Environmental Sociology and Climate Change

Environmental sociology emerged as a distinct subfield in the 1970s, challenging mainstream sociology's neglect of the natural environment and the material basis of social life. William Catton and Riley Dunlap's foundational 1978 article argued that sociology's dominant Western worldview, which they termed the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm, assumed that humans were exempt from ecological constraints, and called for a New Ecological Paradigm recognizing that human societies are embedded within and dependent upon ecosystems with finite carrying capacities.

Allan Schnaiberg's treadmill of production theory, developed in The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity (1980), provides the most influential political economic analysis of environmental degradation. Schnaiberg argues that capitalism operates as a treadmill in which the imperative of profit accumulation drives continuous expansion of production, which requires accelerating extraction of natural resources and generates increasing volumes of pollution and waste. The treadmill is maintained by an alliance between capital, which benefits from expanded production, the state, which depends on economic growth for tax revenue and political legitimacy, and labor, which depends on economic expansion for employment.

This growth coalition systematically marginalizes environmental concerns because environmental protection threatens the conditions of capital accumulation. Schnaiberg's key insight is that environmental problems are not the result of ignorance, irrationality, or market failures but are structurally embedded in the logic of capitalist production. James O'Connor's ecological Marxism extends this analysis by arguing that capitalism's exploitation of nature constitutes a second contradiction of capitalism: the first contradiction is between capital and labor over the distribution of surplus value, while the second is between capitalism and the conditions of production, including natural resources, infrastructure, and human health, which capitalism simultaneously depends upon and destroys.

John Bellamy Foster's concept of metabolic rift, drawn from Marx's analysis of soil depletion under industrial agriculture, describes the fundamental disruption of the metabolic relationship between human societies and the natural world produced by capitalist accumulation.