The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (14 page)

Among those probleÂmatiques we find, in particular, the search for certain know-

ledge and truth, the building of a viable and good political order, the issue of the continuity of the acting person, and ways of relating in the lived present to time past and time future. Without some assumption of human autonomy ± i.e. the

human ability to give ourselves our own laws ± these questions would not arise.

That is why they are fundamentally modern. But this assumption cannot be

taken for granted, and it does not lead toward solutions. That is why the

sociology of ``modern society'' unduly limits the variety of possibilities of conceiving these probleÂmatiques.

These probleÂmatiques co-emerge with modernity, and they can neither be

rejected nor be handled once and for all by finding their ``modern'' solution.

Societies that accept the double imaginary signification of modernity are des-

tined to search for answers to these questions and to institute those answers.

Temporarily stable solutions can thus indeed be found. But those solutions can

always again be challenged, and then new ways of dealing with those probleÂma-

tiques have to be elaborated. Hobsbawm's ``most dramatic'' transformation was

± and still is ± such a transformative crisis of modernity. What the sociology of the contemporary world needs to take from this experience is that the constitutive probleÂmatiques of modernity will tend to re-emerge and they will always

have to be interpreted in their concrete temporality, at their specific historical location.

4

Emerging Trends in Environmental

Sociology

Frederick H. Buttel and August Gijswijt

The subdiscipline of environmental sociology has now has been in existence for a little over a quarter century. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s,

sociologists in a number of (mostly Western) countries began to recognize the

importance of environmental issues, and initiated research relating to the natural environment. By the late 1980s, dozens of universities across the world were

offering courses in environmental sociology, and many of these universities had

designed undergraduate or graduate curricula in environmental sociology. In a

number of countries environmental sociologists formed voluntary associations,

typically within larger sociological associations. For example, in 1975 the Sec-

tion on Environment (later renamed the Section on Environment and Techno-

logy) was formed within the American Sociological Association. In 1990 a group

of 35 environmental sociologists formed a Working Group on Environmental

Sociology at the International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress in

Madrid, and in 1994 it obtained official status as the Environment and Society

Research Committee (RC 24). At each ISA World Congress since Madrid there

has been continued expansion of RC 24 activities in terms of the number of

participants, papers, and post-congress publications.

Despite this impressive expansion of environmental sociology, the subdisci-

pline has yet to achieve a prominent position in the larger sociological discipline.

Nor does it have an influential position in national and international policy-

making circles as do the physical and biological sciences at the Intergovernmen-

tal Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). This lack of centrality suggests the need to look historically at the emergence and institutionalization of environmental

sociology and to do so critically.

In this chapter we survey some of the most important developments in

environmental sociology since its establishment about a quarter century ago.

In so doing we adopt a historical approach, and stress major trends in the

44

Frederick H. Buttel and August Gijswijt

subdiscipline since its founding in the early to mid-1970s. We place particular

emphasis on the major debates in the field and how these controversies have

shaped and contributed to its development.

The Establishment of the Materialist

Materialist Core of

Environmental Sociology

To a very considerable extent the course that environmental sociology took over

its first quarter century was shaped by several interrelated convictions that were strongly held by the most influential founders. The first conviction was, of

course, a tendency for environmental sociologists to have strong pro-environ-

mental predilections, and to feel that sociology ought to be made relevant to

achieving environmental goals. Second, it was held that conventional or main-

stream sociology was seriously flawed because the discipline of sociology had

ignored the role of the biophysical environment. The third strongly held convic-

tion was that the inability of the discipline of sociology to address environmental issues was rooted in the classical tradition, which promulgated thè`social facts''

injunction, and which assumed that indefinite social, technical, and material

progress was inevitable. (By ``social facts'' we refer to the general posture that sociological analysis must stress social explanations of social phenomena.) The

fourth conviction was that environmental sociology ought to aspire for nothing

less than to strive to reorient the larger discipline of sociology so that it could better understand the rooting of human actors and societies within their biophysical contexts.

Perhaps the most critical concomitant of these four convictions of the 1970s

foundation generation of environmental sociologists was that the key problem-

atic of environmental sociology was why there tended to be very strong, if not

intrinsic, tendencies to serious environmental destruction within modern societ-

ies. Not only would persuasive theorization of environmental destruction help to launch the field as a distinctive area of inquiry, but such a theoretical emphasis was thought to be effective in pointing out that mainstream sociology was

obsolete because of its failure to recognize the strong tendencies toward cata-

clysmic environmental changes. Thus, much of the formative literature consisted

of explanations as to why contemporary societies tended to be locked into

environmentally destructive tendencies. Riley Dunlap (1993) and William R.

Catton Jr (1976), for example, posited that the four-plus centuries of abundance made possible by Western expansion resulted in cultural assumptions about the

desirability of growth and the inevitability of progress. Catton posited in his

influential book Overshoot (Catton, 1980) that the combination of the resources

made available through the colonization by the West and the huge supplies of

fossil fuels caused modern societies to engage in growth and expansion that is

analogous to a species which no longer faces predation. In short, exuberant

growth will continue until sustenance runs out, precipitating ``crash'' and ``die-off.'' Similarly, Allan Schnaiberg and colleagues (Schnaiberg, 1975, 1980;

Schnaiberg and Gould, 1994) developed an influential notion of thè`treadmill

Emerging Trends in Environmental Sociology

45

of production,'' which has been employed to explain why economic growth

tends to be in the interest of state managers and agencies, as well as in the

interest of private capital, and how and why state interests in growth reinforce the interests of capital in expansion. James O'Connor (1994) developed a related but distinct neo-Marxist perspective on thè`second contradiction of capital.''

