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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Environmental Sociology

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Environmental Sociology by Kyle W. Knight LAST REVIEWED: 28 October 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199363445-0100

Having emerged in the 1970s as public awareness of and concern for environmental problems increased, environmental sociology’s main goal is to understand the interconnections between human societies and the natural (or biophysical) environment. Environmental sociology has been described as comprising four major areas of research. First, environmental sociologists study the social causes of environmental problems. Along these lines, scholars have developed an array of theoretical frameworks to explain how various social factors, including demographic, social, cultural, political, economic, and technological dynamics, generate environmental impacts and problems, and they have conducted many empirical studies on a wide range of environmental indicators to assess hypotheses derived from these theories. Second, environmental sociology is concerned with how the natural environment influences and impacts society. Early environmental sociologists strongly emphasized the dependence of human societies on the natural environment and stressed that the field should consider how the environment shapes society in addition to how society impacts the environment. Research in this area tackles issues such as the social consequences of natural disasters and the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards along racial and socioeconomic lines. Third, environmental sociology examines social reactions and responses to environmental threats and problems. Research in this area focuses on understanding patterns and trends in environmental attitudes and behaviors (e.g., recycling) as well as various aspects of the environmental movement. Fourth, environmental sociologists are concerned with understanding social processes and dynamics that could advance environmental reform and sustainability. In general, environmental sociology has tended to focus more on explaining how society causes environmental problems while paying less attention to potential solutions, but a shift has taken place in recent decades. The development, discussion, and empirical assessment of theories of environmental reform, analyses of potential solutions to environmental crises, and drafting of conceptual frameworks for sustainability have become important foci of scholarly activity in environmental sociology. Another major area of research, one that cuts across the preceding four, is the human dimensions of global climate change, which has become one of the main substantive issues studied by environmental sociologists. In this article, important scholarly works in each of these five areas are highlighted and briefly discussed, along with a selection of the most relevant textbooks, handbooks and collections, encyclopedia and review articles that provide general overviews of the field, and academic journals that publish environmental sociology research.

A number of encyclopedia articles offer up-to-date, accessible, and relatively concise overviews of research in environmental sociology. Two relatively recent articles that were authored by prominent scholars are cited here ( Jorgenson, et al. 2014 ; York and Dunlap 2012 ). Review articles are another source of overviews of the field; compared to encyclopedia articles these are generally more in-depth, technical, and comprehensive, and they often highlight emerging trends and point out underexamined issues or unresolved questions in the research literature. Four review articles are included here, two classic works ( Buttel 1987 , Dunlap and Catton 1979 ) and two contemporary pieces ( Pellow and Nyseth Brehm 2013 ; Rudel, et al. 2011 ).

Buttel, F. H. 1987. New directions in environmental sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 13:465–488.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.13.080187.002341

This review article provides an overview and assessment of research in environmental sociology in its first decade as an established subdiscipline of sociology and identifies the main areas of inquiry during this period.

Dunlap, R. E., and W. R. Catton Jr. 1979. Environmental sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 5:243–273.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.so.05.080179.001331

A foundational work in the field. This classic review article describes the emergence and early development of environmental sociology, distinguishes it from mainstream sociology, and defines its core focus as the study of society-environment interactions.

Jorgenson, A. K., R. E. Dunlap, and B. Clark. 2014. Ecology and environment. In C oncise encyclopedia of comparative sociology . Edited by M. Sasaki, J. Goldstone, E. Zimmerman, and S. K. Sanderson, 457–464. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

DOI: 10.1163/9789004266179_048

A brief review of the major theoretical and methodological approaches in comparative international environmental sociology research.

Pellow, D. N., and H. Nyseth Brehm. 2013. An environmental sociology for the twenty-first century. Annual Review of Sociology 39:229–250.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-071312-145558

This review article provides the most up-to-date overview of the field. It describes the origins of environmental sociology; reviews major theories, topics, and issues; highlights related areas of inquiry; and discusses future directions for research.

Rudel, T. K., J. T. Roberts, and J. Carmin. 2011. Political economy of the environment. Annual Review of Sociology 37:221–238.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102639

This article provides a chronological review of substantive and theoretical issues in sociological research on the political-economic dynamics of environmental problems, social responses to them, and efforts to address them.

