We lay the foundations for a critical human ecology that combines the strengths of the biophysical human ecology tradition in environmental sociology with those of historical materialism. We show the strengths of a critically informed human ecology by addressing four key meta-theoretical issues: materialist versus idealist approaches in the social sciences, dialectical versus reductionist analyses, the respective importance of historical and ahistorical causal explanations, and the difference between structural and functional interpretations of phenomena. CHE breaks with the idealism of Western (...) Marxism, which dominated academic neo-Marxist thought in the latter half of the 20th century, and advocates instead the pursuit of a materialist, scientific methodology in dialectical perspective for the explanation of social and ecological change. In turn, this project also involves a critique of the ahistorical and functionalist tendencies of traditional human ecology, while sharing human ecology 's basic starting point: the ecological embeddedness of human societies. (shrink)

In this article, I criticize environmental sociology’s conventional diagnosis of its methodological situation and overly narrow definition of its field. I argue for a greater engagement with the natural science base and consideration of anthropological approaches. I start with conceptual analysis, identifying the human-environment relationship as a pro-active two-way interaction. I then present an outline of global environmental dynamics, highlighting the unequal size of human activities on geosphere and biosphere scale, and the role of the biosphere as manager of the (...) geosphere, this as context for the human population problem. Three types of environmental problems are next identified: urban-industrial, rural-agrarian, and high hazard exposure. These are seen as forming a continuum, with anthropogenic and natural factors synergizing at the centre. I comment on their geographic distribution, noting Europe’s limited and specific environmental experience. Lastly I attempt an overview without biological metaphors of the humanenvironment relationship through time, commenting on its inherent imbalances and how these might be diagnosed. I conclude that sociology’s bias to modernity and the West renders it inadequate to the global environmental question. A wider and deeper spacio-temporal consideration is needed, with the whole continuum of environmental problems considered. For this, environmental sociology should seek a synthesis with cultural anthropology centring on the anthropological concept of culture, an approach, I argue, that is accessible through the sociology of Max Weber. (shrink)

Some environmental activists occasionally use the argument that poverty is ‘no excuse’ for not going green and denounce discourses putting forward social conditions as unduly exculpatory. Employing participant observation among middle-class activists mobilising to diffuse environmental lifestyles in socially diverse suburbs near Paris (France), the article explores their relation to the working class and examines the consequences of their endeavours on local class relations. It describes the tension between their goal of mainstreaming environmental reflexivity and the stubborn existence of material (...) inequalities and constraints. While their efforts are configured by a moral economy of environmental responsibility which assigns an undifferentiated moral obligation to consume sustainably to all individuals, they make sense of social differences by drawing on culturalist representations of poverty and folk social theories. These sense-making practices enhance rather than alleviate attributions of blame against working-class people and contribute to reinforcing the activists’ dominant symbolic position. (shrink)