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1Introduction to Environment

and SocietyJ u l e s P r e t t y , A n d r e w B a l l , Te d B e n t o n ,

J u l i a G u i v a n t , D a v i d R . L e e , D a v i d O r r , M a x P f e f f e r a n d H u g h W a r d

PERSPECTIVES ON SUSTAINABILITY

It is only in recent decades that the concepts asso-ciated with sustainability have come into morecommon use. Environmental concerns began todevelop in the 1960s, and were particularly drivenby Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring and thepublicity surrounding it (Carson, 1963). Likeother popular and scientific studies at the time, itfocused on the environmental harm caused by oneeconomic sector, in this case agriculture. In the1970s, the Club of Rome identified the problemsthat societies would face when environmentalresources were overused, depleted or harmed, andpointed towards the need for different types ofpolicies to maintain and generate economicgrowth. In the 1980s, the World Commission onEnvironment and Development, chaired by GroHarlem Brundtland, published Our CommonFuture, the first serious attempt to link poverty tonatural resource management and the state of theenvironment. Sustainable development wasdefined as ‘meeting the needs of the present with-out compromising the ability of future generationsto meet their own needs.’ The concept impliedboth limits to growth, and the idea of different pat-terns of growth, as well as introducing questionsof intergenerational justice (WCED, 1987).

In 1992, the UN Conference on Environmentand Development was held in Rio de Janeiro, tak-ing forward many themes prefigured at the UNConference on the Human Environment held inStockholm in 1972. The main agreement was

Agenda 21, a forty-one chapter document settingout priorities and practices for all economic andsocial sectors, and how these should relate to theenvironment. The principles of sustainable formsof development that encouraged minimizing harmto the environment and human health were agreed.However, progress has not been good, as Agenda21 was not a binding treaty on national govern-ments, and all are free to choose whether theyadopt or ignore such principles (Pretty andKoohafkan, 2002). The Rio Summit was followedby some international successes, including thesigning of the Convention on Biodiversity in 1995,the Kyoto Protocol in 1998 and the StockholmConvention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in2001. The ten years after the Rio World Summit onSustainable Development was then held inJohannesburg in 2002, again raising the profile ofsustainability, but also failing to tie governmentsto clear actions and timetables.

Over time, the concept of sustainability hasgrown from an initial focus on environmentalaspects to include first economic and then broadersocial and political dimensions.

● Environmental or ecological – the core con-cerns are to reduce negative environmental andhealth externalities, to enhance and use localecosystem resources, and preserve biodiversity.More recent concerns include broader recognitionof the potential for positive environmental exter-nalities from some economic sectors (includingcarbon capture in soils and flood protection).

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● Economic – economic perspectives recognizethat many environmental services are not priced bymarkets and that, because of this, it may be eco-nomically rational to use the environment in unsus-tainable ways and to undersupply environmentalpublic goods. In response to this, some seek toassign value to environmental goods and services,and also to include a longer time frame in eco-nomic analysis. They also highlight subsidies thatpromote the depletion of resources or unfair com-petition with other production systems.

● Social and political – there are many concernsabout the equity of technological change. At thelocal level, sustainability is associated with partici-pation, group action and promotion of local insti-tutions and culture (Ostrom, 1990; Pretty andWard, 2001; Grafton and Knowles, 2004). At thehigher level, the concern is for enabling policiesthat target preservation of nature and its vitalgoods and services. Many believe that liberaldemocracies are more likely to give rise to suchpolicies than are autocracies, as part of generallybetter governance (United Nations DevelopmentProgramme, 2003), but the empirical evidence forthis is ambiguous (Midlarsky, 1998; Barrett andGraddy, 2000; Fredriksson et al., 2005). Partlybecause of this some argue that the liberal demo-cratic state needs to be transcended by adding inrepresentation of other species, other generationsand other nations (Eckersley, 2004) and by enhanc-ing the potential for open deliberation about the issues, to bring together the knowledge thatdifferent groups and communities have and toreduce the corrosive impact of narrow self-interest(cf. Saward, 1993; Dryzek, 1996).

SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE ON ENVIRONMENTAND SOCIETY

An important feature of this Handbook centres onhow social organization constrains humans’ rela-tionships with nature, but also how social organi-zations are shaped by nature. Perhaps the mostdistinctive feature of such an approach is that itrejects the notion that any form of social organiza-tion or structured human action is ideal or givenby nature. While much human action is con-strained by social structures (e.g. market behav-iour), it is assumed that those structures aresocially constructed and subject to change. Thisstance implies that human behaviour in relation tonature can be redirected if social structureschange. Furthermore, changes in nature may force changes in social structure which in turnlead to changes in human behaviour.

Social scientists have long striven to develop an understanding of the relationship between the

natural environment and society, but until the1970s treatment by sociologists of this relation-ship remained more implicit than explicit. At this time, sociologists began to consider thenature–society nexus, and contemporary environ-mental sociology became a reaction to growingsocial activism for environmental protection. Thisactivism reflected discontent with the dominantpro-technology and pro-growth economic policiesfollowing World War II. During the Cold War era,these policies might have tended to be either moremarket- or state-centred, but regardless of ideo-logical orientation economic growth driven bytechnological innovation was the overarchingapproach to economic development. This domi-nant worldview held that human domination ofnature was unproblematic from a practical stand-point and was morally justified as well. But thispoint of view came to be challenged on both prac-tical and moral grounds (Catton and Dunlap, 1978;Buttel, 1987; Beck, 1992a,b; Seippel, 2002).

From a practical standpoint, environmentaldeterioration became visible to the untrained eye.Air and water pollution became public issues ofgreat concern (Buttel, 1997; Mertig et al., 2002).Although the scientific community had been thefoundation of technological development, criticsof various technologies began to emerge fromwithin it as well. Perhaps the most celebrated sci-entist to mount a sustained critique of the environ-mental impacts of technology was Rachel Carson.Many observers claim that the publication of herbook, Silent Spring (Carson, 1963), marked therise of contemporary environmentalism in theUSA but there is clear evidence that concern aboutenvironmental destruction had already been stir-ring throughout the industrial world (Rootes,1997; Mertig et al., 2002). The rise of the environ-mental movement in the USA, for example, led to the enactment of a variety of unprecedentedenvironmental legislation.

Sociologists were somewhat taken by surpriseby the environmental movement, and struggled tounderstand it. Its substantive focus as well as thecomposition of its adherents appeared to be some-what different from the other social movements ofthe day. The movement’s adherents were initiallythought to be more middle class and perhaps moremainstream than the anti-war and civil rightsactivists of the time. Substantively, the movementseemed to be charting a new course that was notrooted in the dominant socialist or capitalist ideologies. For this reason some sociologistsbegan to suspect that environmentalists wereadvocating an entirely new paradigm – one thatpolitically was neither left nor right, but entirelydifferent. For this reason some initial thinking by sociologists was that an entirely new theoreti-cal underpinning would need to be formulated

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(Catton and Dunlap, 1978; Dunlap and Catton,1994; Dunlap, 1997).

Initially, existing social theories were largelyrejected on the assumption that they had beendeficient in considering the active part played bythe natural environment in societal developmentand had considered the impact of society onnature as inconsequential. Without a clear theoryto guide the development of an alternative sociol-ogy of the environment, early efforts moved in a variety of directions that steered environmentalsociology away from established theories of society.

Environmental sociologists initially criticizedexisting social theories for their hubris in assum-ing that humans through science and technologycould dominate nature without significant impactson the natural world or society. This paradigm waslabelled ‘human exemptionalism’ (Catton andDunlap, 1978; Dunlap and Catton, 1994). It wasimmediately clear that any sociology of the envi-ronment would need to focus on the relationshipbetween that natural environment and society. A more careful treatment of this issue would chal-lenge many assumptions in sociology. For exam-ple, sociology had assumed that all socialstructures could be explained by human agency.From this point of view, the physical and biologi-cal worlds were passive objects in the human con-struction of the social world (Murphy, 1994). Butenvironmentalists’ concerns about the destructionof nature and its consequences for society led to areconsideration of how nature shapes society.Some claimed that what was distinctive aboutenvironmental sociology was its emphasis on themutual constitution of nature and society(Freudenburg et al., 1995; Norgaard, 1997). Fromthis perspective, some sort of unidirectional andexclusively human construction of the life worldis impossible.

So, what shapes the relationship between soci-ety and the environment? Some early attempts toapply sociological theory to the understanding ofnature–society relationships drew on Marxistpolitical economy. Political economists focusedon the nature of the capitalist organization of pro-duction and how the functional demands of thissystem defined the use of nature. Some of theearly thought in this area emphasized how capital-ism’s requirement for the continuous expansion ofproduction into new areas would inevitably lead tothe destruction of nature (Schnaiberg, 1980;Schnaiberg and Gould, 1994; Buttel, 1997). Morerecently, there has been greater emphasis on howcapitalism is constrained by the biological andphysical limits imposed by the natural world(Benton, 1989, 1998; Dickens, 1996, 1997).

The implications of the dominant system ofmarket capitalism for nature–society relationships

are a point of considerable contention in sociology.Some would argue that the capitalist economy isfundamentally destructive of the environment andfor this reason is unsustainable in the long run.From this point of view, environmental destruc-tion is the ‘Achilles heel’ of capitalism. Thisapproach is deeply suspicious of claims that science and technology can always produce ade-quate substitutes for depleted natural resources(O’Connor, 1998). Recently, a decidedly moreoptimistic theory of ecological modernization hascome into play. From this point of view, environ-mental destruction reflects a lack of investment inmodern technologies and this deficit can be reme-died with state policies that prohibit productionpractices wasteful or destructive of the environ-ment. Ecological modernization is not just abouttechnology, though. It is as much about bringingecological considerations into market decisionmaking through appropriate pricing of environ-mental services. In this theory the state plays aprominent role, with little real significanceattached to abstractions like the ‘free’ market. Thestate constrains markets through policies thatestablish incentives to channel market behaviourin environmentally sound directions (Simonis,1989; Mol, 1996, 2001; Mol and Spaargaren,2000; Spaargaren et al., 2000).

These opposing viewpoints on the environmen-tal impacts of market economies point to the dis-tinctiveness of this approach to understandingnature–society relations. Regardless of their theo-retical orientation, sociologists consider organiza-tional forms to be social constructs that are subjectto change. This assumption implies that humanbehaviour is not inherent or given, but moulded bythe social structures in place at any time in history.Thus, sociologists emphasize the distinctiveness ofprocesses of societal rationalization, or the elabo-ration of a historically specific logic that structuresthe interaction between nature and society. Anyparticular rationalization is not ‘natural’ but has adistinctive form that constrains options for humaninteractions with nature (Murphy, 1994).

Since sociologists assume that social organiza-tion does not take some sort of ‘ideal’ form, theorganization of human interactions with nature isa subject of particular interest to sociologists.Given an infinite number of possible forms oforganization, why are similar forms of organiza-tion widely dispersed across a wide range ofsocial and natural environments? This questionhas become especially salient with the emergenceof the processes of globalization (Yearley, 1996).Economic, environmental and social organizationdisplays some striking similarities in far-flungparts of the world. This organizational isomor-phism is of growing interest to sociologists(Buttel, 1997; Frank, 2002; Frank et al., 2000;

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Schelhas and Pfeffer, 2005; Pfeffer et al., 2006).But just as interesting to sociologists are some ofthe distinctive ways that these organizations arerefashioned by local interests and the local naturalresource base (Pfeffer et al., 2001, 2005).

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSETS AND EXTERNALITIES

Many economic sectors directly affect many ofthe very assets on which they rely for success.Economic systems at all levels rely on the value ofservices flowing from the total stock of assets thatthey influence and control, and five types of asset,natural, social, human, physical and financial cap-ital, are now recognized as being important. Thereare, though, some advantages and misgivings withthe use of the term capital. On the one hand, cap-ital implies an asset, and assets should be caredfor, protected and accumulated over long andintergenerational periods. On the other, capital canimply easy measurability and transferability.Because the value of something can be assigned amonetary value, then it can appear not to matter ifit is lost, as the required money could simply beallocated to purchase another asset, or to transferit from elsewhere. But nature and its wider valuesis not so easily replaceable as a commodity(Coleman, 1988; Ostrom, 1990; Putnam, 1993;Flora and Flora, 1996; Benton, 1998; Uphoff,1998, 2002; Costanza et al., 1997; Pretty andWard, 2001; Pretty, 2003; MEA, 2005).

