental aspect of Durkheim has
been discussed by Schnaiberg (1971) as well.
Eco-Marxism
In the middle of the HEP/NEP debate, the general trend of Neo-Marxism
was occurring. There was cross pollination. Neo-Marxism was based on
the collapse of the widespread believability of the Marxist social
movement in the failed revolts of the 1960s and the rise of many New Social Movements
that failed to fit in many Marxist analytic frameworks of conflict
sociology. Sociologists entered the fray with empirical research on
these novel social conflicts. Neo-Marxism's stress on the relative autonomy of the state from capital control instead of it being only a reflection of economic determinism
of class conflict yielded this novel theoretical viewpoint in the
1970s. Neo-Marxist ideas of conflict sociology were applied to
capital/state/labor/environmental conflicts instead of only labor/capital/state conflicts over production.
Therefore, some sociologists wanted to stretch Marxist ideas of
social conflict to analyze environmental social movements from this
materialist framework instead of interpreting environmental movements as
a more cultural "New Social Movement" separate than material concerns.
So "Eco-Marxism" was based on using Neo-Marxist conflict sociology concepts of the relative autonomy of the state applied to environmental conflict.
Two people following this school were James O'Connor (The Fiscal Crisis of the State, 1971) and later Allan Schnaiberg.
Later, a different trend developed in eco-Marxism via the
attention brought to the importance of metabolic analysis in Marx’s
thought by John Bellamy Foster.
Contrary to previous assumptions that classical theorists in sociology
all had fallen within a Human Exemptionalist Paradigm, Foster argued
that Marx’s materialism lead him to theorize labor as the metabolic
process between humanity and the rest of nature.
In Promethean interpretations of Marx that Foster critiques, there was
an assumption his analysis was very similar to the anthropocentric views
critiqued by early environmental sociologists. Instead, Foster argued
Marx himself was concerned about the Metabolic Rift generated by capitalist society’s social metabolism,
particularly in industrial agriculture— Marx had identified an
"irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,"
created by capitalist agriculture that was destroying the productivity
of the land and creating wastes in urban sites that failed to be
reintegrated into the land and thus lead toward destruction of urban
workers health simultaneously.
Reviewing the contribution of this thread of eco-marxism to current
environmental sociology, Pellow and Brehm conclude "The metabolic rift
is a productive development in the field because it connects current
research to classical theory and links sociology with an
interdisciplinary array of scientific literatures focused on ecosystem
dynamics."
Foster emphasized that his argument presupposed the "magisterial
work" of Paul Burkett, who had developed a closely related "red-green"
perspective rooted in a direct examination of Marx's value theory.
Burkett and Foster proceeded to write a number of articles together on
Marx's ecological conceptions, reflecting their shared perspective.
More recently, Jason W. Moore
inspired by Burkett's value-analytical approach to Marx's ecology and
arguing that Foster's work did not in itself go far enough, has sought
to integrate the notion of metabolic rift with world systems theory,
incorporating Marxian value-related conceptions. For Moore, the modern
world-system is a capitalist world-ecology, joining the accumulation of
capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature in
dialectical unity. Central to Moore's perspective is a philosophical
re-reading of Marx's value theory, through which abstract social labor
and abstract social nature are dialectically bound. Moore argues that
the emergent law of value, from the sixteenth century, was evident in
the extraordinary shift in the scale, scope, and speed of environmental
change. What took premodern civilizations centuries to achieve—such as
the deforestation of Europe in the medieval era—capitalism realized in
mere decades. This world-historical rupture, argues Moore, can be
explained through a law of value that regards labor productivity as the
decisive metric of wealth and power in the modern world. From this
standpoint, the genius of capitalist development has been to appropriate
uncommodified natures—including uncommodified human natures—as a means
of advancing labor productivity in the commodity system.
Societal-environmental dialectic
In
1975, the highly influential work of Allan Schnaiberg transfigured
environmental sociology, proposing a societal-environmental dialectic,
though within the 'neo-Marxist' framework of the relative autonomy of
the state as well. This conflictual concept has overwhelming political
salience. First, the economic synthesis states that the desire for
economic expansion will prevail over ecological concerns. Policy will
decide to maximize immediate economic growth at the expense of
environmental disruption. Secondly, the managed scarcity synthesis
concludes that governments will attempt to control only the most dire of
environmental problems to prevent health and economic disasters. This
will give the appearance that governments act more environmentally
consciously than they really do. Third, the ecological synthesis
generates a hypothetical case where environmental degradation is so
severe that political forces would respond with sustainable policies.
The driving factor would be economic damage caused by environmental
degradation. The economic engine would be based on renewable resources
at this point. Production and consumption methods would adhere to
sustainability regulations.
These conflict-based syntheses have several potential outcomes.
One is that the most powerful economic and political forces will
preserve the status quo and bolster their dominance. Historically, this
is the most common occurrence. Another potential outcome is for
contending powerful parties to fall into a stalemate. Lastly, tumultuous
social events may result that redistribute economic and political
resources.
