Climate Sociology

For most of the twentieth century, sociology treated the natural environment as a backdrop to social life rather than a proper object of analysis. William Catton and Riley Dunlap's landmark essay 'Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm' (American Sociologist, 1978) argued that sociology's founding figures had all assumed a 'Human Exemptionalism Paradigm' in which human societies were seen as exempt from ecological limits. Catton and Dunlap proposed a 'New Ecological Paradigm' (NEP) instead, insisting that societies are embedded in finite biophysical systems whose dynamics shape social outcomes. Their essay crystallized a research program that slowly reshaped the field across the 1980s and 1990s, producing specialized journals (Organization & Environment, Society & Natural Resources) and a distinct ASA section by 1976.

Climate sociology emerged as a distinct subfield in the late 1990s and 2000s, when the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming crystallized and when the political stakes became unavoidable. Unlike earlier environmental sociology, which often focused on local pollution, resource extraction, or conservation politics, climate sociology addresses a genuinely global, intergenerational, and systemic problem. Its core questions include: why have societies been so slow to respond to a well-documented existential threat? Who benefits from fossil-fuel-intensive development and who bears its costs? How are climate impacts distributed within and between nations? And how do cultural, political, and organizational dynamics enable or obstruct mitigation and adaptation? Answering these questions requires integrating sociological theory with climate science, political economy, and international relations.

John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology (2000) and his journal Monthly Review articles revived a Marxist strand within climate sociology through the concept of the metabolic rift — the idea, drawn from Marx's Capital, that capitalist agriculture and industry disrupt the metabolic cycles connecting humans to the rest of nature. Foster argues that climate change is not an aberration of capitalism but an expression of its structural tendency to treat ecosystems as free inputs and waste sinks. Ulrich Beck's Risk Society (German 1986; English 1992) offered a different but complementary framing: modern industrial societies produce novel, globally distributed risks (nuclear accidents, climate change, toxic exposure) that cannot be contained by national borders and that the science generating them cannot fully assess. Climate change, for Beck, is the defining risk-society phenomenon — manufactured by industrial modernity, managed by the same institutions that produced it, and experienced unevenly across social position. Together, Foster's political-economic and Beck's reflexive-modernization framings anchor much of contemporary climate-sociological theorizing.