The New Ecological Paradigm and Environmental Sociology's Founding

Before the late 1970s, mainstream sociology paid almost no attention to the biophysical environment. The classical canon — Marx, Weber, Durkheim — had been forged in the nineteenth century, when industrial expansion seemed to promise indefinite growth and when natural limits barely figured in political or economic debate. Twentieth-century sociology inherited this orientation. Talcott Parsons's structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory, and the empirical subfields of the post-war American academy treated society as essentially self-contained, to be explained by reference to other social facts rather than by reference to soils, rivers, energy flows, or atmospheric chemistry. The environment appeared, when it appeared at all, only as inert backdrop.

This was not an accident. Riley Dunlap and William Catton Jr. would later argue that the entire discipline rested on a shared cosmology they called the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP). Human beings, according to HEP, are fundamentally different from other species because we have culture, language, and technology. Culture can solve the problems technology creates. Because social and cultural environments matter more than biophysical ones, the study of human life can proceed without serious engagement with ecology. Progress through science and markets is cumulative and essentially unconstrained. These assumptions, Dunlap and Catton noted, had never been argued explicitly; they were simply the background understanding against which sociology's many quarrelling schools defined themselves.

The 1960s and 1970s made this complacency untenable. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) exposed the ecological damage of synthetic pesticides. The Santa Barbara oil spill (1969), the fire on the Cuyahoga River (1969), the first Earth Day (1970), and the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (1970) brought environmental concern into mass politics. The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972) used early systems modeling to argue that exponential growth in a finite biosphere would produce crisis within a century. The OPEC oil shock (1973) made energy scarcity an unavoidable political fact. Meanwhile, biologists and ecologists — Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, Howard Odum, Donella Meadows — were writing with increasing urgency about carrying capacity, nutrient cycles, and thermodynamic constraint. A young generation of sociologists, watching their discipline ignore these developments, began to ask whether HEP could survive the ecological turn.

The answer, proposed most famously in 1978, was that it could not — and that a new sociological paradigm was required to take the biophysical world seriously.