Treadmill of production
In 1980, the highly influential work of Allan Schnaiberg entitled The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity
(1980) was a large contribution to this theme of a
societal-environmental dialectic. Moving away from economic reductionism
like other neo-Marxists, Schnaiberg called for an analysis of how
certain projects of "political capitalism" encouraged environmental
degradation instead of all capitalism per se. This ongoing trend in
Marxism of 'neo-Marxist' analysis (meaning, including the relative
autonomy of the state) here added the environmental conditions of
abstract additions and withdrawals from the environment as social
policies instead of naturalized contexts.
Schnaiberg's political capitalism, otherwise known as the
'Treadmill of production,' is a model of conflict as well as cooperation
between three abstracted groups: the state, capital (exclusively
monopoly capital with its larger fixed costs and thus larger pressures
for ongoing expansion of profits to justify more fixed costs), and
(organized) labor. He analyzes only the United States at length, though
sees such a treadmill of production and of environmental degradation in
operation in the Soviet Union or socialist countries as well. The desire
for economic expansion was found to be a common political ground for
all three contentious groups—in capital, labor, and the state—to
surmount their separate interests and postpone conflict by all agreeing
on economic growth. Therefore, grounds for a political alliance emerge
among these conflictual actors when monopoly capitalism can convince
both of the other nodes to support its politicized consolidation. This
can appeal to the other nodes since it additionally provides expanding
state legitimacy and its own funding while providing (at least at the
time) secure worker employment in larger industries with their desired
stable or growing consumption. This political capitalism works against
smaller scale capitalism or other uses of the state or against other
alliances of labor. Schnaiberg called the 'acceleration' of the
treadmill this degradative political support for monopoly capitalism's
expansion. This acceleration he felt was at root merely an informal
alliance—based solely on the propaganda from monopoly capital and the
state that worker consumption can only be achieved through further
capitalist consolidation.
However, Schnaiberg felt that environmental damage caused by
state-political and labor-supported capitalist expansion may cause a
decline both in the state's funding as well as worker livelihood. This
provides grounds for both to reject their treadmill alliance with
monopoly capital. This would mean severing organized labor support and
state policy support of monopoly capital's desires of consolidation.
Schnaiberg is motivated to optimism by this potential if states and
labor movements can be educated to the environmental and livelihood
dangers in the long run of any support of monopoly capital. This
potentially means these two groups moving away from subsidizing and
supporting the degradation of the environment. Schnaiberg pins his hopes
for environmental improvement on 'deceleration' of the treadmill—how
mounting environmental degradation might yield a breakdown in the
acceleration-based treadmill alliance. This deceleration was defined as
state and working labor movements designing policies to shrink the scale
of the economy as a solution to environmental degradation and their own
consumptive requirements. Meanwhile, in the interim, he argued a common
alliance between the three is responsible for why they prefer to
support common economic growth as a common way to avoid their open
conflicts despite mounting environmental costs for the state as well as
for laborers due to environmental disruption.
Ecological modernization and reflexive modernization
By the 1980s, a critique of eco-Marxism was in the offing, given
empirical data from countries (mostly in Western Europe like the
Netherlands, Western Germany and somewhat the United Kingdom) that were
attempting to wed environmental protection with economic growth instead
of seeing them as separate. This was done through both state and capital
restructuring. Major proponents of this school of research are Arthur P.J. Mol and Gert Spaargaren. Popular examples of ecological modernization would be "cradle to cradle" production cycles, industrial ecology, large-scale organic agriculture, biomimicry, permaculture, agroecology and certain strands of sustainable development—all implying that economic growth is possible if that growth is well organized with the environment in mind.
Reflexive modernization
The many volumes of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck first argued from the late 1980s that our risk society
is potentially being transformed by the environmental social movements
of the world into structural change without rejecting the benefits of
modernization and industrialization. This is leading to a form of
'reflexive modernization' with a world of reduced risk
and better modernization process in economics, politics, and scientific
practices as they are made less beholden to a cycle of protecting risk
from correction (which he calls our state's organized irresponsibility)—politics
creates ecodisasters, then claims responsibility in an accident, yet
nothing remains corrected because it challenges the very structure of
the operation of the economy and the private dominance of development,
for example. Beck's idea of a reflexive modernization
looks forward to how our ecological and social crises in the late 20th
century are leading toward transformations of the whole political and
economic system's institutions, making them more "rational" with ecology
in mind.
Social construction of the environment
Additionally
in the 1980s, with the rise of postmodernism in the western academy and
the appreciation of discourse as a form of power, some sociologists
turned to analyzing environmental claims as a form of social
construction more than a 'material' requirement. Proponents of this
school include John A. Hannigan, particularly in Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective
(1995). Hannigan argues for a 'soft constructionism' (environmental
problems are materially real though they require social construction to
be noticed) over a 'hard constructionism' (the claim that environmental
problems are entirely social constructs).