Nonetheless, as terms, natural, social andhuman capital have become widespread in helpingto shape concepts around basic questions aboutthe potential sustainability of natural and humansystems. The five capitals have been defined in thefollowing ways:

1 Natural capital produces environmental goodsand services, and is the source of food (bothfarmed and harvested or caught from the wild),wood and fibre; water supply and regulation;treatment, assimilation and decomposition ofwastes; nutrient cycling and fixation; soil forma-tion; biological control of pests; climate regula-tion; wildlife habitats; storm protection and floodcontrol; carbon sequestration; pollination; andrecreation and leisure.

2 Social capital yields a flow of mutually benefi-cial collective action, contributing to the cohe-siveness of people in their societies. The socialassets comprising social capital include norms,values and attitudes that predispose people tocooperate; relations of trust, reciprocity and obli-gations; and common rules and sanctions mutu-ally agreed or handed down. These are connectedand structured in networks and groups.

3 Human capital is the total capability residingin individuals, based on their stock of knowledgeskills, health and nutrition. It is enhanced byaccess to services that provide these, such asschools, medical services and adult training.People’s productivity is increased by their capac-ity to interact with productive technologies andwith other people. Leadership and organizationalskills are particularly important in making otherresources more valuable.

4 Physical capital is the store of human-madematerial resources, and comprises buildings, suchas housing and factories, market infrastructure,irrigation works, roads and bridges, tools and trac-tors, communications, and energy and transporta-tion systems, that make labour more productive.

5 Financial capital is more of an accountingconcept, as it serves in a facilitating role ratherthan as a source of productivity in and of itself. Itrepresents accumulated claims on goods and services, built up through financial systems that gather savings and issue credit, such as pen-sions, remittances, welfare payments, grants and subsidies.

As economic systems shape the very assets onwhich they rely for inputs, there are feedbackloops from outcomes to inputs. For instance, someeconomists emphasize the way that marketsrespond to resource scarcity is by pushing upprices, encouraging substitution and searching fortechnical change (Beckerman, 1996). However,such market feedbacks cannot work properly ifenvironmental assets come for free. Thus, whilesustainable systems will have a positive effect onnatural, social and human capital, unsustainableones feed back to deplete these assets, leavingfewer for future generations. For example, an agri-cultural system that erodes soil whilst producingfood externalizes costs that others must bear. Butone that sequesters carbon in soils through organicmatter accumulation helps to mediate climatechange. Similarly, a diverse system that enhanceson-farm wildlife for pest control contributes towider stocks of biodiversity, whilst simplifiedmodernized systems that eliminate wildlife do not.Agricultural systems that offer labour-absorptionopportunities, through resource improvements orvalue-added activities, can boost local economiesand help to reverse rural-to-urban migration pat-terns (Carney, 1998; Dasgupta and Serageldin,1998; Ellis, 2000; Morison et al., 2005; Pretty et al., 2006).

Any activities that lead to improvements inthese renewable capital assets thus make a contri-bution towards sustainability. However, the idea ofsustainability does not suggest that all assets areimproved at the same time. One system that con-tributes more to these capital assets than another


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can be said to be more sustainable, but there maystill be trade-offs with one asset increasing asanother falls, though some environmental assetsare essentially irreplaceable and vital, so they can-not be substituted – see the discussion of the ideaof sustainability below. In practice, though, thereare usually strong links between changes in natu-ral, social and human capital, with systems havingmany potential effects on all three.

Many economic systems are, therefore, funda-mentally multifunctional. They jointly producemany environmental goods and services. Clearly,a key policy challenge, for both industrialized anddeveloping countries, is to find ways to maintainand enhance economic productivity. But a keyquestion is: can this be done whilst seeking bothto improve the positive side-effects and to elimi-nate the negative ones? It will not be easy, as mod-ern patterns of development have tended to ignorethe considerable external costs of harm to theenvironment.

VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT

The idea that the environment and the services itprovides can be valued strikes some as antitheticalto the intrinsic values of environmental resourcesand the role that these resources play in society,history and culture. How can we possibly assignan economic or monetary value, it might be asked,to unique biodiversity such as the bald eagle or thesnow leopard, to views of the Alps or the RockyMountains, or to water resources that are essentialto life and that many societies consider to be an inherent human right? If economic/monetaryvalues of these and similar resources can be esti-mated, how can they possibly be accurate ifunderlying conditions of scarcity change, as theyinevitably will, leading to changes in associatedscarcity values? And, if economic/monetary val-ues are assigned to resources, whatever those values may be, does this valuation in and of itselfinevitably lead to political trade-offs that maydegrade those resources in the interests of economic development or other goals?

For these and many other reasons, the valuationof environmental resources is often fraught withcontention, both conceptually and certainly inpractice, where many empirical estimation andmeasurement issues arise. Yet, as mentionedabove, the treatment of environmental assets asnatural capital and associated exercises in meas-urement, valuation and evaluation are increasinglycommon in both academic analysis and policy-making. This is for several reasons. First, withoutsuch valuations, society has done a remarkablypoor job in managing its stewardship of environ-mental resources; surely, any mechanism that can

help improve on society’s past dubious record inenvironmental policy is an advance. Second, sinceat least the 1960s and 1970s, the environmentalimpacts of economic development and humaninterventions in the landscape have been central topolicy debates as society has increasingly beenconcerned with both the direct effects and oppor-tunity costs of those interventions – e.g. what islost when development proceeds. Third, in the twodecades since the publication of the BrundtlandReport (WCED, 1987), issues of sustainabilityhave achieved much higher prominence in publicdebate in many countries, highlighting the needsof future generations in decisions made todayabout resource use. This has increased interest inhow to trade off current versus future demands onthe environment and how to deal with associatedintergenerational equity concerns, which, in turn,has increased interest in mechanisms, like eco-nomic valuation, that permit these intertemporalcomparisons.

In addition to these general factors stimulatinginterest in environmental valuation, efforts at eco-nomic and monetary valuation of the environmenthave flourished over the past several decadesbecause they address several additional specificneeds that are increasingly evident in environmen-tal policymaking. First, the importance of thedivergence between social valuation of resourcesand their incomplete (or non-existent) valuation inthe market is increasingly apparent. How can webegin to address the problem of global warming,for example, if the externalities of industrial pollution are so poorly measured and understood,and consequently devalued in the policy arena,compared with the measurable jobs and incomethat are created? Second, as the human populationexpands and many formerly abundant resourcesare increasingly scarce – clean water and clean air,wilderness, open space, even silence – accountingfor, and valuing, the public good dimensions ofthese resources has become increasingly impor-tant in prioritizing their survival in policy debates.How else, outside of moral suasion, will thescarcity value of public goods be understood andtaken into account? Third, as the demand for eco-nomic valuation has expanded since the 1960s and 1970s, specific valuation methods and estima-tion procedures have also improved significantly,permitting a more accurate – though still frequently problematic – estimation of economicand monetary values of environmental resourcesand associated services.

An additional factor has to do with the responseto policymaking itself. The limitations of ‘com-mand and control’ and ‘fences and fines’approaches to environmental policymaking havebecome increasingly evident, both in industrial-ized countries, where the institutions are often in


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place to deal effectively with at least some envi-ronmental problems, and certainly in developingcountries, where such institutions are often non-existent, irrelevant or functionally powerless. Yet,‘command and control’ policy and regulatoryapproaches often generate responses by privatedecision-makers that are, at best, socially ineffi-cient and wasteful of resources, and, at worst,stimulate rent-seeking behaviour and strategicdecision-making that yield perverse outcomes. Isit not preferable to develop policies and regulatoryframeworks that are compatible with privateincentives and that, in fact, employ these incen-tives and knowledge of human behaviour in inno-vative ways to lead to socially desired outcomes?Much of the recent interest in environmental valuation has been concerned with precisely thesequestions, specifically, the development of incen-tive-compatible policies and regulatory approachesthat yield desired outcomes in ways that may beless costly and more socially efficient. Hence, theinterest in tradable emissions permits, carbon-trading schemes, the pricing of heretofore freewater resources, valuation, compensatory and payment transfer mechanisms for environmentalservices, and other such innovations.

Although alternative typologies exist, one com-mon framework for organizing our thinking aboutresource valuation distinguishes four types ofecosystem values (Pearce and Turner, 1990): (1)direct use values, due to the direct utilization ofresources and ecosystem services; (2) indirect usevalues, attributable to the externalities of ecosys-tem services; (3) option value, due to preservingthe option for future use of the resource (alsodirectly addressing sustainability criteria); and (4) non-use values, which are attributable to avariety of intrinsic ecosystem characteristics. Thisnomenclature aside, perhaps inevitably, much ofthe attention in environmental valuation hasfocused on specific methodologies and analyticalapproaches to assigning economic and monetaryvalues to resources, especially those resources thathave typically been outside the formal market(Hanley and Spash, 1993; Freeman, 2003).

Accordingly, as discussed further in severalchapters in Section II, these approaches are com-monly divided into ‘expressed (or ‘stated’) prefer-ence’ approaches and ‘revealed preference’approaches. The former approaches ask consumersand other private agents to assign resource valuesand rankings directly; these approaches include‘contingent valuation’ methodologies in whichpeople are asked for their ‘willingness-to-pay’ topay for environmental benefits, for example. Thelatter approaches indirectly elicit consumer valua-tions through methods such as the ‘travel cost’approach and ‘hedonic pricing’, which estimateresource values through statistical analysis of

factors underlying human behaviour and the pref-erences (e.g. values) that are thus revealed. All ofthese methods have acknowledged strengths anddeficiencies (also discussed in Section II). Yet,they have achieved wide acceptance because theycontinue to be at least partially successful in giv-ing policy analysts and policymakers usefulmechanisms and standards for achieving a betterunderstanding of the values of environmentalresources, thus enabling them to make better deci-sions regarding resource management, includingthe conservation and preservation of environmentalresources in the face of competing uses.

THE CONSUMPTION TREADMILL

Since the World Commission on Environment andDevelopment began deliberating on the linksbetween environment and economy, there havebeen at least a couple of hundred further defini-tions of sustainability, and the term has nowentered our common language. But where are wenow with this sustainability idea? Does it offersome new hope for the world, or has it just hiddena much greater problem? The biggest challenge tosustainable development is now the consumptiontreadmill. The figures are worrying. People inNorth America now consume 430 litres of waterper day; in developing countries, 23% have nowater. In North America, 308 kg of paper are con-sumed by each person annually; in Europe 125 kg,in China 34 kg, and in India and Africa just 4 kg. InNorth America, there are 75 motor vehicles per 100people, in Japan 57, in Europe 24, and in China,India and Africa just six to nine (see Table 1.1).Worldwide, some 400,000 hectares of croplandare paved per year for roads and parking lots (theUSA’s 16 million hectares of land under asphaltwill soon reach the total area under wheat). Theworld motor-vehicle fleet grows alarmingly, as thenearly wealthy look to other parts of our globalcommunity for guidance as to what to buy. Byalmost every measure of resource consumption orproxy for waste production, the USA and Europelead the way. And what model is being held up asthe one to aspire to? There are now few people inthe world who do not now aspire to the same lev-els of consumption as North America, which is,after all, presented as the pinnacle of economicachievement.

This consumer boom is already happening (seeMeadows et al., 1972; Bell, 2004; see also Frank,1999; Kasser, 2002; Schwartz, 2004; Nettle,2005). The new consumers (Myers and Kent,2003, 2004) have already entered the global econ-omy, and are aspiring to have lifestyles currentlyenjoyed by the richest. A number of formerly poorcountries are seeing the growing influence of


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affluence, as the middle classes of China, India,Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea,Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia andMexico engage in greater conspicuous consump-tion. The side-effects are already being felt – theaverage car in Bangkok spends 44 days a yearstuck in traffic. But there is still a long way to go.The car fleet of the whole of India is still smallerthan that of Chicago, and that of China is half thenumber of cars in greater Los Angeles. At thesame time as a consumer boom is occurringamong newly affluent urban elites, poor people insuch countries as India and China lack access tothe basics such as clean water and health care.