York, R., and R. E. Dunlap. 2012. Environmental sociology. In The Wiley-Blackwell companion to sociology . Edited by G. Ritzer, 504–521. Chichester, UK: Blackwell.

DOI: 10.1002/9781444347388.ch27

This excellent encyclopedia article offers a broad but detailed discussion of the major areas of research and theoretical debates within contemporary environmental sociology.

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Climate change sociology: Past contributions and future research needs

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

• Debra J. Davidson

Published: July 12, 2022

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000055
• Reader Comments

Citation: Davidson DJ (2022) Climate change sociology: Past contributions and future research needs. PLOS Clim 1(7): e0000055. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000055

Editor: Jamie Males, PLOS Climate, UNITED KINGDOM

Copyright: © 2022 Debra J. Davidson. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

That the causes and consequences of climate change are deeply entangled with socioeconomic systems is no longer a provocative statement. Contributions by social scientists have grown impressively in both volume and influence recently. Sociology has played a particularly prominent role in the field, and several excellent recent reviews far more comprehensive than what I will offer here are available [ 1 – 6 ]. In what follows, I highlight notable findings offered by sociologists who focus on climate change, followed by key priorities in future research.

Notable sociological contributions, representing findings with strong agreement across several studies, fall into in three main areas, including social drivers; social impacts; and the power and politics associated with responses to climate change.

The research record articulating multiple social factors and their relative weight as drivers of climate change represent what is perhaps the strongest and most extensive set of sociological contributions to climate science and policy. Especially of note is the degree to which sociological research contradicts persistent claims in political discourse, including, first, the fact that population size has at most an indirect association with emissions, in fact economic growth is far more consequential. Second, individual consumption practices and climate action are shaped by multiple socio-cultural factors that belie simplistic, rationalist, ‘knowledge deficit’ models of human behaviour—information is necessary but by no means sufficient to motivate climate concern and action.

The prevailing finding emerging from research on the social impacts of climate change is the inequitable nature of those impacts. Because those peoples who are the most vulnerable—notably many global south regions, and BIPOC, Indigenous, and non-cismales in all regions—are also the least accountable for the emissions that produced the risks in the first place, the inequitable distribution of climate risks also represents a grievous injustice.

Third, sociologists have made resoundingly clear that responding to climate change has relatively less to do with technology and economics, where attention is so often directed, and far more to do with power and politics. From the local to the international scale, sociologists have provided evidence of the strong arm of power relations and their influence over political processes in the climate sphere. Most notable has been irrefutable evidence provided of the orchestration of climate denial through the deployment of disinformation by representatives and allies of the fossil fuel industry, effectively postponing proactive policy responses in many western polities for decades. Also notable are studies evidencing the role of media institutions in attenuating the perceived risk of climate change among publics. Sociologists attribute this institutional influence at least in part to the deployment of discourses—human exceptionalism, neoliberalism and technological optimism being particularly consequential—that prescribe a narrow ontological lens through which problem and solution spaces are created. Other studies have catalogued the factors facilitating the escalation in social movement engagement, and the successes of those endeavours.

As noteworthy as this body of scholarship is, the list of questions to which sociology could and should contribute more is far longer, including areas of contention and disagreement in current scholarship, and emergent themes associated with our rapidly shifting socio-ecological dynamics. In the realm of social drivers of emissions, there remains a need to disentangle the specific role of economic structures that operate at differing levels, including neoliberalism, globalization, industrialization, and capitalism, each of which has very different ramifications for policy response. In addition, the roles that both colonialism and patriarchy have played and continue to play in driving climate and environmental disruption have entered into academic climate dialogues, and warrant more attention.

