What is Environmental Sociology?

Diana Stuart

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509544400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Umwelt- & Energiepolitik

Given the escalating and existential nature of our current environmental crises, environmental sociology has never mattered more. We now face global environmental threats, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as local threats, such as pollution and household toxins. The complex interactions of such pervasive problems demand an understanding of the social nature of environmental impacts, the underlying drivers of these impacts, and the range of possible solutions. Environmental sociologists continue to make indispensable contributions to this crucial task.

This compact book introduces environmental sociology and emphasizes how environmental sociologists do "public sociology, " that is, work with broad public application. Using a diversity of theoretical approaches and research methods, environmental sociologists continue to give marginalized people a voice, identify the systemic drivers of our environmental crises, and evaluate solutions. Diana Stuart shines a light on this work and gives readers insight into applying the tools of environmental sociology to minimize impacts and create a more sustainable and just world.

1
Environmental Sociology: In Uncharted Waters

Environmental sociology is a subdiscipline of sociology that examines the relationships between humans and the entities and processes on Earth that are often lumped together and referred to as “nature” or “the environment.” Dominant philosophical views from the past fortified the use of such terms to refer to what lies outside of the human or social world. In other words, we humans are here in society and “nature” or “the environment” is somewhere else, out there. However, as scientists, philosophers, environmentalists, and many others increasingly have realized, the idea of a separation between nature and society is far from accurate. We must also acknowledge that both “nature” and “society” represent complicated configurations of beings and entities and are concepts that are diverse, complex, and socially constructed.

If there is something called “the environment,” then we live in it, depend on it, and are a part of it. It is where we live, work, and recreate. It includes all life, plant and animal, as well as nonliving things such as soil, rocks, water, and atmosphere. While some who want to protect “the environment” might be thinking only about the nonhuman world, our inherent relationships and dependencies make humans a part of the biophysical community. The idea of a divide between nature and society has perniciously masked these fundamental linkages. The belief that we can take resources from “the environment” and put waste into “the environment” without any consequences is not only false, but dangerous. The long-ignored interconnections between the human and nonhuman worlds are now clear, as environmental impacts directly affecting humans have increased over time. In response to these impacts, environmental sociology emerged in the 1970s to better understand these overlooked relationships.

While environmental sociology emerged over forty years ago, this book focuses on more recent definitions and applications. Gould and Lewis (2009: 2) define environmental sociology as “the study of how social systems interact with ecosystems.” Lockie (2015: 140) defines environmental sociology as “the application of our sociological imaginations to the connections among people, institutions, technologies and ecosystems that make society possible.” In both of these definitions is the term ecosystem, which refers to all living organisms in a community, the nonliving components of this community, and their relationships. While humans affect ecosystems and ecosystems affect humans, a more accurate depiction is that humans depend on ecosystems, live in ecosystems, and are also driving rapid ecosystem change. With accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, it has become clear that human activities now shape the fate of all species on the planet. Therefore, as a field of study, environmental sociology examines how humans interact with the nonhuman beings, entities, and processes on Earth and how these relationships shape our mutual existence, survival, and possibilities for flourishing.

In Uncharted Waters

As we now face global and existential environmental threats, environmental sociology has never been more important. Early environmental issues such as the pollution in the Cuyahoga River and Love Canal were regional. While we still face these kinds of environmental issues, which threaten humans and other species in certain places, we now also face environmental crises that are existential because they threaten the future existence of our species and others. Environmental issues have been on the social radar for decades, yet we have reached a new era of global and existential environmental threats.

Calling these threats “existential” may sound extreme or exaggerated, but unfortunately it is not. We face unprecedented global environmental impacts putting our existence at risk. In recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019), scientists have illustrated the severity of both the climate and biodiversity crises and how current trajectories put us at risk of societal collapse, massive population loss, and even possible extinction. These reports call for rapid and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society to address these crises and minimize ecological and social impacts. The climate and biodiversity crises together pose a global existential threat to the human race. While these two distinct crises are discussed here, they will sometimes be grouped together and referred to as “the environmental crisis” or “existential threats” throughout the book.

With only about a 1.1° Celsius (C) average global temperature increase thus far, we are already seeing serious impacts due to global climate change, including unprecedented fires, floods, and hurricanes; and much more severe impacts are projected as warming continues. The words “crisis” and “emergency” are increasingly used by scientists and in the media to describe climate change. Steffen and colleagues (2018) explain the very real possibility of reaching a critical threshold of warming, a global tipping point, after which additional warming would be uncontrollable, resulting in a “Hothouse Earth” scenario. In Nature, Lenton and colleagues (2019: 595) state that climate change “is an existential threat to civilization,” explaining that “the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency.” Finally, Ripple and colleagues (2019: 1), representing the Alliance of World Scientists, identify “disturbing” and “worrisome” vital signs that they state “clearly and unequivocally” illustrate we are in a “climate emergency.” Klinenberg et al. (2020: 664) and other sociologists argue that climate change needs to be a central focus in all subdisciplines of sociology, as it is rapidly transforming the conditions of life on the planet for all people and “everything is at stake.”