O'Connor has posited that in addition to there being a contradiction between

capital and labor (the first contradiction, as elaborated by Marx), the expansionism of capitalism tends to cause environmental problems and create a second

contradiction (which is manifested mainly as rising private costs of production).

Raymond Murphy (1994) developed a neo-Weberian analysis that locates the

causes of environmental problems in the increasing institutional sway of formal

and instrumental rationality and the increased tendency for private accumula-

tion to become the accepted end of private and public decision-making.

These early theoretical developments in environmental sociology tended to be

couched in ambivalence toward or criticism of mainstream sociology. In addi-

tion, emphasis was typically placed on the claim that the inability of standard

sociology to recognize the importance of the natural world had to do with the

legacy of the classical tradition. The pioneering environmental sociologists felt that the nineteenth-century classical sociological theorists, in their quest to

distinguish sociology from the rival disciplines of psychology, biology, econo-

mics, and geography, had shifted the pendulum of scholarship too far in the

direction of handcuffing sociology with thè`social facts'' injunction. Catton and Dunlap (1978), Dickens (1992), Benton and Redclift (1994), Martell (1994),

Murphy (1994), and many others insisted that nineteenth-century social thought

has had the effect of steering the discipline of sociology in the direction of

ignoring resources, nature, and the environment. Not only has there been

sharp criticism of the classical sociologists (especially Marx, Durkheim, and

Weber) within core environmental sociology, but Catton and Dunlap (1978)

argued that thè`human-exemptionalist'' character of twentieth-century soci-

ological thought presumes that social-organizational, cultural, and technological innovations exempt humans from the natural laws that govern other species.

Conversely, Catton and Dunlap have argued that environmental sociology

should strive for nothing less than to catalyze a fundamental reorientation of

the discipline of sociology. They have suggested that the very nature of environmental sociology is that it represents à`new paradigm'' (Catton and Dunlap,

1978), while the apparent divisions within sociology ± for example, between

Marxism and functionalism ± are actually relatively minor variations on the

larger tendency of sociology to ignore the natural environment (see Foster,

1999a).

These and other influential pieces of scholarship during environmental soci-

ology's first two decades have very significant strengths and have been major

contributions. Each of these scholarly traditions has been theoretically ambi-

tious. Each has striven for a multi-institutional perspective that, for example, encompasses major literatures from such sociological specialty areas as political sociology, economic sociology, sociology of science, sociology of occupations

and work, demography, and urban sociology.

46

Frederick H. Buttel and August Gijswijt

At the same time, the core of environmental sociology exhibits some pro-

blems. First, the preoccupation with accounting for the causes of increasing

environmental degradation has tended to foreclose consideration of ongoing

social processes of responding to or providing solutions to environmental pro-

blems. As we will see below, the need for environmental sociology to be able to

theorize the processes of environmental improvement has resulted in some major

changes in the subdiscipline over the past five or so years.

A second issue is that these core or foundational works were written at a high

level of abstraction and have tended to lead to a theoretical literature that is meta-theoretical in nature. Put somewhat differently, it has proven difficult for these core environmental-sociological scholars to deduce testable hypotheses

from their work and apply them in a systematic, sustained research program.

Many of the pioneers in environmental sociology have found themselves doing

their empirical work at some distance from their theoretical views. For example, as is noted below, Dunlap's (1991) empirical work has tended to focus on public

environmental attitudes (particularly the degree to which à`new environmental

paradigm'' can be found in public environmental orientations). Likewise,

Schnaiberg's empirical work has focused on local environmental movements

(particularly anti-toxics and recycling movements), albeit with attention to

how the treadmill of production constrains movement strategies (Gould et al.,

1996). But in the main the tendency has been for controversies in the field to be dealt with on the grounds of theoretical debate rather than empirical evaluation and comparison. Thus, there has remained a fairly wide gulf between theory and

research, though the 1990s have arguably witnessed a number of major efforts to

narrow this gulf.

Third, each of the core theories in environmental sociology has tended to have

an overly general conception of what the environment is or how the environment

should be defined. These theories tend to presume that the environment is a

singular ``thing'' that is being degraded in essentially a cumulative fashion by extraction of materials from the earth and biosphere and by the creation of

pollution. That is, ``the environment'' ± even if it is acknowledged to be multidimensional and a highly complex system ± is nonetheless seen in some ultimate

sense as having some upper bound of long-term human-carrying capacity, and as

having an underlying `ùnity'' (Ophuls, 1977). Thus, mainstream environmental

sociology has not tended to recognize the different levels or scales of environ-

mental resources or environmental causality, nor has it been effective in recog-

nizing the importance of what Benton (1989) has called `ècoregulatory

practices'' (by which he means renewable resource extraction systems based on