This is now the concern: the idea of sustainableeconomic development seems to imply that theworld can be improved, or even saved, by bringingeveryone up to the same levels of consumption asthose in the industrialized countries. We can, it issaid, grow out of many kinds of economic trouble.This cannot be done, as we would need six worldsat European and eight to nine at North Americanlevels and patterns of consumption (Rees et al.,1996; Rees, 2002, 2003). How much, we mightwonder, would be enough (see Suzuki, 1997)?

The currently dominant idea about theinevitable benefits of progress would appear to bea modern invention. Indigenous peoples do notbelieve that their current community is any betterthan those in the past. To them, past and future arethe same as current time. Their ancestors, andthose of animals too, constantly remind them to behumble as they move about their landscapes. Butthe myth of progress permits the losses of bothspecies and special places, as it is believed that

losses can be offset by doing something else thatis better. The myth permits a belief in technologi-cal fixes, which are indeed effective in manyways, but rarely seem to make everyone happier,even if some of them contribute to humanlongevity and reduce suffering. Environmentalproblems are, after all, human problems. Newtechnologies will make improvements, but possi-bly not fast enough to save us. They also bringsome new risks, possibly rendering society more vulnerable. To come soon will be fabulouselectronic memory, a genomics revolution, renew-able energy, and human brains augmented bycomputers, though as Rees (2002) puts it, ‘asuper-intelligent machine could be the last inven-tion humans ever make.’ Rees recounts the 1937efforts by the US National Academy of Sciencesto predict breakthroughs for the rest of the lastcentury. They made a good stab at agriculture,rubber and oil, but completely missed nuclearenergy, antibiotics, jet aircraft, space travel andcomputers (see also Gray, 2002, 2004).

It is now clear from a variety of studies of peoplein the USA and Europe that people were happierin the 1950s compared with today. We can onlyguess more about earlier times, as the data do not exist in comparable form. But it does seem that our programmed happiness is aboutstriving for, not actually increasing, happiness(Frank, 1999; Kasser, 2002; Schwartz, 2004;Nettle, 2005). One reason is that we compare our consumption with others around us, and we do not necessarily feel better off or happier if oth-ers’ consumption is also increasing. There isalways a nagging gap between present levels of


Table 1.1 Indicators of consumption from different countries and regions of the world (datafrom 2004–05)

Latin Central

USA Europe China India Asia Africa America WorldPassenger cars per 100 people 75 24 7 6 17 9 6 9Annual petrol and diesel consumption 1624 286 33 9 47 36 169 174

(litres per person)Annual energy consumption 8520 3546 896 515 892 580 1190 1640

per person (kg oil equivalent)Annnual carbon dioxide 20.3 8–12 2.7 0.99 <1 <1 <1 3.85

emissions (tonnes per person)Annual paper and board 308 125 34 4 29 4 38 52

consumption (kg per person)Annual meat consumption (kg per person) 125 74 52 5 28 13 58 40Daily water consumption 4.6 1.59 1.35 1.74 1.72 0.47 1.47 1.73

(cubic metres per person)Population (million, 2005) 293 730 1306 1080 3667 887 518 6500Children born per woman 2.08 1.56 1.72 2.78 3.1 4.82 2.75 2.55

Sources: Pretty (2007), using Brown (2004); Myers and Kent (2004); WRI (2006)

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contentment and how it could be. We believe wewill be happier in the future, but seldom are. Wealso are constantly worrying about how future lifeevents affect our happiness. As Bell (2004) haspointed out, we could work four hours per day, orjust for about half a year, if we consumed at 1940slevels, yet be equally happy. But would anyonechoose this option if they could?

EMERGING PERSPECTIVES ONPOPULATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Population will continue to grow in many coun-tries at least until mid-century, posing consider-able problems in relation to providing for basicneeds and dealing with environmental damage insome. Yet population is already declining is somerich countries, and others’ population can beexpected to stabilize then to decline, as the agestructure of the population shifts and social prac-tices change. A psychological problem yet to befaced is the consequence of coming populationdecline. Thomas Malthus (1798) argued thathuman population growth would always outstripresources. ‘Population, when unchecked,’ he said,‘increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistenceincreases only in an arithmetric ratio. A slightacquaintance with numbers will shew the immen-sity of the first power in comparison with the sec-ond’. Since then, most policies and practiceregarding natural resources and food have beenshaped by concerns about our growing numbers.Humans are, after all, an extraordinarily success-ful species. When agriculture emerged, some10,000 years ago, there were probably five millionpeople worldwide. To the mid-19th century, worldpopulation then doubled eight times. Since then ithas doubled four more times, and will continue togrow to probably eight and a half billion people by the middle of the 21st century. It will then sta-bilize for a while, and subsequently fall. Notbecause of wars, climate change or infectious dis-eases (though they may contribute to greaterdeclines), but because of changing fertility pat-terns. More choices about contraception anddecreasing poverty reduces the need to have somany children, and changing lifestyles among therich delay child-bearing ages. When one genera-tion produces fewer daughters, and fewer daugh-ters are produced by them, then the replacementrate soon falls below the 2.1 needed to maintainpopulation stability.

Today, the average woman in industrializedcountries has fewer than 1.6 children, in the leastdeveloped countries 5 children, and in the otherdeveloping countries 2.6. The lowest fertility ratesare now in southern Europe, at 1.1 children perwoman. In the mid-1970s, the average Bangladeshi

woman had six children; today she has about three;in Iran, fertility has fallen from more than fivechildren in the late 1980s to just over two today.The worldwide annual gain is still 76 million peo-ple (down from 100 million in 1990), but this isexpected to fall to zero by 2050 as the number ofchildren falls from today’s average of 2.55 to 2.0.Life expectancy at birth was 47 years in 1950–55,rose to 65 years by 2000–05, and will rise again to75 years worldwide by 2045–50. By then, thenumber of people over 60 will have tripled to 1.9 billion, and the number over 80 will have risen from today’s 86 million to 395 million. Ofcourse, these changes will not be evenly spread.Some countries are predicted to triple their num-bers by 2050: these include Afganistan, BurkinaFaso, Burundi, Chad, Congo, DR Congo, DRTimor-Leste, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger and Uganda. But the populations of 51countries will fall, including Germany, Italy,Japan and most of the former USSR (UN, 2004,2005a).

What will happen after this peak, less than twogenerations away from us now? The UnitedNations (2005b) has made population predictionsfor the next 300 years, and uncertain though thesemust be, the medium fertility estimates suggest atleast a levelling of world population for 250 moreyears at 8.5 to 9 billion. At low fertility (at thekind of levels we are already seeing today – afterall, 93 out of 222 countries already have fewerthan 2.1 children per women, and 37 have lessthan 1.5), world population declines to 5.5 billionby the end of this century, to 3.9 billion by 2150,and down to 2.3 billion by 2300. Which track weend up on depends entirely on early changes infertility. Demographers cannot, of course, agreeon the probability of stability or decline. But anykind of fall will bring huge changes. In 2000, peo-ple on average retired two weeks before mean lifeexpectancy (at 65 years); by 2300, people willretire more than 30 years short of life expectancy(unless age of retirement changes), when on aver-age women will live to 97 and men to 95 years.This does not take account of potentially revolu-tionary changes to human longevity that new medical technologies might bring.

Caldwell (2004) says that ‘the low scenario isby no means implausible’, and that the low projec-tions ‘would probably portend to many the fear ofhuman extinction’. Governments would try toraise fertility levels, but it could be very difficultto achieve, as people do not always do the biddingof their governments. What, then, will happen toall those settlements we do not need? What of thefields and farms that become surplus to require-ments? What of the wild animals – will we seetheir return to places where they had long sincebeen eliminated (not the extinct species, of course,


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as they are gone forever)? Or might the vision bequite different – of spreading urban wastelands, offorgotten linkages to nature, of the nightmare ofdecivilization (a term coined by Timothy GartonAsh, in Porritt, 2005)?

DUALISM, SEPARATION AND CONNECTIONS

In recent years, with growing concerns for sus-tainability, the environment and biodiversity,many different typologies have been developed tocategorize shades of deep to shallow green think-ing. Arne Naess sees shallow ecology, for exam-ple, as an approach centred on efficiency ofresource use, whereas deep ecology transcendsconservation in favour of biocentric values. Othertypologies include Donald Worster’s imperial andarcadian ecology (Worster, 1993) and the resourceand holistic schools of conservation. For some,there is an even more fundamental schism –whether nature exists independently of us, orwhether it is characterised as post-modern or aspart of a post-modern condition. Nature to scien-tific ecologists exists. To some post-modernistperspectives, though, it is mostly a cultural con-struction. The truth is, surely, that nature doesexist, but that we socially construct its meaning tous. Such meanings and values change over time,and between different groups of people.

There are many dangers in the persistent dual-ism that separates humans from nature. It appearsto suggest that we can be objective and independ-ent observers – rather than part of the system andinevitably bound up in it. Everything we knowabout the world we know because we interact withit, or it with us. Thus, if each of our views isunique, we should listen to the accounts of othersand observe carefully their actions. Another prob-lem is that nature is seen as having boundaries –the edges of parks or protected areas. At the land-scape level, this creates difficulties, as the whole isalways more important than each part, and diver-sity is an important outcome (Foreman, 1997;Klijn and Vos, 2000).

This can lead to the idea of enclaves – socialenclaves such as reservations, barrios orChinatowns, and natural enclaves like nationalparks, wildernesses, sites of special scientificinterest, protected areas or zoos. Enclave thinkingcan lead us away from accepting the connectivityof nature and people, though it has the advantageof creating niches for specialization. One consequence is that biodiversity and conservationcan be considered to be in one place, and productive agricultural activities in another (Crononet al., 1992; Deutsch, 1992; Brunkhorst et al.,1997; Pretty, 2002). It is no longer acceptable

to cause damage in some natural landscapes, pro-vided we leave some areas protected. Enclavesalso act as a sop to those with a conscience – thewider destruction can be justified if we fashion asmall space for natural history to persist.

By continuing to separate humans and nature,the dualism also appears to suggest that technolo-gies can always intervene to reverse damagecaused by this very dualism. The greater vision,and the more difficult to define, involves lookingat the whole, and seeking ways to redesign it.Cartesian dualism that puts humans outside natureremains a strange concept to many human cultures. It is only modernist thinking that hasseparated humans from nature in the first place,putting us up as distant controllers. Most peoplesdo not externalize nature in this way. From theAshéninha of Peru to the forest dwellers of formerZaire, people see themselves as just one part of alarger whole, as do many people who adhere tomajor modern religions – even Christians who areoften accused of treating nature as something tobe plundered. Their relationships with nature areholistic, based on ‘both/with’ rather than‘either/or’ (Benton, 1998; Gray, 1999). Recentresearch on the biophilia hypothesis of E. O. Wilsonis indicating that natural or green places are goodfor mental health, irrespective of social context(Kellett and Wilson, 1993; Pretty, 2004; Pretty et al., 2005).

The idea of the wilderness struck a chord in themid-19th century, with the influential writersHenry David Thoreau and John Muir setting out anew philosophy for our relations with nature. Thisgrew out of a recognition of the value of wildlandsfor people’s well-being. Without them, we arenothing; with them, we have life. Thoreaufamously said in 1851, ‘in wildness is the preser-vation of the world’. Muir in turn indicated that:‘wildness is a necessity; and mountain parks andreservations are useful not only as fountains oftimber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains oflife.’ But as Roderick Nash, Max Oelschlaeger,Simon Schama and many other recent commenta-tors have pointed out, these concerns for wilder-ness represented much more than a defence ofunencroached lands. (For the Thoreau quote, seeNash, 1973, p. 84 – quoted in turn from a speechby Thoreau on April 23rd, 1851, to the ConcordLyceum. For the Muir quote, see Oelschlaeger,1991. See also Nash, 1973; Schama, 1996; andVandergeest and DuPuis, 1996.) It involved theconstruction of a deeper idea, which proved to behugely successful in reawakening in NorthAmerican and European consciences the funda-mental value of nature.