Although there was sometimes acrimonious debate between the constructivist and realist
"camps" within environmental sociology in the 1990s, the two sides have
found considerable common ground as both increasingly accept that while
most environmental problems have a material reality they nonetheless
become known only via human processes such as scientific knowledge, activists' efforts, and media attention. In other words, most environmental problems have a real ontological
status despite our knowledge/awareness of them stemming from social
processes, processes by which various conditions are constructed as
problems by scientists, activists, media and other social actors.
Correspondingly, environmental problems must all be understood via
social processes, despite any material basis they may have external to
humans. This interactiveness is now broadly accepted, but many aspects
of the debate continue in contemporary research in the field.
Events
Modern environmentalism
United States
The 1960s built strong cultural momentum for environmental
causes, giving birth to the modern environmental movement and large
questioning in sociologists interested in analyzing the movement.
Widespread green consciousness moved vertically within society,
resulting in a series of policy changes across many states in the U.S.
and Europe in the 1970s. In the United States, this period was known as
the “Environmental Decade” with the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and passing of the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and amendments to the Clean Air Act. Earth Day
of 1970, celebrated by millions of participants, represented the modern
age of environmental thought. The environmental movement continued with
incidences such as Love Canal.
Historical studies
While
the current mode of thought expressed in environmental sociology was
not prevalent until the 1970s, its application is now used in analysis
of ancient peoples. Societies including Easter Island, the Anaszi, and the Mayans
were argued to have ended abruptly, largely due to poor environmental
management. This has been challenged in later work however as the
exclusive cause (biologically trained Jared Diamond's Collapse
(2005); or more modern work on Easter Island). The collapse of the
Mayans sent a historic message that even advanced cultures are
vulnerable to ecological suicide—though Diamond argues now it was less
of a suicide than an environmental climate change that led to a lack of
an ability to adapt—and a lack of elite willingness to adapt even when
faced with the signs much earlier of nearing ecological problems. At the
same time, societal successes for Diamond included New Guinea and Tikopia island whose inhabitants have lived sustainably for 46,000 years.
John Dryzek et al. argue in Green States and Social Movements: Environmentalism in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway (2003)
that there may be a common global green environmental social movement,
though its specific outcomes are nationalist, falling into four 'ideal
types' of interaction between environmental movements and state power.
They use as their case studies environmental social movements and state
interaction from Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States, and
Germany. They analyze the past 30 years of environmentalism and the
different outcomes that the green movement has taken in different state
contexts and cultures.
Recently and roughly in temporal order below, much longer-term
comparative historical studies of environmental degradation are found by
sociologists. There are two general trends: many employ world systems
theory—analyzing environmental issues over long periods of time and
space; and others employ comparative historical methods. Some utilize
both methods simultaneously, sometimes without reference to world
systems theory (like Whitaker, see below).
Stephen G. Bunker (d. 2005) and Paul S. Ciccantell collaborated on two books from a world-systems theory
view, following commodity chains through history of the modern world
system, charting the changing importance of space, time, and scale of
extraction and how these variables influenced the shape and location of
the main nodes of the world economy over the past 500 years.
Their view of the world was grounded in extraction economies and the
politics of different states that seek to dominate the world's resources
and each other through gaining hegemonic control of major resources or
restructuring global flows in them to benefit their locations.
The three volume work of environmental world-systems theory by
Sing C. Chew analyzed how "Nature and Culture" interact over long
periods of time, starting with World Ecological Degradation (2001) In later books, Chew argued that there were three "Dark Ages"
in world environmental history characterized by periods of state
collapse and reorientation in the world economy associated with more
localist frameworks of community, economy, and identity coming to
dominate the nature/culture relationships after state-facilitated
environmental destruction delegitimized other forms. Thus recreated
communities were founded in these so-called 'Dark Ages,' novel religions
were popularized, and perhaps most importantly to him the environment
had several centuries to recover from previous destruction. Chew argues
that modern green politics and bioregionalism
is the start of a similar movement of the present day potentially
leading to wholesale system transformation. Therefore, we may be on the
edge of yet another global "dark age" which is bright instead of dark on
many levels since he argues for human community returning with
environmental healing as empires collapse.
More case oriented studies were conducted by historical
environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker analyzing China, Japan, and
Europe over 2,500 years in his book Ecological Revolution (2009).
He argued that instead of environmental movements being "New Social
Movements" peculiar to current societies, environmental movements are
very old—being expressed via religious movements in the past (or in the
present like in ecotheology)
that begin to focus on material concerns of health, local ecology, and
economic protest against state policy and its extractions. He argues
past or present is very similar: that we have participated with a tragic
common civilizational process of environmental degradation, economic
consolidation, and lack of political representation for many millennia
which has predictable outcomes. He argues that a form of bioregionalism,
the bioregional state, is required to deal with political corruption in present or in past societies connected to environmental degradation.
After looking at the world history of environmental degradation
from very different methods, both sociologists Sing Chew and Mark D.
Whitaker came to similar conclusions and are proponents of (different
forms of) bioregionalism.
