The Ecological Rift by John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark & Richard York

Author:John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark & Richard York
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2010-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Navigating the Great Divide: Realism versus Constructionism

From its first appearance in the mid-1970s until the 1990s, environmental sociology was characterized by “an almost universal commitment … to a realist epistemology and a materialist ontology.”9 Nevertheless, the social constructionist perspective, which soon gained prominence within the sociology of science, social problems, and the sociology of gender, began strongly to impress itself on environmental sociology by the 1990s. The result was a debate between realists and constructionists that, while resembling similar controversies in other areas of sociology, took on an extremely virulent form.

From the beginning, environmental sociologists have charged that sociology as a discipline has been far more reluctant than other social science disciplines to incorporate natural-environmental postulates into its analysis—a failing, they claimed, that was less evident in the work of sociology’s classical founders.10 In their original formulation, which helped to launch the field, William R. Catton Jr. and Riley E. Dunlap presented environmental sociology as a subdiscipline, embodying a “new environmental paradigm” that opposed the “human exemptionalist” (from nature) assumptions prevalent in much of social science and sociology in particular.11

Environmental sociology arose in conjunction with the environmental movement in the 1970s, spurred on like the latter by the warnings of scientists with regard to ecological crisis.12 Environmental sociologists thus saw themselves as addressing this developing ecological crisis from the standpoint of social systems, institutions, processes, and agents. Because of this focus on the reality of ecological crisis that had defined the field from the start, numerous environmental sociologists saw the sudden intrusion of strong social constructionist views into environmental sociology, roughly a decade and a half after its inception, as a threat to the very constitution of the subdiscipline. Realist environmental sociologists responded sharply to the antirealism, for example, of Keith Tester, who provocatively declared that “a fish is only a fish if it is socially classified as one, and that classification is only concerned with fish to the extent that scaly things living in the sea help society define itself…. Animals are indeed a blank paper which can be inscribed with any message, and symbolic meaning, that the social wishes.”13

For realists within environmental sociology, this kind of strong social-constructionist “antirealism,” as it was sometimes called even by those sympathetic to it, only seemed to reinforce, at an even more extreme level, an anthropocentrism with regard to nature that environmental sociology from the beginning had sought to combat.14

Realist environmental sociologists were further alarmed by the persistent questioning of not only science in general but also scientific depictions of ecological crises, as the methods and conclusions of sociologists of science influenced by the Edinburgh “strong programme” and the work of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar began to filter into environmental sociology.15 Thus in extending arguments from the sociology of science into the terrain of environmental sociology, Steven Yearly stressed the “uncertain basis” of the global warming hypothesis, which he contended rested on questionable scientific authority and scientific framing, concluding that the fact that “we cannot know such things for certain” was the “Achilles’ heel” of environmental science, as with science in general.

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