Debates have since raged over whether ‘discovered’ landscapes were ‘virgin’ lands or‘widowed’ ones, left behind after the death of


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indigenous peoples. Did wildernesses exist, or didwe create them? Donald Worster, environmentalhistorian, points out for North America that ‘nei-ther adjective will quite do, for the continent wasfar too big and diverse to be so simply genderedand personalised’ (Worster, 1993). In other words,just because they constructed this idea does notmean to say it was an error. Nonetheless, theywere wrong to imply that the wildernesses in, say,Yosemite were untouched by human hand, asthese landscapes and habitats had been deliber-ately constructed by Ahwahneechee and othernative Americans and their management practicesto enhance valued fauna and flora.

Henry David Thoreau developed his idea ofpeople and their cultures as being intricatelyembedded in nature as a fundamental critique ofmechanical ideas that had separated nature fromits observers. His was an organic view of the connections between people and nature (For agood review of Thoreau, see Oelschlaeger, 1991,pp. 133–171). In his Natural History, Thoreau cel-ebrates learning by ‘direct intercourse and sympa-thy’ and advocates a scientific wisdom that arisesfrom local knowledge accumulated from experi-ence combined with the science of induction and deduction. But he still invokes the core idea of wilderness untouched by humans – even though his Massachusetts had been colonized just two centuries earlier and had a long history of ‘taming’ both nature and local nativeAmericans.

The question, ‘is a landscape wild, or is it man-aged’, are perhaps the wrong ones to ask, as itencourages unnecessary and lengthy argument.What is more important is the notion of humanintervention in a nature of which we are part.Sometimes such intervention means doing noth-ing at all, so leaving a whole landscape in a ‘wild’state, or perhaps it means just protecting the lastremaining tree in an urban neighbourhood orhedgerow on a field boundary. Preferably, interven-tion should mean sensitive management, with alight touch on the landscape. Or it may mean heavyreshaping of the land, for the good or the bad.

So it does not matter whether untouched andpristine wildernesses actually exist. Nature existswithout us; and with us is shaped and reshaped.Most of what exists today does so because it hasbeen influenced explicitly or implicitly by thehands of humans, mainly because our reach hasspread as our numbers have grown, and as theeffects of our consumption patterns have com-pounded the effect. But there are still places thatseem truly wild, and these exist at very differentscales and touch us in different ways. Some are ona continental scale, such as the Antarctic. Othersare entirely local, a woodland amidst farmedfields, a saltmarsh along an estuary, a mysterious

urban garden, all touched with private and specialmeanings.

In all of these situations, we are a part, con-nected, and so affecting nature and land, and beingaffected by it. This is a fundamentally differentposition to one which suggests that wilderness isuntouched, pristine, and so somehow betterbecause it is separated from humans – who, ironyof ironies, promptly want to go there in large num-bers precisely because it appears separate. But anhistorical understanding of what has happened toproduce the landscape or nature we see before usmatters enormously when we use an idea to forma vision that clashes with the truth. An idea thatthis place is wild, and so these local people shouldbe removed. Another idea that this place is ripe fordevelopment, and so a group of people should bedispossessed. The term wilderness has come tomean many things, usually implying an absence of people and presence of wild animals, but alsocontaining something to do with the feelings andemotions provoked in people. Roderick Nash(1973) takes a particularly Eurocentric perspec-tive in saying, ‘any place in which a person feelsstripped of guidance, lost and perplexed may becalled a wilderness’, though this definition mayalso be true of some harsh urban landscapes. Theimportant thing is not defining what it really is,but what we think it is, and then telling storiesabout it.

SOCIOLOGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The classical approaches to understanding thestructure of society shared two basic features. Onewas the ambition to provide ways of conceptualiz-ing the large-scale structural features of wholesocieties, and to situate them in the context oflong-term historical change and in relation to thealternative social forms and historical tendenciesin the rest of the world. The other was the insis-tence that human social and historical life was adistinct order of reality in its own right, not to beexplained away in terms of the biological sciencesof the day: industrial development, social inequal-ity, crime, suicide rates, gender divisions and thelike were to be understood in terms of social andcultural causes, not racial inheritance, geneticendowment or physiological constitution. Thissecond feature was the basis for a process of ‘sep-arate development’, through which the life andsocial sciences proceeded in ignorance of oneanother: ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ were distinct andcontrasting realms, knowing and needing to knownothing of one another (Benton, 1996, 2001).

A common feature of the classics was theirinsistence on human social and cultural life as anorder of reality in its own right, irreducible to the


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biological realm. Through most of the 20th cen-tury, this was taken to be an unquestioned assump-tion: social processes were to be explained interms of social causes. This resistance to biologi-cal explanation was strongly reinforced by wide-spread revulsion at the consequences of Nazidoctrines of racial superiority, and the racistunderpinning of much European imperial domina-tion of non-Western peoples. With the rise of newsocial movements from the 1960s onwards, chal-lenging established inequalities and social exclu-sions based on gender difference and sexualorientation, the terms ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ cameto be viewed with suspicion. Sociologists sympa-thetic to the struggle for women’s emancipation orgay rights critically exposed the way dominantideologies justified oppression in the name of adistinction between what was ‘natural’ and whatwas ‘unnatural’, and therefore pathological. Inthis way, the strong links between sociology andprogressive social movements reinforced theassumption already built into the main sociologi-cal traditions that biology, the ‘natural’, should beheld at arms length and viewed with suspicion. Itbecame a standard procedure for sociologists, andespecially those who identified with a criticalstance towards established society, to call intoquestion all authoritative claims to knowledge of‘nature’ or ‘reality’ (Soper, 1995; MacNaughtenand Urry, 1998).

Then, from the late 1970s onwards, develop-ments in linguistics and cultural theory becamevery influential, and approaches which (followingWeber and Simmel, among the classics) focusedon symbolic meaning and the role of language inshaping our experience of the world flourished.Questions about the material reality of nature andour relation to it now became excluded as a mat-ter of methodological principle: all experience ofthe world is to be understood as mediated by lan-guage and culture. But there is no way anyone canstand outside the available language and culture tosee reality in itself: we are left with the task ofcharacterizing the role played in social life by var-ious different and often conflicting linguistic andcultural ‘constructions’ of reality. It is important toremain neutral and agnostic about which, if any,of these ‘constructions’ is true. Critical sociologycan aid emancipatory social struggles by exposingthe ‘constructed’ character of the prevailing oppres-sive accounts of what is ‘natural’, thus ‘decon-structing’ them and challenging their authoritativehold over peoples’ lives. These are the core insightsof the approaches called ‘constructionist’.

The sensitivity of sociology to the social andcultural movements and issues in the wider worldoutside the academy now presented it with a deepchallenge: from the early 1960s the progressivesocial movements with which many sociologists

had become identified also included a burgeoningradical environmental movement whose intellec-tual leaders (often dissident natural scientists)raised public alarm about the growing threatposed by our affluent, growth-oriented throwawaysociety to its own planetary life-support systems.Here was a new and powerful basis for a radical,critical politics, but one which celebrated nature,and claimed authoritative knowledge of the terri-ble destruction of it unleashed by contemporarysociety. This was a deep challenge in two ways.First, it was an intellectual challenge. Sociologyhad established its right to exist as a distinct disci-pline by a radical separation of the realms ofnature and culture, but now faced pressing ques-tions about the consequences of the mutual inter-connection, the shared fate, of natural processesand social life. The second challenge was rootedin the normative commitment of critical sociolo-gists and was particularly strongly felt by thosewho sympathized with such emancipatory move-ments as anti-racist, gay rights and women’s liber-ation activism but were also drawn to the emergentgreen politics with its passionate defence of‘nature’.

There emerged two very broad, and to someextent conflicting, ways of addressing the newenvironmental agenda. One, typically ‘construc-tionist’, and deriving from the ‘modest’ tradition,tended to avoid large-scale theorizing. The greatstrength of this tradition has been its detailed casestudies of particular environmental issues, socialmovements, campaigns and episodes of conflict.Rather than use the new environmental agenda asan occasion for questioning the basic inheritedassumptions of the discipline, this sort of approachhas concentrated on treating environmental issuesas a new field in which to demonstrate the value ofalready-established sociological concepts andstyles of argument. For instance, this approach hasdebunked many myths about the environmentalmovement. It was found that while parts of themovement retain a radical and progressive edge,many had evolved into highly professional lobbyorganizations seeking insider status in govern-ment decision making through moderating theirdemands (Dalton, 1994). At the same time, manymembers do little or nothing beyond giving anannual donation, having little or no direct involve-ment in local politics and living remarkably stan-dard middle-class lives. The key standard conceptsturn out to be institutionalization as a consequenceof the problem of resource mobilization, which inturn derives from rational choice by individuals todo little, as captured in the Prisoner’s Dilemmametaphor and other models of collective actionfailure (Jordan and Maloney, 1997).

For sociologists of science, the natural sciencesare thoroughly social in character, their conceptual


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organization, research priorities and methodologicalprocedures all shaped by social interests and cul-tural values – generally subservient to the domi-nant group or elite interests. Similarly withtechnologies – these are designed to serve power-ful interests and cannot be fully understood inde-pendently of the social practices and relationshipswhich their use either maintains or transforms.This way of understanding scientific and technicalinnovation has much to offer in the environmentalfield. It opens up the possibility of analysis of thekinds of pressures, power relationships, forms ofregulation, etc., which promote environmentallydamaging technologies, and also suggests thesorts of social and economic change which mightencourage more benign forms of technicalchange.

Contructionist approaches have also producedvaluable research in the field of environmentalsocial movement mobilization and organization.The key insight which informs their approach isrecognition that there is no one-to-one correspon-dence between the existence of, say, air pollution,or biodiversity loss, on the one hand, and theemergence of a social movement which identifiesit as an unacceptable condition and campaigns for change, on the other. A leading constructionistenvironmental sociologist, John Hannigan (1995),provides an illuminating set of concepts foranalysing the social and cultural processesinvolved in ‘constructing’ an environmental prob-lem. First, a problem-claim has to be ‘assembled’:evidence, including scientific evidence, has to becollected and put together in such a way as toshow that the state of affairs is significant enoughto justify public concern and action. Next, it has tobe ‘presented’: the problem has to be character-ized in ways which will attract attention, and pro-voke the desired public concern. Since the mediaare now so central to communication to widerpublics, this will also involve ways of engagingwith the media in such a way as to ensure not onlytheir attention, but also that media representationscoincide with the movement’s own ‘framing’ ofthe issue. The case of Greenpeace’s use of dramaticfilm footage of whaling is a good example. Thevisual images were irresistible material for the elec-tronic media, and their vivid portrayal of the vio-lent death of great and beautiful creatures hadmore impact on public conscience than a thousandbooks. Perhaps, too, the constructionists mightargue that the ethical and aesthetic power of theseimages far outweighed the influence of detailedscientific studies of the population dynamics andrisk of extinction of the different whale species.

Finally, Hannigan notes that success on the partof social movements in making their ‘problem-claim’ is not the end of the matter. In each case,interests will be threatened by the raising of an

issue – in the case of whaling, for example, theindustry itself, and spin-off processing and retailinterests, as well as consumer cultures in certaincountries and indigenous people for whom whal-ing is central to their whole way of life. So, theraising of an issue will generally be met withcounter-arguments, and competition for mediaframing and public acceptance. Hannigan callsthis the ‘contestation’ of movement claims. Socialmovement theory also has developed concepts foranalysing the processes involved in establishing,maintaining and coordinating social movementactivity, for studying the culture of such movementsand how they shape the identities of individuals whoparticipate in them (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991;Yearley, 1991, 1994; Munck, 1995).