One of the emerging impacts that warrants further attention entails interlinkages between climate change and labour—including working conditions in highly exposed regions and occupations, as well as prospects for, and prospective effects of, occupational shifts prompted by climate policies (e.g. de-growth and Just Transition initiatives). As the impacts of climate change evolve rapidly from the projected to the realized, the multiple consequences for families, communities and societies are coming into sharp focus, opening up a plethora of urgent questions for sociology. The most glaring of consequences are those associated with extreme events—floods, fires, heat waves and drought—unfolding at a shocking pace across the global map in recent years. Somewhat less vivid but no less consequential are rapid declines in essential needs—food, energy, and water—that have begun to unfold anew in some places (e.g. the US southwest), and intensify in regions already defined by scarcity (e.g. east Africa). Enormous disruptions to normalcy and survival associated with the loss of livelihoods, of homes and entire communities, and subsequently large movements of people, bespeak the need for a sociology of loss [ 7 ]. Material impacts include not solely the cost of disaster recovery but also rapid devaluation of real estate, and stranded assets associated with energy transition. All of these disruptions raise the spectre of failure in our risk and disaster management institutions, what Esping-Andersen [ 8 :5] refers to as a “disjuncture between the existing institutional configuration and exogenous change,” forcing a political confrontation with current structures of political and economic power. Sociologists have also begun to broaden our account of climate impacts to include the numerous non-material consequences associated with the loss of home and community, and coming to terms with climate futures.

Research needs are equally substantial in the realm of climate change responses. Notable here are growing calls for greater understanding of how emotions shape individual and collective responses to climate change, including climate anxiety, particularly among younger generations. As well, the intersections between climate politics and the escalation of far-right, populist and authoritarian movements; competition for political and public attention posed by contingent crises like the coronavirus pandemic and associated economic decline, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all loom large on the sociology of climate change agenda.

The unique contribution of sociology to the study of climate change rests with its centering of mechanisms of social change within a conceptual landscape that encompasses individual, social interactional, and socio-structural levels. Yet, despite its record of achievements, and its potential to address the emerging research questions described here, sociology remains in the back seat in climate science and policy. The comparatively lower funding levels received by the social sciences and humanities have already been noted elsewhere. But some self-reflection about this underperformance within the discipline is warranted as well. Most notably, the disciplinary core has yet to fully embrace climate change as a worthy subject [ 3 , 5 ]. Sociologists committed to the study of climate change face difficulties receiving career rewards from their home disciple, and resort to publication outside of major sociology journals [ 4 ]. Alas, the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm still prevails. Sociology needs to embrace the interdisciplinarity that can allow for application of socio-ecological systems approaches [ 2 ]. Other disciplinary shifts are also called for, including methodological experiments in forecasting, rather than solely explaining, change would enhance sociology’s role [e.g. 9 ], as would expanding representation of climate sociology scholarship emanating from researchers in the Global South.

• 1. Falzon D., Roberts J.T. and Brulle R.J. Sociology and climate change: A review and research agenda. In: Caniglia BS, Jorgensen A, Malin SA, Peek L, Pellow DN, Huang X. editors. Handbook of Environmental Sociology. Springer; 2021, pp. 189–217.
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• 6. Dunlap RE, Brulle RJ, editors. Climate Change and Society : Sociological Perspectives . Oxford University Press; 2015.
• 8. Esping-Andersen G. Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies. New York, Oxford University Press; 1999.

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Environmental Sociology is dedicated to applying and advancing the sociological imagination in relation to a wide variety of environmental challenges, controversies and issues, at every level from the global to local, from ‘world culture’ to diverse local perspectives. As an international, peer-reviewed scholarly journal, Environmental Sociology aims to stretch the conceptual and theoretical boundaries of both environmental and mainstream sociology, to highlight the relevance of sociological research for environmental policy and management, to disseminate the results of sociological research, and to engage in productive dialogue and debate with other disciplines in the social, natural and ecological sciences.

Contributions may utilize a variety of theoretical orientations including, but not restricted to: critical theory, cultural sociology, ecofeminism, ecological modernization, environmental justice, organizational sociology, political ecology, political economy, post-colonial studies, risk theory, social psychology, science and technology studies, globalization, world-systems analysis, and so on. Cross- and transdisciplinary contributions are welcome where they demonstrate a novel attempt to understand social-ecological relationships in a manner that engages with the core concerns of sociology in social relationships, institutions, practices and processes. All methodological approaches in the environmental social sciences – qualitative, quantitative, integrative, spatial, policy analysis, etc. – are welcomed. Environmental Sociology welcomes high-quality submissions from scholars around the world.

