Emergent themes? A year in the life of Environmental Sociology

Attempts to summarize key themes in environmental sociology – the sorts of summaries we find in review articles, ‘state of the art’ handbooks and introductory texts – usually present environmental sociology as a series of debates: (1) constructivism versus materialism; (2) ecological modernization versus ecological realism; and (3) European versus North American sociology.¹ Sometimes, these debates are explicitly mapped onto to each other – giving us something like ‘constructivist European ecological modernizationists’ versus ‘critical American material realists’. Sometimes, this mapping is implied.

Of course, any attempt to summarize a field must impose some kind of order and ‘key debates’ may, in principle, be as useful a way to do this as any other. No-one means to imply that environmental sociology can be split neatly down the middle, leaving two distinct paradigmatic communities fighting it out for theoretical and geopolitical supremacy. The real world, everyone will admit, is more complex, more fluid and, thankfully, more interesting. There is always room towards the end of handbooks and review essays for a section on ‘the Other’ – whether this Other be scholarship from outside the USA and Europe or the emergence of new theoretical or empirical concerns. It’s just that some problems, places and conceptual frameworks tend to dominate scholarship and debate.

Or do they?

Rounding out Volume 1 of Environmental Sociology it is worth reflecting on what those articles published through our first year suggest about the status and concerns of environmental sociology as a field of scholarly endeavour. It may be too early to generalize about the emergence of new trends and debates across the entire field but it is not at all too early to ask how well the themes we generally use to characterize environmental sociology capture the emerging content of the journal.

Not terribly well, as it happens.

Constructivism versus materialism?

We could group articles based on whether they are broadly constructivist or broadly materialist in orientation, by which I mean whether their main interest lies in the discourses, ideologies, understandings, etc., relevant to a particular environmental issue or if their principal concern lies, alternatively, in the deployment of capital, energy, resources and so on to transform socio-ecological relations. The problem is that while many contributors have emphasized one side of the constructivist/materialist duality relative to the other this is really only a matter of degree. Even were we to position articles somewhere along a continuum between strong constructivism and material determinism the positioning, for many, would be forced.

Take Hays’ (2015) article ‘The lie of the lion: racialization of nature in the safari souvenir’, for example, an article about the projection of stereotypical ideas about African people, animals and landscapes onto Maasai villagers living within Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The approach and intent of this article is explicitly constructivist. But so too are they explicitly materialist. Hays traces the imposition of highly racialized notions of wild and untamed (human) nature on Maasai from early twentieth-century hunting safaris to latter day cultural and eco-tourism economies. Despite their outward invocation of authentic Maasai cultural experiences such as the lion hunt, souvenirs from Ngorongoro tell another, less obvious, story about the parallel imposition of highly restricted land use and livelihood options on the Maasai. Reflecting on how to position this article in terms of constructivism and materialism does it an injustice. What is far more interesting is what it suggests – both theoretically and empirically – for future scholarship on the relationships between environmental justice, globalization, property, government and the rights and aspirations of indigenous peoples.

Environmental justice reminds us of the need to challenge essentialist notions of wild and pristine nature. A key dynamic identified in papers by Busca and Lewis (2015) and Harrison (2015) is the appropriation of ideas like environmental justice by institutions and actors seeking to impose their own interests and values on marginalized populations. Rather than ensuring a just distribution of environmental goods and services (e.g. clean air and water, access to natural resources, etc.), localized processes of decision-making in France and Quebec, as Busca and Lewis find, normalize inequality and routinely subvert environmental goals. Harrison’s US study demonstrates how the pursuit of goals traditionally associated with environmental justice (e.g. reduced exposure to toxic hazards) may be undermined both through direct attacks on regulatory protections and through a discursive reframing of environmental justice to emphasize community self-help and small-scale green entrepreneurialism. Whatever merits self-help and employment generation programmes might have, they do little, if anything, to challenge the socio-ecological inequalities that first mobilized communities and scholars around the idea of environmental justice. Community gardens, recycling campaigns, etc., are important in their own right, but what do they do to address the disproportionate exposure to pollution and natural hazards experienced by disadvantaged groups or, in other contexts, the tenuous rights to land and other natural resources held by indigenous peoples? Environmental justice activism and scholarship troubles the boundaries between constructivism and materialism by treating them as two sides of the same problem.