It is increasingly common for constructioniststo defend a more limited or ‘contextual’ construc-tionism, which does not deny either the reality orthe importance of actual environmental change.So, there is a convergence between constructionistand the alternative ‘realist’ approaches in theirunderlying philosophy. Even so, the rhetoric of amore radical constructionism is often retained,and a lack of analysis of the crucial ambiguities ofconcepts such as ‘construction’ itself can give the impression that an account of the cultural construction of an environmental change as an‘issue’ somehow also explains the socio-economiccauses of the change itself. In other words, theconstructionist approaches may be true to the‘nature-sceptical’ critical traditions, but they donot, in the end, address the need to revise thosetraditions to reconnect our understanding of societywith its material basis in nature.

The four basic types of approach are, first, the‘new environmental paradigm’ advanced in thelate 1970s, second, ‘reflexive modernization’, asadvocated by Giddens, Beck and others, third, amore recent cluster of approaches referred to as‘ecological modernization’, and, finally, a rangeof approaches deriving from the Marxist, or his-torical materialist, tradition in various combina-tions with green, feminist and anti-racist ideas.These latter approaches can be collectivelyreferred to as ‘radical political economy’. The pio-neers of the first approach were the US sociolo-gists, R. E. Dunlap and W. R. Catton. In a series ofarticles from the late 1970s onwards (see Cattonand Dunlap, 1978, 1980; Dunlap and Catton,1994) they criticized mainstream sociology forworking with a ‘human exemptionalist’ paradigm:that is, sociologists had tried to understand humansocieties in abstraction from their interdependencewith the rest of nature, as if we were ‘exempt’ fromthe laws of nature which apply to all other beings.Instead, they proposed a ‘new environmental para-digm’ which would locate human societies withinthe wider web of environmental interactions.


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Clearly, their proposal was for an ecology-inspired radical revision of the whole sociologicaltradition. Very much in line with these originalproposals is an influential approach which attemptsto measure the scale of materials and energy takenup by and emitted by particular societies at differ-ent historical periods. Key concepts in materialsand energy flow accounting are the ‘metabolism’between societies and nature, and ‘colonisation’ ofnature and natural resources by social processes(Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 1993; Foster,1999; Schandl and Schulz, 2000). This approachoffers a means of quantitative measure of theextent of ‘ecological modernization’ over time inthe industrialized countries (Adrianne et al., 1997;Matthews et al., 2000).

Whereas the focus of the radical political econ-omy analyses is modern capitalism, its expansion-ary tendencies and political implications, the key concept for these other approaches is ‘moder-nity’ and the key process ‘modernization’. Theshift from ‘modern’ as an adjective, to the idea of‘modernity’ as a way of characterizing a wholesociety or historical period (Craib, 1992, 1997;Stones, 1998) is associated with a tradition knownas ‘functionalism’. This approach assumed anevolutionary development in the history of soci-eties toward more complex and functionally dif-ferentiated societies. The Western societiesrepresented the highest developmental stage, andmodels were devised to foster ‘development’ inthe rest of the world, on the assumption that itwould follow the model already achieved in thewest. This process was ‘modernization’. Its out-come would be capitalist and liberal-democratic.‘Modernity’ was the state we in the West hadalready attained, and, by implication, one towhich everyone else would, or should, aspire. Inthis early version the notion included three aspects:modernity was the destiny of the whole world, theWest was leading the way, and this was a goodthing. Initially influential as a cold-war ideology,this assumed more triumphalist forms with the fallof Soviet and East European state-centralistregimes at the end of the 1980s (Fukuyama, 1992).This period also marked a revival in the use of theterms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernization’ by sociolo-gists, often as a way of avoiding the more politically contentious term ‘capitalism’.

Most relevant to our theme have been two the-oretical approaches which have linked ‘moder-nity’ and ‘modernization’ with ecological changeand environmental social movements: ecologicalmodernization theory and the notion of ‘reflexivemodernization’ associated with Ulrich Beck andAnthony Giddens. Both approaches see ‘moder-nity’ as a phase in historical development as wellas a type of society, and both subdivide modernityitself into successive developmental phases.

In this respect, reflexive modernization theorists,especially, incorporate some of the themes ofpost-modernism as characterizing a significanttransition within modernity. Beyond this, the twotraditions diverge quite radically.

Ecological modernization theory had its originsin the 1970s. Its earliest advocates shared the opti-mistic evolutionary/developmental perspective ofthe American functionalist versions. They distin-guished an early phase of modernity, a phase ofindustrial ‘construction’, in which increased pro-duction was won at the cost of increased environ-mental degradation, from a more recent phase of‘reconstruction’. In this latter phase, industrialproduction and consumption were increasingly gov-erned by a new, ‘ecological rationality’. Scientificand technical innovation was increasingly devotedto adapting the industrial society to environmentalconstraints (Murphy, 2000).

The idea of reflexive modernization, too, has atwo-phase model of development within ‘moder-nity’. Modernity itself is defined (in Giddens’sversion) as a combination of four distinct institu-tional dimensions: a liberal democratic state, concerned with surveillance, a military establish-ment which monopolizes the legitimate use offorce, an economic system, characterized by pri-vate property and market, and industrial technolo-gies as the mode of appropriation of nature.However, in recent decades, this model of ‘sim-ple’ modernity is rendered increasingly inappro-priate by three interrelated social processes.Globalization, which, for Giddens, is primarily amatter of increased international flows of commu-nication and information, opens up all closedcommunities and stable traditions to the existenceof alternatives. A new cosmopolitanism emergesin which it is impossible to maintain traditions ‘inthe traditional way’. So, along with globalizationcomes ‘de-traditionalization.’ Freed from the con-straints of localism and traditionalism, both indi-viduals and institutions become more ‘reflexive’:more self-conscious, and consequently more opento revising their practices and identities. Instead ofa life whose main outlines are determined by thecontingencies of birth – class, sex, locality – weare increasingly required to turn our lives into a‘reflexive’ process of flexibly inventing and re-inventing our identities. Traditional forms ofgender relation and family forms, establishedauthority relations and norms of conduct and espe-cially the traditional political divisions of left andright, rooted in traditional class identities, areexpected to dissolve in the acid of reflexivity(Giddens, 1994; for commentary, see O’Brien et al., 1999; Benton, 2000).

Beck and Giddens concur in their expectationthat the mass politics of left and right, like theclass identities which that expressed, will fade


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away, to be replaced by a new politics ‘beyond left and right’. Giddens speaks of this as a politicsof life-style and voluntary activity, whilst Beck’s hope is for a ‘new modernity’ in whichnon-institutionalized social activism will demanddemocratic accountability from technocrats andpoliticians in the way science and technology aredeveloped and introduced.

In the face of such analyses from the reflexivemodernizers, and from the developments of the rad-ical political economy approach, the contemporaryadvocates of ecological modernization have signif-icantly reworked their inherited theory. Writerssuch as A. Weale, G. Spaargaren, A. P. J. Mol,M. A. Hajer and others have acknowledged thatthe advance of their hoped-for ‘ecological ration-ality’ is more problematic than earlier writers suchas Huber and Janicke had supposed (Weale, 1992;Hajer, 1995; Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000). Recentwork in this tradition differs from the earlier inthree main respects. First, the earlier emphasis ontechnology is broadened to include the importanceof accompanying changes in culture, consumerbehaviour, organization and governmental inter-vention and regulation as fostering environmentaladaptation. Along with this is a shift away fromthe functionalism of the earlier version in favourof recognition of the role of social agency inbringing about change, and, finally, the recogni-tion that ecological modernization is a ‘project’,facing resistance, obstacles and reverses, not aninherent, smoothly operating tendency inherent inthe historical development of ‘modernity’.

The ecological modernizers remain, however,significantly more optimistic about the environ-mental prospects of ‘modernity’ than either theanalysts of ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992) or the radi-cal political economists (for more on theseapproaches, see Chapter 6). In favour of the eco-logical modernizers is the evidence that the‘advanced’ industrial societies have made signifi-cant progress in environmental regulation and‘green’ taxation, most have ministries devoted toenvironmental policy, significant gains have beenmade in combating important sources of air, waterand soil pollution, recycling, materials substitution,and increasingly energy and resource-efficienttechnologies have been developed and employed.Evidence on materials and energy flow over atwenty-year period for some of the industrializedcountries does indeed show the looked-for‘decoupling’ of economic growth measured infinancial terms from measurable environmentalimpact: industry in these countries does appear tobe increasingly ecologically efficient per unit ofeconomic value produced.

In the domain of environmental politics, thegreen movements in most advanced industrialsocieties have changed their role from a marginal,

oppositional and ‘outsider’ status, to insiders, collaborators with business, government and tech-nocrats in setting mainstream policy objectives. In the international sphere, the EU has gaineddemocratic legitimacy for its vigorous espousal ofenvironmental issues, both in relation to the widerglobal scene and in relation to the record of mem-ber states. At the global level, a series of confer-ences leading up to Rio in 1992 have provided anoverarching concept of sustainable developmentembracing both social justice and long-term envi-ronmental protection, as well as internationalagreements on, among other important issues,trade in endangered species, climate change, ozonedepletion and conservation of biological diversity.

There is a major debate about how effectivethese agreements are, and indeed about whateffectiveness means (Underdal, 1992; Young andLevy, 1999; Sprinz and Helm, 2000). Internationalagreements do not operate in isolation from eachother and they frequently have negative side-effects on other environmental problems (Ward et al., 2004). For instance, some substitutes forCFCs are powerful greenhouse gases, so theMontreal Convention on ozone-depleting sub-stances has side-effects on the Kyoto Protocol,eventually leading to international action. Becauseof such interconnections and side-effects the realissue is whether the system of international envi-ronmental agreements promotes sustainability onbalance (Ward et al., 2004). There is evidence thatit does do so, pushing countries beyond what theywould otherwise have done to promote sustain-ability (Ward, 2006).

As the constructionists clearly demonstrate, theformation and transformation of environmentalissues as an agenda for public attention and policy-making depends on complex interactionsbetween social movement activists, researchers,media communicators, policy networks and com-munities, industrial lobbies, government depart-ments, international organisations and many othersorts of actors. In the realist approaches favouredhere, recognition of the roles played by these het-erogeneous and often conflicting social actors hasto be complemented by acknowledgement of theactive causal role played by non-human beings,relations and forces: both those purposively mobi-lized in the course of technologically mediatedhuman social interaction with nature, and thoseunintentionally and often unexpectedly ‘strikingback’. Scholars have an important place in theeffort to understand the systemic connectionsbetween the social, economic, political and biophysical dimensions of our increasingly prob-lematic ‘metabolism’ with non-human nature. Theintellectual demands of such an enterprise, and thegreat divisions of interest and of value judgementat stake in it suggest that it will always be


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a thoroughly contested enterprise. The lessencouraging aspect of our situation, however, isthat the socio-ecological processes of destructionand degradation escalate as we argue.

SECTION I: ENVIRONMENTAL THOUGHT – PAST AND PRESENT

In the first chapter of this Handbook (Chapter 2)on the enlightenment and its legacy, Ted Bentonsketches some of the historical background to ourcontemporary debates about the relationshipbetween human society and the rest of nature.This chapter begins with the influence of the 17thcentury scientific revolution on the thinkers of theEnlightenment. The views of Hobbes, Locke andRousseau are compared, to illustrate the greatdiversity of thought within the Enlightenment.Rousseau, especially, is introduced as a precursorof the Romantic movement, which challenged theprevalent view of nature as merely a set of resourcesto be utilized for human purposes. Instead, theRomantics offered views of our relationship tonature as one in which aesthetic appreciation – evenawe and wonder at nature’s magnificence – wereessential to full human flourishing.

Benton goes on to note the importance of thelegacy of romanticism for Darwin’s revolutionaryunderstanding of the historical character of evolv-ing nature, and for his sense of wonder at theimmense diversity of life. Despite Darwin’s owninitial reluctance to elaborate on the implicationsof evolution for our understanding of humannature and prospects, he was soon drawn into theintense debates about these questions that fol-lowed the publication of his Origin of Species.Here, Benton attempts to show that the influenceof Darwin’s ideas on social thought were muchmore diverse than is often recognized.