Topics of interest to Environmental Sociology include biodiversity; business and the environment; climate change adaptation, mitigation and consequences; consumers and consumption; culture and the environment; ecological citizenship; ecological practices; energy; environmental attitudes, behaviours and practices; environmental communication; environmental controversies; environmental governance, policy and regulation (including participatory approaches); environmental risks, hazards and uncertainties; environmental social movements; environmental technologies; food, agriculture and the environment; gender and the environment; global environmental change; health and the environment; human ecology; mass media, new medias and the environment; mobilities, migration and transport; natural resource management; population and environmental change; race, ethnicity and the environment; sociology of water management; sustainable development; urban and industrial environments; etc. Submissions are also sought on innovations, challenges and debates in research methods and teaching in environmental sociology.

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Environmental sociology provides many perspectives on interactions between the social and material aspects of life. This course will explore a variety of these perspectives as we examine issues including: pollution, climate change, resource use, and access to environmental amenities. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to apply concepts from environmental sociology to contemporary events. Some questions that we will consider over the course of the semester include: What factors contribute to disparities in access to environmental benefits and exposure to environmental costs? How can we assess tradeoffs between economic and environmental priorities? How does conceptualizing the environment as “other” impact processes and outcomes? How do cultural values, norms, and practices contribute to environmental degradation and also make it more challenging to improve environmental problems? How do various social science methods help us to measure, conceptualize, and intervene in environmental challenges?

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• Scott Frickel 8 &
• Florencia Arancibia 9  

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

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From their inception, the fields of environmental sociology and science and technology studies (STS) have nourished deep political commitments toward science and technology. Yet, those political commitments have tended to run in different directions, often leading practitioners to ask different questions and nourish different theoretical traditions and methodological preferences. By paying less attention to philosophical differences among certain scholars, and more attention to empirical research and practice, we hope to persuade readers that STS provides an important set of connections to—and has the potential to help advance—what we take to be one of environmental sociology’s central projects: a deeper materialist understanding of nature-society interactions. Accordingly, this chapter reviews three key areas of overlapping research, drawing examples from North and South American contexts: Neo-extractivismo and sociotechnical regimes of resource extraction, environmental ignorance and the problem of undone science, and the political mobilization of environmental science.

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Studies of boundary work in the environmental sciences include Clark et al. ( 2016 ), Gaziano ( 1996 ), and Kinchy ( 2006 ).

The centrality of materialism to environmental sociology’s intellectual project remains firm, even as the field has moved with the rest of the social sciences through a “cultural turn”, with some scholars lighting on hybrids, cyborgs, posthumans, and technonatures as tools for mapping material-cultural environments (White et al., 2015 ).

On the history of political ecology and STS in Latin America see, respectively, Pengue ( 2017 ) and Kreimer and Vessuri ( 2018 ).

Generally speaking, STS is articulated through its intellectual and institutional relationships with anthropology, history, geography, philosophy, and sociology. For recent reviews of the STS field, see Felt et al. ( 2017 ) and Kleinman and Moore ( 2014 ). Both handbooks contain multiple chapters dealing with environmental topics, including environmental justice, global environmental science, risk, and environmental ignorance.

In conducting research for this review we were delighted to come across Lidskog and Sundqvist’s new article, which sketches the connections between STS and environmental sociology, mapped through the concept of “expertise.” We have taken a different, but complementary, approach here. We also note that the journal Environmental Sociology , established in 2015, has published a number of STS-related articles.

Enrique Leff takes a broadly similar approach in his essay, “Environment and science articulation” (Leff, 1986b ), in which he reflects on the close relationship between techno-scientific knowledge and capitalist production, and the associated epistemological limits of traditional “environmental sciences” to address environmental problems related to productive activities.

Other programmatic statements in the political sociology of science and technology include Frickel and Moore ( 2006 ), Frickel and Hess ( 2014 ), Hess ( 2016 ), and Moore et al. ( 2011 ).

While industrial-scale resource extraction is nothing new in Latin America, since the 2000s its intensification has been heavily promoted by international organizations and influential think-tanks (Burchardt & Dietz, 2014 ; Svampa, 2015b ). These promotional efforts have run in parallel with a shift in Latin American economic development policy from what had been called the “Washington consensus” (arising in the 1980s and dominant through the 1990s), to a newer “commodities consensus” that continues today (Svampa, 2015b ). In fact, primary goods in Latin America grew from constituting 27% of total exports in 2000 to 60.7% in 2011, clearly exceeding total industrial exports (CEPAL 2012 ). According to the UN, in 2011, raw materials represented 76% of total exports in Latin America, compared to only 34% for the world as a whole (UNCTAD 2014 ). Latin American manufacture of advanced technology, in comparison, represented 7% compared to 25% worldwide (Ibid.).