Although the climate crisis contributes to biodiversity loss, the biodiversity crisis is considered a separate yet related crisis. Biodiversity loss receives much less public attention than climate change, yet it too poses an existential threat to humans. Imagine the impacts on humans if extinction cascades resulted in the loss of insect pollination or the loss of all ocean life. This is why terms like “ecological crisis” and “biodiversity crisis” are now commonly used by scientists and in the media. For example, a letter representing almost 100 scientists was published in October of 2018 titled: “Facts about our ecological crisis are incontrovertible” (Green and Scott Cato 2018). A year later, the United Nations report on biodiversity and ecosystem services (IPBES 2019) resulted in scientists publicly calling for rapid funding and intervention to address the “biodiversity crisis” (Malcom et al. 2019). The IPBES media release (2019) states that species loss has accelerated to rates that “constitute a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.” The climate and biodiversity crises can both be seen as “crises of civilization” that together represent an unprecedented existential threat.

The climate and biodiversity crises are related, as climate change increases extinction rates, but they are also related in how the impacts of these crises are unfolding, who is most affected, the underlying drivers, and the likely solutions. Environmental sociology can play a critical role in understanding these impacts, drivers, and solutions. Already, environmental sociologists are working to identify unequal and unjust impacts, root drivers of impacts that are overlooked by oversimplified diagnoses, the ineffectiveness and inadequacy of proposed solutions, and the extent of social transformation necessary to stave off these existential threats. While this book will draw from examples beyond these global crises, it will emphasize how current and future environmental sociologists can contribute to understanding and addressing these escalating threats. We are in uncharted waters, and environmental sociologists can play an important role identifying and advocating for the most effective and just paths forward.

While crises create uncertain and daunting times, they also can create opportunities for change that can be positive. Having plans for positive social transformation already formulated is critical for being prepared to direct the path of change. It is those who have studied and who understand the impacts and drivers of problems who can point us in the direction of effective and just solutions. Conditions can rapidly change due to environmental, economic, and health crises (e.g., the Covid-19 pandemic) and ideas that were previously deemed unfeasible can suddenly gain popular support. As windows open for positive social change, environmental sociologists can play a key role in identifying effective solutions and helping to steer society toward paths that increase social and ecological well-being. This important work requires a thorough understanding of the complex relationships between nature and society.

Navigating Nature and Society

Navigating the study of nature and society is a relatively recent endeavor, due to philosophical and scientific paradigms that remained dominant for hundreds of years. The Enlightenment period, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, was also called the Age of Reason, as scholars emphasized how humans can use their unique intellectual abilities to control and dominate nature for social progress. Nature was regarded as separate from and subordinate to humans, reinforcing the notion of human exceptionalism. This rationality also influenced the development of the sciences into distinctive and isolated disciplines for examining the social and natural worlds. Sociology developed specifically as a science of society, using social facts to explain social phenomena. Yet, as with many other disciplines, over time scholars increasingly realized that separating nature and society was a false and dangerous depiction of the world.

Environmental sociology emerged in the 1970s as a result of calls for new theories and methods that cast away Enlightenment notions of society as separate from nature, offering a more holistic (and realistic) understanding of the world. In a series of articles, Dunlap and Catton convincingly argued for a new kind of sociology involving a paradigmatic and methodological shift away from a solely anthropogenic focus (Catton and Dunlap 1978a, 1978b, 1980; Dunlap and Catton 1979, 1983). They called for a purposeful move away from the dominant human exceptionalism perspective in sociology toward one that incorporates ecological entities and processes. It has been over forty years since these articles were published, and a diverse body of scholarship has emerged in environmental sociology.

It is important to know that sociology was not the only or first discipline to breach the nature-society divide. Human geographers were examining the relationships between people, place, and the environment long before environmental sociology existed. Anthropologists were also examining how people lived and related to their surroundings. In addition, human ecology, a subfield related to multiple disciplines, focused on relationships between humans and the biophysical world. In the past few decades, new areas of study have also emerged that cross the nature-society divide. Political ecology, a subdiscipline in geography, examines nature-society relations, focusing on power, marginalization, and political economy. Ecologists have also developed approaches to study the resilience of social-ecological systems. In summary, as the nature-society divide has been increasingly deemed false, scholars in a range of disciplines have developed new theories and approaches to examine nature and society together.

What are theories? Theories are general explanations of how the world works or how processes unfold. For example, the theory of evolution explains how over time life evolved into diverse and specialized species across the globe. The theory of inheritance explains how the traits from one generation are passed on to the next. These are theories that have stood the test of time and are still widely believed to explain reality accurately. Other theories, however, have been found to be false and were replaced by others. For example, the flat earth theory was deemed false and superseded by the round earth theory. Maternal impression theory, which explained birth defects as a product of the pregnant mother’s thoughts, was also found to be false and replaced by genetic theory. Some theories offer explanations that hold, while others are eventually debunked, replaced, and disregarded. Theories are useful for multiple reasons: they can guide research questions, they can help to reveal specific patterns, and they can foster broader discussions that many scholars can contribute to over time.

In sociology, theories explain how society functions or how people act and relate to each other. Some theories explain how society works at a macro scale and focus on how the structures of social institutions, policies, and economic systems shape society. For example, Marxist theory posits that the mode of production, or how our economy is organized, creates a social order that results in specific class relations, power dynamics, and social and environmental outcomes. Other theories focus on individuals or groups of people and how they behave or interact with each other. For many years, social scientists debated whether it is the structure of our social order or choice and individual agency that most influence human behavior. Most scholars now agree that both are very important and that they are in many ways related. The ideas, beliefs, and choices of individuals are shaped and reinforced by the social order; and the ideas, beliefs, and actions of individuals are critical to either maintain or alter the social order.

While many theories from sociology have been applied or adapted to study the environment, new theories have also emerged specifically to examine nature-society relations. For example, the trea...