Damian White and Gideon Kossoff then assessthe history of anti-authoritarian thought in anar-chism, libertarianism and environmentalism in thesecond chapter (Chapter 3). They trace the diverseconnections between anarchism, the broader liber-tarian tradition, environmentalism and scientificecology. Anarchists maintain that it is the verycoercive ideologies, practices and institutions ofmodernity that are the source of the disorder andsocial chaos they are designed to prevent. Theauthors demonstrate that the resistance many con-temporary forms of ecological politics holds forconventional leadership patterns, individualismand division of labour has a long pedigree. At thesame time, social anarchist, left libertarian andecological anarchist currents have all influencedthinking about social–nature relations. It is appar-ent that many politics going under the loose termecology continue to find these traditions invaluable

sources of ideas and innovation. The se′arch forself-organizing societies continues, as does con-cern for the establishment of sustainable cities andother settlements.

In the third chapter (Chapter 4) of this section,Mary Mellor analyses the development of think-ing around ecofeminism, gender and ecology (seealso Mellor, 1992). Ecofeminism is based on theclaim that there is a connection between exploita-tion and degradation of the natural world and thesubordination and oppression of women. It alsotakes the view of the natural world as intercon-nected and interdependent, with humanity system-atically gendered in ways that subordinates,exploits and oppresses women. Unlike some otherwriters, Mellor does not make a claim that womenhave a superior vision, or higher moral authority,but indicates that an ethics that does not takeaccount of the gendered nature of society isdoomed to failure, as it will not confront the struc-ture of society and how that structure impacts onthe material relationship between humanity andnature.

The problem, of course, is how political changecan occur. Should it be driven from the top, ordoes political agency need to come from peopleand groups who are exploited, marginalized andexcluded by the existing social and ecologicalstructures? Mellor indicates that building coali-tions and coordinated political action are essen-tial. The basis for this position is that knowledgeabout the natural world will always be partial, andso awareness of pervasive uncertainty should bethe starting point of all other knowledge.Humanity is part of a dynamic iterative ecologicalprocess where the whole is always more than thesum of the parts. Far from being a restriction onfeminism, ecofeminism offers analyses that showhow exploitative and ecologically unsustainablesystems have emerged through the gendering ofhuman society. Such an analysis demands radicalchange.

In the fourth chapter (Chapter 5) on deep ecol-ogy, Ted Benton suggests that the orientations tonature expressed in the art and literature of theRomantic movement (Chapter 2) find more sys-tematic philosophical and political expression inthe stream of modern environmentalism known as‘deep ecology’. Benton presents an outline of the thought of the Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, who is generally recognized as the‘founding figure’ of the deep ecology movement.Naess made a sharp contrast between ‘shallowecology’, which seeks mainly to manageresources for human purposes, and his own, ‘deepecological’ perspective, which understandshumans and nature as bound together in a singleindivisible totality, every part of which is (in principle) equally valuable. Not surprisingly,


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Naess’s distinction itself, as well as the implica-tions of his deep ecological alternative to ‘main-stream’ environmentalism have been verycontroversial. Benton goes on to present some ofthe main arguments of the critics of deep ecology,and the replies offered by the deep ecologists andother ‘ecocentrics’. The debate is presented asopen-ended, and as having much to offer to ourcurrent practice of environmental politics.

In the fifth chapter (Chapter 6) on greening theleft, Ted Benton explores some of the historicalbackground to the present tendency for social jus-tice (a traditional concern of the political left) tobe linked closely to the demand for environmentalprotection (a central concern of the green move-ment). He suggests that there has been a long his-tory of the intertwining of these two sets ofconcerns in the thought and practice of some ofthe traditions of the left. Beginning with Marx andEngels’s ways of analysing the different historicalforms of human society and historical change interms of their ‘metabolism’ with the rest of nature,he suggests that they have valuable insights tooffer to today’s environmental movements – thisdespite the dreadful environmental record of manyof the regimes established in Marx’s name (seealso Benton, 1989, 1996; Foster, 1999).

With the re-emergence of radical environmentalpolitics in the 1960s, some of the radical thinkersof the left responded by drawing on and develop-ing the legacy of the earlier socialist traditions.Their aim was to address what they saw as theclose connections between the social and ecologi-cal crises of our own times. The work of the late19th century designer, artist, craftsman, environ-mentalist and socialist, William Morris, has beenan important inspiration. Benton also discussesthe more recent ideas of Andre Gorz and theAmerican eco-Marxist, James O’Connor, goingon to introduce an approach called ‘World SystemTheory’. This is an attempt to understand thecauses of continuing inequalities in the globaleconomy and in the relations between differentnation states. Benton suggests that this approachhas much to offer in explaining global ecologicaldegradation and the current lack of success intackling its causes.

The sixth chapter (Chapter 7) of this sectioncontains an exposition by Warwick Fox on theproblems that need to be addressed by a theory ofgeneral ethics. Old ethics has generally occurredin a closed moral universe, whilst new ethics, thatconducted in a whole earth, or Gaian, contextseeks to work in an expansive moral universe.There are problems, though, with new ethics. Ifbiodiversity is important to preserve, what do wemake of introduced (or alien) species that are eco-logically destructive? Should they be removed,even if they increase net biodiversity? What if they

are sentient themselves? The consideration of theholistic integrity of ecosystems is further consid-ered, along with the difficulties of being bothcomprehensive and consistent. In this article,eighteen problems as they relate to interhumanethics, animal welfare ethics, life-based ethics,ecosystem integrity ethics, and the ethics ofhuman-constructed environments are discussedand analysed. This effectively sets out a map ofthe ethical terrain for those addressing environ-mental and society-related issues and the likelydilemmas they will encounter.

The final chapter of this section (Chapter 8) isby Damian White, Chris Wilbert and Alan Ruddy,and addresses the contemporary and growingproblem of anti-environmentalism. The emer-gence of the Lomborg controversy was seen bysome as a new phase of criticism of environmen-talism, by some even a unique critique. Yet therewere many antecedents, arising from left, rightand technocratic sources to post-war environmen-talism, then to the global environmentalism of the1990s (after the Rio conference and as a result ofthe efforts to establish international treaties) andthen the modern contrarians exemplified byLomborg and others. There remains a fundamen-talist form of contrarianism that is at the centre ofgreenwash attempts by anti-environmental indus-try. Yet framing of debates as primarily beingbetween contrarians and radical ecologists missesmany important developments in both thinkingand action. There are, for example, distinct tendencies of green optimism in industrial ecol-ogy, sustainable architecture and sustainable agri-culture. At the same time, there are others whoframe arguments in technologically pessimisticterms.

SECTION II: VALUING THE ENVIRONMENT

In the first chapter of this section (Chapter 9),Thomas Crocker examines the basic economicquestions underlying the social choice of environ-mental management instruments and institutions.The author argues that, at its root, this socialchoice is motivated by competing ‘deontological’versus ‘individualistic’ visions and their associ-ated management options. Neither vision, in itsextreme, is seen as an accurate or realistic basis forenvironmental management. Rather, the authorsuggests that environmental management is basedon discovering ‘collective procedural rationality’,not to be confused with the ‘limited elementalrationality’ of the individual. To the extent that exchange institutions – markets and other incentive-compatible environmental policies and instruments – accurately reflect available


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information and options, they can help create collectively rational mechanisms which ‘guidepeople to their own interests.’ This process is basedon market prices which provide incentives for col-lectively rational behaviour, but that are themselvessubject to a variety of limitations which interferewith achieving efficient outcomes: incompleteinformation, non-zero transactions costs, misdi-rected incentives, and undefined, non-transparentor illegitimate initial distribution of rights overassets. The conclusion is that top–down decision-making of environmental authorities regarding theselection of control instruments and effort spent onmonitoring and compliance to mandate ‘what to doand how to do it’ is obsolete, assumes scarce orincomplete information, and is expensive due tostrategically interdependent decisions of theauthority and users. But neither will the total priva-tization of environmental decision-making by individuals typically be collectively rational.

The best, then, that authorities can often do ishelp guide asset owners and resource users tomake private decisions which lead to environmen-tal outcomes that are compatible with collectivelyrational mechanisms. In the past 20 years, thisprinciple has been extended to numerous exam-ples, including effluent charges, tradable permitsand liability standards. The chapter offers anextended example of the use of tradable permits toaddress biodiversity conservation, specifically thewildlife habitat requirements mandated by the USEndangered Species Act. Achieving a lower-cost,lower-risk incentive-compatible outcome isshown to be dependent on a clear definition of thehabitat units to be traded, the baseline distributionof units, and a carefully defined institutionalframework for exchange. In this and other similarexamples, public goods constraints are a furtherobstacle to least-cost collectively rational out-comes and also must be considered. In general,collectively rational institutions for environmentalmanagement require three things: the crediblecommitments of economic agents, transparentmarket or shadow prices, and effective arbitrageopportunities. In the end, for these instruments towork and represent an effective alternative to com-mand-and-control policies, careful initial attentionmust be given to institutional design based on afully informed understanding of the use and usersof the natural asset.

The next chapter (Chapter 10) by Ian Batemanprovides a comprehensive review of three centralquestions related to the valuation of environmen-tal impacts. The first is comparison and contrast ofthe two principal approaches used in the evalua-tion of environmental impacts: cost–benefit analy-sis (CBA) and environmental impact analysis(EIA). The author states that CBA assumes an anthropocentric approach, growing out of

economic analysis, and typically focuses on theprecise measuresment and evaluation of multipleimpacts, discounted to the present. In execution, itis highly quantitative and attempts to incorporatemultiple impacts into a single money valuenumeraire, with the attendant pro’s and con’s. It isnot good, however, at addressing the distributionof costs and benefits among different groups nor in assessing sustainability dimensions. Bycontrast, EIA does not attempt to assess monetaryimpacts comprehensively but focuses on evaluat-ing diverse physical environmental impacts, bothquantitatively and qualitatively. Its wide variety ofimpact assessment measures is a positive featureof this approach, enabling long-term sustainabilityimpacts to be more easily be incorporated than in CBA. However, by failing to incorporate the assessment of multiple impacts into a singlemeasure, it becomes more difficult to compareprojects and interpret their results using compatiblecriteria.

The author also discusses and summarizes anumber of important conceptual and empiricaldistinctions that arise in valuing environmentalimpacts. To begin with, prices do not equate withvalues for either private or public goods (due tonon-zero consumer surplus). The chapter outlinesthe basic distinction between private and publicgoods, with the key result that open-accessresources may be highly valued even though private prices may be wholly absent. The broaderconcept of total economic value (TEV) (also discussed in Chapter 11) comprises both use val-ues (option and bequest values, for example) andnon-use values (existence and non-human values).These lead to complications in valuation whichare reinforced by the existence of complex trade-offs and the multidimensional valuation criteriaused by different individuals. In theory as well aspractice, ‘willingness to pay’ measures (to obtaina gain or avoid a loss) very often differ from ‘will-ingness to accept’ measures (to forgo a gain orsuffer a loss). Context specificity, loss aversionand ‘part-whole’ problems further complicateenvironmental valuation in practice.

Economists have developed a wide array ofalternative approaches to conduct empirical mon-etary valuation of environmental public goods.These are often differentiated as ‘pricing’approaches and ‘valuation’ approaches; each arebriefly summarized in Chapter 11 (and discussedseparately in chapter 12). The former includesapproaches which employ estimates of: opportu-nity costs, costs of alternatives, mitigation costs,shadow project costs, government (subsidy) costsor dose–response value estimates. All of theseapproaches suffer from the flaw that the ‘prices’that are estimated may differ from true economicvaluation. The latter set of ‘valuation’ approaches


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include two categories of methods. Expressed orstated preference methods such as contingent val-uation, preference ranking and conjoint analysisall involve explicit, direct valuation (or ranking)of environmental goods by respondents. Revealedpreference approaches – specifically, the travelcost method and hedonic pricing – assess environ-mental values by measuring respondent’s actualmarket behaviour and statistically estimating theresultant ‘revealed’ environmental values. Overall,the author argues that while valuation methods aremore cumbersome in their application, they havewider applicability and address the differencebetween prices and values. It should be noted thatthe Bateman chapter only reviews the relevantenvironmental economics research through thelate 1990s; this is an active area of ongoingresearch in the field.

