Woodgate, G; (2017) From Environmental Sociology to Ecosociologies. In: Choné, A and Hajek, I and Hamman, P, (eds.) Rethinking Nature: Challenging Disciplinary Boundaries. (pp. 114-127). Routledge: London, UK.

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Abstract

Sociological engagement with the material bases of social life has a long, but intermittent and sometimes overlooked, genealogy. The emergence of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and events like the first ‘Earth Day’ in 1970, followed soon after by the postulation of material ‘limits to growth’, although generating significant sociological interest, also revealed the inadequacy of then-dominant forms of sociological enquiry. Entrenched anthropocentrism, born from engagement with the ‘exuberant expansion’ of Western civilization in a context of abundant natural resources, limited sociology’s ability to shed light on the societal relevance of changing ecological circumstances. At a time when heavyweight US sociologists such as Talcott Parsons were still focusing their attention on functional societal evolution and Daniel Bell was deriding the concerns of the ecology movement as ‘apocalyptic hysteria’, Catton and Dunlap (1978, 1980) called for sociology to reject what they termed the ‘human exceptionalist paradigm’ (HEP), which they associated with the dominant US sociological canon, and adopt a ‘new ecological paradigm’ (NEP) for a ‘postexuberant’ sociology.

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