ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY: Classical Foundations, Contemporary Insights

Environmental Sociology is a comprehensive survey and assessment of sociological theories of the relations between societies and their “natural” biophysical environments. This book addresses virtually all of the major perspectives, focal points, and debates in environmental sociology today—classical and twentieth-century social theories, macro-micro linkage issues, globalization and development, reflexive modernization, ecological modernization versus “limits” viewpoints, modernity and post modernity, risk society, constructionalism-realism, environmental movements/ identities, consumption and environment, cultural sociologies of the environment, and so on. At the same time, the book aims to go beyond an inventory of environmental sociological theory. Environmental Sociology stresses how new ground can be broken in the articulation of environmental sociology with major classical and contemporary sociological theories.

Riley E. Dunlap is Boeing Distinguished Professor of Environmental Sociology at Washington State University and former president of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Environment and Society.

Frederick H. Buttel is professor of rural sociology and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is currently president of the Research Committee on Environment and Society of the International Sociological Association.

Peter Dickens is senior research fellow on the faculty of social and political sciences, University of Cambridge, UK. He is also a fellow and director of studies at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge.

August Gijswijt retired as an environmental sociologist from the University of Amsterdam in 1998. In 1990 he and György Szell founded the Research Committee on Environment and Science.