Chapter 11 by Randall Kramer reviews many ofthe basic economic valuation concepts covered inthe previous chapter – use values, option values,non-use values – and applies them to the valuationof a particularly important environmentalresource: water. The author summarizes some ofthe recent research regarding the non-market val-uation of environmental services, and the advan-tages and limitations of alternative valuationmethods. Several empirical examples employingstandard non-market environmental valuationconcepts and methods are introduced and dis-cussed: impacts of lake pollution on water recre-ation (using the travel-cost method); impacts ofwater quality on residential land prices (contin-gent valuation); and estimation of the value ofwater quality protection (contingent valuationestimates subsequently used in a cost–benefitanalysis). By focusing on the valuation of environ-mental services (specifically the value of waterquality) the author emphasizes the fact that the‘true value of nature’ termed by the MillenniumEcosystem Assessment (MEA) (2005) is bestassessed by highlighting the scarcity value of theservices provided by environmental resources.

Chapter 12 by David Lee treats the topic ofenvironmental trade-offs addressed elsewhere inthis section, but with an explicit focus on develop-ing countries which are home to many of the mostvexing environmental management and policyproblems. Given the severe resource constraintsfacing many developing countries, achieving envi-ronmental management goals typically must occurin the context of simultaneously realizing foodsecurity, economic growth and improved liveli-hood objectives. But doing so is more often char-acterized by trade-offs among these goals than bysynergistic relationships. The author argues thatsignificant insights into understanding these rela-tionships lie in the empirical evidence at bothmacro- and micro-levels. At the macro-level,

much of the discussion over the past decade hascentred around the ‘Environmental KuznetsCurve’ (inverted ‘U’) hypothesis and empiricalevidence supporting or contradicting it. Overall,the evidence is distinctly mixed for most indica-tors, suggesting that a country’s ability to ‘grow itsway’ out of environmental degradation problems isnot a generalizable policy result.

At the micro or household level, the evidence isalso limited, for different reasons. Comparing theresults of household- and village-level studies isdifficult due to the use of non-comparable analyt-ical methodologies, the lack of results estimatedover time (which would demonstrate the sustain-ability of production and livelihood systems), andthe use of different empirical measures for keyeconomic, production and environmental indica-tors. Several case study examples which surmountthese obstacles and in which positive environmen-tal outcomes are shown to be achieved alongsideother social objectives are discussed. The factorswhich generally condition the achievement of sus-tainable environmental outcomes in the context ofjointly realizing production, food security andeconomic livelihood objectives are identified anddiscussed.

In the final chapter of this section (Chapter 13),Joe Morris applies economic concepts and analyt-ical tools to the analysis of the Water FrameworkDirective (WFD) of the European Union. TheWFD seeks to prevent the deterioration of surfaceand groundwater sources and aquatic ecosystemsin the EU and provide for good surface andground water quality by 2015. It operates througha dual approach; first, of ‘command and control’regulatory methods to establish environmentalquality standards and control pollution discharges,and second, employs various economic measuresand incentive pricing mechanisms to achieve tar-geted outcomes. As the author indicates, the set-ting of water quality standards by regulatory fiatmeans that cost-effectiveness, rather than eco-nomic efficiency, is the standard by which deliv-ery mechanisms are evaluated. However, the WFDdoes treat water as an ‘economic commodify’ andemploys economic analytical and policy toolswidely.

The chapter describes in considerable detail thescope for using economic analytical tools in esti-mating water demand and the values of water’smultiple uses, and in evaluating alternative meas-ures to improve water quality. Specifically, thesetools are used in estimating: a range of user bene-fits stemming from alternative water demands anduses; the external uncompensated costs of watersupply; the cost-effectiveness of alternative deliv-ery mechanisms; and the impacts of incentivepricing on consumers of water. While there arestill considerable practical and methodological


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challenges involved in implementing economic-based mechanisms in the WFD, the application ofthese analytical tools in identifying cost-effectivemeasures for water quality management can beexpected to be broadened to address issues of non-point source pollution and agricultural landmanagement.

SECTION III: KNOWLEDGES AND KNOWING

What do we know about environment and societylinks, and what do we need to know to escapefrom the emerging environmental crises? Perhapsmore importantly, we will need to ask how we candevelop systems of knowing about the world thatare transformative. Knowledge on its own is not asufficient condition for change. What is needed isways of knowing that change the way people seethe world, interact with one another, and bringtheir views to bear over critical challenges for acomplex and contested world.

In the first chapter in this section of theHandbook (Chapter 14), David Orr sets out thecomponents and principles of ecological designand education. In spite of nearly a century of sub-stantial economic growth, a large proportion ofthe world is either on the edge of starvation inabsolute poverty, or is suffering the consequencesof over-consumption in their worlds of trafficjams, bad diets, addictions, boredom and mentalill-health. These two worlds may appear to someto be diverging, but may actually be on a collisioncourse. The inability to solve ecological and socialproblems points to deeper flaws in a faith inhuman capability to solve all the problems webring on ourselves.

Ecological designers know one big thing –everything is hitched to everything else. This sug-gests a need for a blending of nature with humancrafted space, a bringing together of arts, crafts,science and architecture. But this is easy to say,and hard to achieve. We will need to spend moretime thinking about how we see the world, andhow we learn from it. A number of key principlesare set out for a new type of design that recali-brates education with ecology. Nature is not some-thing to be mastered, but a potential tutor andmentor for human actions. But ecological designis deeper than mimicry. It should encourage us toask what will nature permit us to do? Another keyprinciple is that humans are not infinitely plastic.There are biological and evolutionary constraintsthat shape our interactions with the world. Alldesign is, of course, inherently political, as it isabout both provision of goods and services, butalso the distribution of risks, costs and benefits.Ecological design implies robust economics, an

honest assessment of human capabilities, a capac-ity to understand the lessons of history and pastcivilizations, and above all offers opportunities ofhealing. Designers are story-tellers that aim tospeak to the human spirit, and this is where educa-tion must mimic, and tell better stories about theworld.

Richard Bawden then develops the theme ofknowing systems and the environment in the sec-ond chapter (Chapter 15). Once again, the prob-lem lies in how we have come to risk the world onthe back of such great achievements in economicand technological development. The chapterfocuses on systems, both hard and soft, and oncoming to know. Our quest, says Bawden, in seek-ing to come to terms with sustainability, must startwith learning. What we think we mean when weuse terms like development and sustainability. Wehave made the world as it is, and so it is up to uscollectively to make meaning through our learning.In a state of denial, about how bad circumstancesare, we are going to need to devise different waysto think, interact and act very quickly.

An important contrast centres on how we con-ceptualize systems’ ideas, and thus bring somecognitive coherence to bear on a complex world.Earlier pioneers of systems’ thinking focused oncybernetic regulative processes that maintainedsteady states, and many ideas about resilience andadaptation have since been developed. Butstrangely, systems ideas in the social scienceshave seen declining support in recent decades.Another conceptualization, however, centres lesson systems in the world, and more on systems ofcognition, in which inquiry about the world is thesoft system that can be both revealing and trans-formative. In this way, learning becomes lessabout the acquisition of knowledge and moreabout the transformation of experience, wherebyknowledge is fluid, being created, recreated andused by individuals as they seek to make sense ofthe world. The quest for sustainability focuses onnew types of engagement between people withtheir different worldviews and paradigms, and theworld about us.

Max Pfeffer and Linda Wagenet show inChapter 16 how such new ways of knowing areplaying out in the environmental volunteering sector in the USA. Volunteer environmental mon-itoring offers the possibility of directly involvingcitizens in environmental decision-making. It mayalso reinforce public confidence in science-baseddecision-making, and offer the means to increasemore direct interactions with the environment andits resources. Such volunteering is likely to beimportant where there are already extensive envi-ronmental regulations and clear compliance stan-dards, and where concerned citizens have the timeand resources to participate. Existing literature


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contains no comprehensive review of volunteerenvironmental monitoring, and this chapterreviews its importance over more than a century intracking weather data, bird ringing (or banding),game fish tagging, water quality monitoring,wastewater plant monitoring, and the Christmasbird survey. All of these represent important typesof citizen science in action.

More than half of Americans are engaged insome kind of local volunteer activity, howeverminimal, and forms of civic environmentalismhave become common and indeed effective. It iswidely known that a lack of meaningful publicinvolvement can lead to the emergence of barriersto environmental management, and since the1990s there has been growing uptake by federalagencies, particularly for watershed management.Some authors are confident that this represents thepotential for positive outcomes for both humanand ecosystem well-being; others are cynical,characterizing the interactions as no more than thescientifically illiterate versus the politically clue-less. Nonetheless, such community science doeshave transformative potential, not only for indi-viduals but also for groups who coalesce to acttogether. The chapter addresses three key ques-tions: do volunteers generate data that meetacceptable scientific standards? Are such datathen used by agencies engaged in environmentalmanagement? And finally, does this activityreduce the gap between environmental scienceand the lay public?

In the fourth chapter in this section (Chapter 17)on environmental ethics, Val Plumwood goes onto draw some of these themes together by askingdo only human lives and humans count, as werelentlessly drive other species from the planet?How we think about these kinds of questionsdetermines partly how humans act in this world.Plumwood explores a series of perspectives onvalue, including instrumentalism, utility andintrinsic value, and teases apart common defaultsettings that are often ignored in environmentalnarratives. Interspecies relationships may be thekey task of environmental ethics, but such an ethicwill also need to challenge conventional conceptsof human identity too. The problem with instru-mentalism is that it is seen to draw the life, mean-ing and wonder from the world, as we progressivelycommodity relationships with nature and its goodsand services.

Instrumentalism also suggests a human apart-ness from nature, which echoes concerns aboutintrahuman dominance, especially on the groundsof gender and race. Non-humans are taken to benaturally inferior, and lacking qualities that aresupposed to matter, such as mind, rationality andindividuality. A human centred (or anthropocen-tric) worldview and its misunderstandings of

human nature pose risks to both human and non-human survival. Commodities become taken forgranted, and nature is starved of resource for itsown maintenance. Sustainability is a projectaimed at countering the exhaustion of the planet’sresources for life, and Plumwood indicates whywe should recognize human and non-human needsas part of this concept. The chapter concludes witha perspective on counter-hegemonic structuresand communicative ethics, and includes howprocesses of knowing and coming to know canbreak down discontinuities between humans andnature, reconstruct human identity, dehomogenizenature and human categories, and acknowledgedifference.

In the final chapter of this section (Chapter 18),Luisa Maffi analyses the concept of bioculturaldiversity and how it relates to current concernsabout both ecological and cultural sustainability.Biocultural diversity draws on anthropological,ethnobiological and ethnoecological insightsabout the relationships between human language,knowledge and practices with the environment.Evidence now indicates that the idea of the exis-tence of pristine environments unaffected byhumans is erroneous. Humans have maintained,enhanced, and even created biodiversity throughculturally diverse practices over many thousandsof generations. There are some suggestions thatbiodiversity and cultural diversity in the form oflinguistic differences are associated, though at thelocal level these relationships do not always stand scrutiny. But the role of language isnonetheless critical as a vehicle for communicat-ing and transmitting cultural values, traditionalknowledges and practices, and thus for mediatinghuman–environment interactions.

Landscapes can be networks of knowledge andwisdom, conveyed by the language of local peo-ple. But the problem is that many languages areunder threat. There are some 5000–7000 lan-guages spoken today, of which 32% are in Asia,30% in Africa, 19% in the Pacific, 15% in theAmericas and 3% in Europe. Yet only half of these languages are each spoken by more than10,000 speakers. Some 550 are spoken by fewerthan 100 people, and 1100 by between 100 and1000 people. A small group of less than 300 lan-guages is spoken by communities of one-millionspeakers or more. Some 90% of all the world’slanguages may disappear in the course of this century – yet these very languages are tied to thecreation, transmission and perpetuation of local knowledge and cultural behaviour. As lan-guage disappears, so does people’s ability tounderstand and talk about their worlds. Naturaland cultural continuity are thus connected. Thephenomenon of loss has been called the extinctionof experience – and the loss of traditional


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languages and cultures may be hastened by environmental degradation.