Ecological modernization versus ecological realism?

Grouping articles according to whether they are broadly ecological modernizationist in orientation or, conversely, ecologically realist, would be just as problematic – principally because the vast majority of authors simply do not position themselves within this debate. Categorization, for most, would be imposed.

Classification is also complicated by the multifaceted character of ecological modernization. Ecological modernization can be characterized as a meso-level theory of change in contemporary environmental governance; a normative theory of how governance should be reformed to improve environmental outcomes; and a macro-level theory of societal transition through the ecological rationalization of institutions and public choice mechanisms. For the most part, scholars examine the relationships between environmental reform and the political and institutional context for this reform – standard sociological stuff. It is the generalizations derived from this analysis that provide a lightning rod for criticism. For some, attempts to identify pathways towards more effective incentives and regulation are pragmatic contributions to policy-making. For others, they reflect naïve acceptance of the economic and political status quo and a selective approach to evidence at greater spatial and temporal scales.²

The realist alternative is probably even more multifaceted: a loose collection of theoretical frameworks and concepts (such as the ‘treadmill of production’, the New Ecological Paradigm, societal metabolism, STIRPAT models, etc.) united by shared preferences for materialist ontology and macro-level explanation of structural change; in particular, structural change associated with the interplay of resource use, technology, markets, production, environmental outcomes, etc. At face value, realist concepts fill a number of gaps left by ecological modernization. But so too do they beg a number of questions. Would realist approaches benefit from more sustained attention to institutional relationships and policy-making? Does competition between the explanatory and macro-level dimensions of these theoretical perspectives distract from opportunities for productive synthesis at the meso- or applied scales? While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with questioning whether regulatory or institutional reforms identified by ecological modernizationists are leading to reduced net environmental damage, little is gained by treating either approach as a straw person.

Scanu (2015) takes a pragmatic and critical approach to ecological modernization in ‘Climate governance in the post-industrial city’. She notes that government and non-government organizations alike are adopting the normative or political project of ecological modernization at the sub-national scale. Driven by frustration at the glacial pace of national and international reforms and a belief in the need for detailed local policy and design work, municipal governments are taking steps themselves to accelerate economic growth and improve residents’ quality of life while simultaneously reining in greenhouse gas emissions. The search for win–win climate solutions, policy integration, decentralization and technological and institution innovation are all evident in Scanu’s case study of the Italian city of Genoa. At the same time, Scanu notes, Genoa has been struggling for some time with a rapidly de-industrializing economy and the need to promote more knowledge-intensive economic and employment opportunities. With its no-regrets approach to climate policy, Genoa has embarked on the politically palatable road to modernized energy infrastructure and improved urban amenity but has done little to tackle issues related to climate adaptation, security and social equity – issues that seem to lack solutions with well-defined economic benefits.

It is true that Scanu does not assess in quantitative terms the net environmental (or social) impact of Genoa’s climate policies. However, it is also the case she never claims these policies to be net positive, and nor does she claim they are the only governance options on the table.

Volume 1 of Environmental Sociology has published several articles that, in best realist fashion, examine relationships between various forms of economic growth and environmental degradation. McGee, Clement, and Besek (2015), for example, show how the spatial extent of impervious surface area – a proxy for urbanization – across 173 countries is positively correlated with greenhouse gas emissions. Such a result may seem inevitable in comparative studies that do not differentiate between different kinds of urban development. However, Griffin, Pavela, and Arroyo (2015) demonstrate how urban development spurred by growth in the ostensibly post-industrial, service-oriented tourism economy of the Caribbean also increases energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. For many other countries, according to Prell and Sun (2015), reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions of domestic industry are more than offset by increases in the emissions associated with their imports. Fitzgerald, Jorgenson, and Clark (2015), further, find positive relationships between average working hours and energy consumption across both developed and developing countries. For the sake of the planet (and ourselves), it seems, we really should be spending less time at our desks.

