Environmental sociology
1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment.
From the other perspectives, humans are distinguished from other species because of their innovative capacities, distinct cultures and varied institutions.
[10] Human creations have the power to independently manipulate, destroy, and transcend the limits of the natural environment.
There have been many critiques of this view particularly political scientist Elinor Ostrom, or economists Amartya Sen and Ester Boserup.
Instead, in documented cases a lack of political entitlement to resources that exist in abundance, causes famines in some populations.
In the 1970s, the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) conception critiqued the claimed lack of human-environmental focus in the classical sociologists and the sociological priorities their followers created.
The HEP viewpoint claims that human-environmental relationships were unimportant sociologically because humans are 'exempt' from environmental forces via cultural change.
This view was shaped by the leading Western worldview of the time and the desire for sociology to establish itself as an independent discipline against the then popular racist-biological environmental determinism where environment was all.
In this HEP view, human dominance was felt to be justified by the uniqueness of culture, argued to be more adaptable than biological traits.
In the 1970s, sociological scholars Riley Dunlap and William R. Catton, Jr. began recognizing the limits of what would be termed the Human Excemptionalism Paradigm.
The Treadmill of Production is a theory coined and popularized by Schnaiberg as a way to answer for the increase in U.S. environmental degradation post World War II.
[citation needed] Two people following this school were James O'Connor (The Fiscal Crisis of the State, 1971) and later Allan Schnaiberg.
Later, a different trend developed in eco-Marxism via the attention brought to the importance of metabolic analysis in Marx's thought by John Bellamy Foster.
Instead, Foster argued Marx himself was concerned about the Metabolic rift generated by capitalist society's social metabolism, particularly in industrial agriculture—Marx had identified an "irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,"[17] created by capitalist agriculture that was destroying the productivity of the land and creating wastes in urban sites that failed to be reintegrated into the land and thus lead toward destruction of urban workers health simultaneously.
Burkett and Foster proceeded to write a number of articles together on Marx's ecological conceptions, reflecting their shared perspective[19][20][21] More recently, Jason W. Moore, inspired by Burkett's value-analytical approach to Marx's ecology and arguing that Foster's work did not in itself go far enough, has sought to integrate the notion of metabolic rift with world systems theory, incorporating Marxian value-related conceptions.
Secondly, the managed scarcity synthesis concludes that governments will attempt to control only the most dire of environmental problems to prevent health and economic disasters.
Third, the ecological synthesis generates a hypothetical case where environmental degradation is so severe that political forces would respond with sustainable policies.
Popular examples of ecological modernization would be "cradle to cradle" production cycles, industrial ecology, large-scale organic agriculture, biomimicry, permaculture, agroecology and certain strands of sustainable development—all implying that economic growth is possible if that growth is well organized with the environment in mind.
[citation needed] Neo-liberalism includes deregulation, free market capitalism, and aims at reducing government spending.
Since Neo-liberalism includes deregulation and essentially less government involvement, this leads to the commodification and privatization of unowned, state-owned, or common property resources.
Proponents of this school include John A. Hannigan, particularly in Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective (1995).
Although there was sometimes acrimonious debate between the constructivist and realist "camps" within environmental sociology in the 1990s, the two sides have found considerable common ground as both increasingly accept that while most environmental problems have a material reality they nonetheless become known only via human processes such as scientific knowledge, activists' efforts, and media attention.
Widespread green consciousness moved vertically within society, resulting in a series of policy changes across many states in the U.S. and Europe in the 1970s.
Societies including Easter Island, the Anaszi, and the Mayans were argued to have ended abruptly, largely due to poor environmental management.
At the same time, societal successes for Diamond included New Guinea and Tikopia island whose inhabitants have lived sustainably for 46,000 years.
They analyze the past 30 years of environmentalism and the different outcomes that the green movement has taken in different state contexts and cultures.
[citation needed] Recently and roughly in temporal order below, much longer-term comparative historical studies of environmental degradation are found by sociologists.
Thus recreated communities were founded in these so-called 'Dark Ages,' novel religions were popularized, and perhaps most importantly to him the environment had several centuries to recover from previous destruction.
More case oriented studies were conducted by historical environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker analyzing China, Japan, and Europe over 2,500 years in his book Ecological Revolution (2009).
