A political sociology of socionatures: Revisionist manoeuvres in environmental sociology

Abstract

Grow or die/treadmill of production (GOD/TOP) discourses have played a valuable role in insisting that the antagonism between capitalist political economy and ecology should be a central concern of environmental sociology. However, this article raises questions as to the extent to which emphatic versions of this argument are sufficiently subtle for grasping what is at stake in the current environmental debate. In neo-liberal times, ‘Nature’ may well be made and remade as a commodity as ever before. However, a range of developments from the sociology of environmental science to the rise of non-equilibrium ecology, critical political ecology to the desire to develop post-naturalistic agential and cultural materialisms in human geography and science and technology studies all point to considerable complexities in unravelling winners and losers in this process. Engagement with the uneven spread, revisions, reversals and pathologies of ecological modernisation introduces further points of uncertainty into the discussion. It is suggested that such developments point first to the hazards of polemically foreclosing debate about the relationship between capitalist political economy and ecology. Second, these developments also suggest that more fluid and open engagements in the environmental social sciences will be required to map the power geometries that flow through the production, en-framing, enclosing and degrading of twenty-first century socionatures and technonatures.

Notes

1. This paper is concerned with some generic weaknesses that can be found in Schnaiberg's ‘treadmill’ analysis and broader ‘grow or die’ arguments that have emerged from social ecology and ecoMarxism. However, this should not obscure that there are substantial internal differences of emphasis. For an account of such differences, see Buttel (2004).