Should environmental sociologists wanting to reverse these negative environmental trends necessarily accept the project(s) of ecological modernization? Of course not. As other articles published in Environmental Sociology show that there are a number of ways in which scholars might approach and contribute to improved environmental governance. From critical analysis of the social life of technology (e.g. Gould 2015) and organization of global capitalism (Sapinski 2015) to the political dynamics of local environmental policy (e.g. Sodero and Stoddart 2015) and international climate negotiations (Flagg 2015), it is clear that there are numerous ways in which environmental governance and reform might be scrutinized. This diversity of analytical approaches to environmental governance is mirrored, interestingly, in the activities of environmental social movements. Operating in a variety of settings, articles published in Environmental Sociology show social movements to be evolving (Novikau 2015), forging novel alliances with business and governments (Bruce and Shwom 2015; Cordner and Brown 2015), and grappling with how best to integrate concerns about social and environmental justice with more traditional green politics (Busca and Lewis 2015; Harrison 2015). Here again we find boundaries being troubled with social movement organizations, including environmental justice organizations, working simultaneously towards tighter regulation of capitalist enterprises and towards more equitable participation in the market economy.

European versus North American environmental sociology?

What then of the geopolitical divides attributed to environmental sociology? The framing of environmental sociology as a largely Euro-American enterprise is always going to irritate those of us from ‘the rest of the world’, the Others, regardless of how meaningful the Euro-American division actually proves to be. Still, what does Volume 1 of Environmental Sociology suggest for our prospects of a more cosmopolitan and democratic field?

Here, the news is mixed. There is certainly no evidence of environmental sociologists from Europe and North America slugging it out for supremacy. But this is not because we have published so much material from the rest of the world. It is because we have published relatively few articles from Europe. Indeed, the vast majority of articles published in Volume 1 are authored by scholars based in the United States. We clearly have a great deal of work to do to bring the rest of the world into the orbit of Environmental Sociology. At the same time though, the contributions of US-based authors are in no way parochial. Evincing a diversity of empirical concerns, theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, these demonstrate that US environmental sociology – to the extent it makes sense to talk of such a thing – cannot be contained in one neat paradigmatic box.

A new order?

As stated above, it is too early to distil a limited number of dominant themes in the pages of Environmental Sociology. However, it is not too early to suggest that in place of a small number of well-defined theoretical perspectives and debates we see both plurality and border-crossing. We see the development of conceptual and methodological tools that enable careful measurement of changes in resource consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, etc., complemented with frameworks which allow equally careful analysis of the political and corporate networks responsible for these changes, the means through which their goals are pursued, and the social movement organizations and strategies that contest them. We see explicit discussion of how best to articulate the transgression of theoretical boundaries – through concepts of environmental justice, for example – complemented with detailed case studies describing the rich and messy realities of socio-ecological relations at multiple scales.

In short, we see many more attempts to move beyond the so-called ‘key debates’ than we do to position scholarship within them.

It may be that as new themes emerge it will make more sense to frame these around key questions or problematics in environmental sociology. How to understand and address the negative impacts of economic and technological development? How to contribute to improved environmental governance? How to empower those marginalized in environmental politics and decision-making? These seem the most common questions underlying contributions to Volume 1 but we cannot yet say they are representative of the field.

It is not surprising that climate change provides the predominant empirical context in which these questions are asked but regional and local environmental issues, processes, politics, etc., are all clearly visible. What is perhaps more surprising is the absence of studies addressing social practices related to commodity production, supply chains, consumption, etc., and a relative dearth of articles on environmental attitudes. Perhaps too it is surprising how many articles, conversely, have addressed very personalized experiences of interaction with our environments – with urban natures, capricious weather, insects and companion animals (e.g. Cutler 2015; Gross 2015). Could we be seeing more attentiveness among environmental sociologists to micro-scale interactions and the affective (i.e. the embodied and emotional) dimension of human experience? Maybe. It remains, of course, too early to tell.

Notes

1. See, for example, Dunlap (2010) and Lidskog, Mol, and Osterveer (2015).

2. For more detailed critiques of ecological modernization, and responses to these critiques, see York, Rosa, and Dietz (2010) and Mol (2010), respectively.