As one of our reviewer’s noted, “academic dependency” and a critical adoption of theoretical frameworks and technologies from the North have been recurring topics in Latin American STS (Beigel, 2013 ; Connell et al., 2017 ; Díaz et al., 1983 ). Indeed, the sociotechnical regime framework we review here is in some ways consonant with studies of socio-technical systemic views pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s by members of the Latin America School of Thought on Science and Technology (e.g., Sábato & Botana, 1968 ; Varsavsky, 1974 ; see also Thomas, 2010 ).

The authors credit this observation to Thomas and Fressoli ( 2011 ).

Agro-ecology is a holistic approach that applies ecological principles to agriculture, this means relying on ecological interactions and synergies between biological components within the farm rather than requiring external inputs (e.g., pesticides) (Altieri, 1995 ).

The term epistemic inequality is malleable. See, for example, Go ( 2017 ) and Morgan et al. ( 2018 ) for very different examples of meanings and uses.

The movement documented increased occurrences of cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes and autism as well as a range of reproductive health ailments including miscarriages, birth defects, infertility, and delayed pregnancies.

The book recounts The Great Collapse culminating in the rapid disintegration of the West Antarctica and Greenland Ice Sheets during 2073–2093.

Speculative though it is, Oreskes and Conway’s description of how The Great Collapse will unfold is based on current science and some of its most sophisticated predictive models.

The critiques emerging from political sociological accounts of scientific institutions, organizations, and fields are not deconstructionist in the postmodern sense and do not require epistemological relativism as an underpinning.

Enrique Leff’s ( 1986b ) epistemological work on environmental thinking is an important exception, one that exemplifies the power of a reflexive approach in political ecology.

Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions: An essay on the division of expert labor . University of Chicago Press.

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Alimonda, H. (2002). Ecología política . Naturaleza, Sociedad y Utopía. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

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Alimonda, H., Pérez, C. T., & Martín, F. (2017b). Ecología política latinoamericana. Pensamiento crítico, diferencia latinoamericana y rearticulación epistémica, Volumen 2. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

Allen, B. (2003). Uneasy alchemy: Citizens and experts in Louisiana's chemical corridor disputes . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Allen, B., Ferrier, Y., & Cohen, A. K. (2017). Through a maze of studies: Health questions and ‘undone science’ in a French industrial region. Environmental Sociology, 3 (2), 134–144. https://doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2016.1220850 .

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (NSF Award Number: 1827910). We thank the editors for the opportunity to contribute to this larger project, and we especially thank Apollonya Porcelli and David Pellow for their knowledgeable and constructive suggestions for improving our initial draft. We have tried to meet their expectations and take full responsibility for any remaining lapses of logic or interpretation.

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Stephanie A. Malin

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Frickel, S., Arancibia, F. (2021). Environmental Science and Technology Studies. In: Schaefer Caniglia, B., Jorgenson, A., Malin, S.A., Peek, L., Pellow, D.N., Huang, X. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Sociology. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77712-8_22

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Patrick Greiner will join UW Sociology Faculty in Fall 2024

Patrick Trent Greiner’s research centers on providing greater insight into the complex co-constitution of social inequalities, environmental changes, and their consequences. His teaching interests center on the theories and methods that facilitate understanding of simultaneous and reciprocal change in social and ecological systems as well. Professor Greiner’s work has been published in journals such as  Environmental Sociology ,  Environmental Research Letters, Nature + Culture, The Journal of Land Use Science, The Journal of Classical Sociology, Rural Sociology,  and  Human Ecology Review,  among others. He has written and had his work highlighted in a number of international periodicals and news outlets, such as  The Conversation ,  El Globo News,  and  Phys  as well.

Greiner received his BA in Politics and Policy from Washington State University, and his MS and PhD in Sociology from University of Oregon. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Studies, and the 2022-2024 C Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow of Grand Challenges in Climate and Society at Vanderbilt University. To learn more, go HERE

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