Environment and Sociology: The State of the Debate

Irwin A. 2001. Sociology and the Environment. Oxford: Polity Press.

Littig B. 2001. Feminist Perspectives on Environment and Sociology. Harlow: Prentice Hall.

Spaargaren G., Mol A., and Buttel F.H., eds. 2000. Environment and Global Modernity. London: Sage.

Just before the events of 11th September, President George W. Bush initiated a controversy on the issue of global warming, by denying that the problem existed and by withdrawing from an international agreement concerning its prevention. At the same time as this, the UK rural economy was being devastated by agricultural disease. Environmental risk is now front page news.

In this regard, the volume edited by Spaargaren, Mol, and Buttel might be regarded as timely, in that it provides a useful overview of the main literature and debates in the field of environmental sociology. The collection is based on a regional conference of the environment research group of the International Sociological Association, and is one of several "overviews" of the literature in books and journals over the last few years.

Although the book is not subdivided in any way, it is possible to loosely identify four main themes. Firstly, there are attempts to map out the approaches to environmental sociology, and identify the underlying "axis of disagreement" of the differing theoretical schemas. From these axis, three distinct debates emerge from the chapters in the collection. The question of the extent to which classical social theory can offer any insights into global environmental issues is a major area of contention. A second debate, which has been prominent in the literature for some time, concerns the extent to which questions of environment are socially constructed. However, the main business of the book concerns the theory of ecological modernization, of which two of the editors are among the main developers, and much of the collection concerns expositions and critiques of this approach.

The volume plays down the matter of disagreement and debate though. The stated aim in the preface is to find common ground, both within sociology and between other social science disciplines. The contributions are therefore not ordered around themes. The introduction, written by the editors, attempts to join these diverse and contradictory approaches into a seamless whole. While very few introductions of collections are able to achieve this anyway, the collection might have been more readily understood if the debates had been presented as such, especially since the debates in this field are of particular importance, and the disagreements tend to follow the usual fault lines of the discipline.

The contribution of Eugene Rosa shows this up well. The chapter could best be viewed as an attempt to "map out" the theoretical approaches to environment. The axis on which he maps the various approaches are firstly a social/individual continuum, and also a realist/idealist continuum; which are fairly standard social science divisions. Indeed Rosa identifies four orthodox traditions of sociology with the four parings of these axiological elements. The Marxist/Weberian tradition is identified as social and realist, whereas the Durkheimian tradition is social and idealist. The phenomenological tradition, Rosa suggests, is idealist and individualist. The approach of rational action (which Rosa associates with the utilitarian tradition) is realist and individualist.

These axes are employed by Rosa to situate the approaches to the analysis of risk. The approach of Giddens, Rosa suggests, tends towards a social/idealist combination. He believes it has a macro Sociological approach to cultural analysis, although this is internalized into individual social actors (p.87). Rosa also notes Giddens' concern with globalization, what Giddens terms social relations, which link distant localities, in that local events are no longer separable (Giddens 1990, cited in ibid). This creates a world of interdependence, which will in turn lead to common cultures, which are "textured with" common risks and anxieties, of which environmental risks are at the forefront.

Giddens might well reject the individualist/social continuum that Rosa suggests though. This was, after all, rather the point of structuration theory. However, Rosa...