Yet in many parts of the world, both in develop-ing and industrialized countries, such traditionalecological knowledge (or ecological literacy) isdeclining and under threat of extinction. Ashumans coevolved with their local environments,and have now come to be disconnected, so knowl-edges that coded stories, binding people to place,have become less valued. New efforts to analysebiocultural diversity on a country-by-countrybasis are reviewed, and despite some importantprogress in the international sphere, such as in the Convention on Biodiversity, the most funda-mental changes must come from ground-upactions. In this way, the field of biocultural diver-sity has embraced strong ethics and human rightscomponents.

SECTION IV: POLITICAL ECONOMY OFENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

The fourth section of this Handbook exploresquestions of distribution, risks, winners and losersin the quest for representation and access toresources. Environmental change occurs at a dif-ferent pace at different human scales, and affectsdifferent groups of people in different ways. As aresult, incentives and inclinations to act differgreatly, even though all humans are part of thesame world system. These differences raise con-tradictions, complexities and conflicts, and posi-tive social outcomes for some may mean negativeenvironmental outcomes for others.

In the first chapter (Chapter 19), Ron Johnsonexplores questions of representative democracyand the solution of environmental problems thatrequire collective action at different scales. Manyenvironmental problems have three common char-acteristics. They are produced by individualactions, but their intensity may be more than thesum of individual contributions. Most problemsaffect others, and these spatial overspills requirethat all those (or at least most) must reduce or endtheir contributions. And third, individual contribu-tors can gain advantage over others by decliningto participate in efforts designed to solve the prob-lem. In small-scale situations, generally trust andenforcing agreements are possible, and indeedhave been very effective in many parts of theworld, but at higher scales, efforts have to centreon either privatizing the commons or on externalregulation by bodies with the power to ensurecompliance.

There is always a range of scientific and politi-cal challenges to be overcome. An issue has to beidentified, recognized that there is an associatedproblem, a postulated cause accepted, and then

acceptance that the problem can be tackled orremedied. But tackling a problem requires com-mitment of resources (and thus always in shortsupply), which have to be obtained from citizens.For a solution to be implemented, there musttherefore be both political and public support. Thechallenges of environmental problems thus playout in different ways according to whether theyare confined within individual states, are sharedby two or more states, and confined within theirboundaries, or involving interactions with largenumbers of states. Most governments have short-time horizons, and this adds further complicationsto the need to address pressing current and futureproblems.

In the second chapter (Chapter 20), Ron Herringanalyses how the genomics revolution in biologyseems to be creating novel analytical and policyquestions for political ecology. Such politics rein-force the centrality of science to all political ecol-ogy, which in turn presents new challenges to theway interests in nature are understood by citizensand political classes that control states. Muchindeterminacy of interests in nature is knowledgebased, and so radically different levels of ecologi-cal knowledge occur amongst mass publics, polit-ical actors and administrative managers over time.There are many contradictory positions. There areglobal conflicts over transgenic organisms thatfocus, at least in part, on ecological threats arisingin agriculture (even though modern agriculture isitself quite destructive of nature), yet transgenicpharmaceuticals seem to be quite immune toprotest. There are, of course, many political reasonsfor this selectivity – miracle drugs save lives andare ineffective targets for opposition.

At the same time, it is clear that public goodsand bads are not objectively perceived, but ratherare embedded in normative logic and culturalnorms. A swamp was once seen to be unhealthyand thus gladly drained (except for the people liv-ing there); but wetlands now purify water and arefor preserving. In the contested politics surround-ing such normative spectrums, new and unpre-dictable relationships emerge. In the genomicsrevolution itself, new values are created in naturallandscapes, as yesterday’s obscure species becomesan object for bioprospecting and biopiracy.Whatever regulators may seek to do, there will becircumstances in which the practice of individualsforces further change. The seed sharing amongstfarmers in India and Brazil is an example wherestates had to follow what farmers themselves pre-ferred to do. In the end, though, the science ofecology frustrates policy, as unexpected intercon-nections amongst parts of systems keep being dis-covered. Honest science is always incomplete atthe frontier, and yet such uncertainty is the mostpowerful weapon of opposition movements.


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In the third chapter (Chapter 21), Steven Griggsand David Howarth explore protest movements,environmental activism and environmentalism inthe UK, using examples of struggles against roadbuilding and airport expansion. There are notmany people who are in favour of fewer pollutioncontrols, more greenhouse gases and greaterspecies extinction, and the public goods struggledfor by many environmental movements and organ-izations are goods desired by large numbers ofpeople. Yet, despite the appeal of many of theseenvironmental demands, the translation of suchpopularity into a populist form of politics has notbeen straightforward or even successful. Populistdiscourses appeal to a collective subject, such asthe people or a nation. They are grounded on theconstruction of an underdog versus establishmentfrontier, the latter being seen as the enemy oradversary of the people. And they are centred on an appeal to all the people in a space or adomain – there are, after all, universal concerns, itis commonly claimed.

The authors explore three phases in environ-mental politics – from early conservation environ-mentalism to mid-late 20th century ecologicalenvironmentalism, and the later emergence of rad-ical environmentalism. Over time, membership ofsome environmental groups has grown remark-ably, and their size and scope has caused them tobecome institutionalized, thus blunting the radicalaspirations of some people or members. As somehave become larger (and more effective in certainspheres), so others have moved away from suchinsider routes to set up alternative movements.Some of these have resulted in direct actionagainst roads and airports, and indeed have led tothe melding of unlikely social groups, such as rad-ical protestors and middle-class residents. Tacticsare often different, but new alliances have hadsome influence on how national politics framesenvironmental problems and solutions.

In Chapter 22, Tim O’Riordan explores themany faces of the sustainability transition by sug-gesting that the phrase sustainable developmenthas become so universal that it now means every-thing and so is in danger of meaning nothing.Sustainable development binds a range of move-ments – peace, democracy, development and envi-ronment, and yet current economic developmentpatterns are widening the gap from wealthy topoor and destroying the natural resources and life-support systems daily, and so are rapidly movingaway from sustainable development by the day.Despite concerns, though, about reaching globaltipping points arising from the huge collectivehuman influence on the world, the chapter suggests that localism offers real opportunities to create sustainable communities. People canform communities where safety, security and

sustainability can flourish and form livelihoodsthat offer hope for all involved.

We do not, however, know enough about thechanging state of planetary support systems.Forecasts remain uncertain, and so there is greatdifficulty in making predictions about how politi-cal systems and their leaders will respond. At thesame time, of course, we are not good at deliver-ing well-being for both people and nature. TheUK has a very good sustainable developmentstrategy, but as yet there is little or no capacity inthe UK government for a change of direction. Wewill need to build from below, and seek to findways to leap to sustainability in one generation.Several zones of sustainability engagement showpromise, including some change in businesses,consumer behaviour and use of purchasing power,in that tipping points are beginning to be noticed,and in that well-being is appearing on the politicalagenda.

The final chapter (Chapter 23) of this sectiontakes forward one of these themes, as ChristinaPage and Amory Lovins explore whether busi-nesses can be greened, and whether the very idearepresents an opportunity or contradiction.Businesses have recently begun to move beyondcommand and control environmentalism towardsthe mindset where pursuit of sustainability is seenas a competitive advantage. Private businesses andcompanies can be a source of innovation andinvention, and so can create novel solutions tosome social and environmental challenges. Assetsin socially responsible investing have grown fasterthan all other professionally managed assets, andthis too is causing a rethink. The authors set the scene for a natural capitalism framework.Industrialized capitalism liquidates rather thanvalues important forms of natural, social andhuman capital, yet sustainability calls for ways to protect and invest in these assets over the long term.

What can businesses themselves do? They canseek to increase radically the productivity ofresources – do more, better, with far less and forlonger. This is easy to say, but there are indeedcompelling examples of where this is working.They can practice biomimicry, by designing indi-vidual systems with closed loops, no waste and notoxicity. They can shift from a product-basedeconomy to a solutions-based one, and finally,they can reinvest in natural capital. Progress, how-ever, may bring unintended consequences, as suc-cessful enterprises that use less per unit of productmay see demand so increase that at the aggregatelevel an increase in negative impact on the envi-ronment may occur. The path forward suggests theneed to think in whole systems and to adopt fullcost accounting to capture the problem of externalities. But there will still be a need for civil


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society, shareholders and government to applymore than a little pressure to help in the transition.

SECTION V: ENVIRONMENTALTECHNOLOGIES

The fifth section of this Handbook explores keyquestions around environmental technologies, thehistory of pollution, the scales at which environ-mental problems are manifested, and some poten-tial options for intervention that could solvehitherto intractable problems. In the first chapter(Chapter 24), Thomas Wilbanks and PatriciaRomero-Lankao analyse the human dimensions ofglobal environmental change, a term that covers awide range of processes and phenomena. Thereare three major categories: human driving forcesthat lead to environmental change, human impactsof environmental change and human responses toenvironmental change. To these has recently beenadded human decision support, which links infor-mation about driving forces and impacts withdecisions that can moderate driving forces orreduce impacts. The range of key drivers includeindustrialization, world population demographics,technological change that encourages greater con-sumption, and institutional change. Vulnerabilityto environmental change is related to exposureand sensitivity to changes, and the capacity to cope.Human responses then centre on mitigation oradaptation, and when impacts are negative, thereare many types of adaptive responses.

The chapter details three specific cases toexplore these issues: human settlements and carbon footprints, economic growth and develop-ment, and governance and society. The humandimensions of global environmental change havethe potential to be profoundly important for thefundamental challenges of sustainability, equityand peace. Human societies, economies andresponses to these impacts, and concerns aboutthe risks of them, in turn shape further changes.We will need to improve our understanding ofthese dynamics if sustainable futures for bothnature and society are to be discovered.

Howard Frumkin then discusses the concept ofenvironmental health in the second chapter(Chapter 25). The human impact of environmentalexposures, it is suggested, should be consideredbroadly. The environment affects people alongmany dimensions, including medical status, psy-chological well-being and spirituality. While thefocus of much scientific attention has been onenvironmental exposures that are toxic, it is clearthat other exposures can also be health promoting.These differences have shaped the evolving defini-tions of environmental health over time. The chap-ter explores the ancient origins of environmental

health, the industrial awakenings, combined withthe emergence of new analytical methods, and themodern era.

A range of themes have developed in the mod-ern era, beginning with the recognition of chemi-cal hazards, and the linkages to ill-health,supported by advances in toxicology and epidemi-ology. A new development was in environmentalpsychology, founded on E. O. Wilson’s theory ofbiophilia (Wilson, 1984). Further developmentsincluded the continued integration of ecology with human health, and the expansion of clinicalservices related to environmental exposure.Environmental health policy has continued toemerge, at both national and international levels.A new theme, though, has been a growing focuson environmental justice, born of a fusion of envi-ronmentalism, public health and civil rights.Environmental justice is one example of a broadertrend, a focus on susceptible groups rather thanwhole populations.

In the third chapter (Chapter 26), Ian Colbeckexplores the history of actions and effectiveness ofchange in influencing air pollution and itsimpacts. Despite some technological and policyadvances, air pollution continues to impose aheavy burden on the health of populations in manyparts of the world, particularly now in urban areasof developing countries. In the European Union,though, particulate matter claims an average of 8.6months from the life of every person. Other keyproblems arise from ozone, sulphur dioxide andoxides of nitrogen. Air pollution also has other keyeffects on the environment, including on forests,lakes, agriculture, wildlife and buildings.

There has been a long history of the recognitionof the problems of air pollution, dating back atleast to ancient Rome. But it was the industrialrevolution that substantially increased the burdenof pollutants in the air, leading to many combinedefforts by civil society and policy makers, whichin turn did affect attitudes amongst the public.Single large events had a significant effect onchange, such as from the anticyclone that coveredLondon in December 1952. The smoke-laden fogcaused the deaths of at least 4000 people (possiblynearer 12,000 according to recent assessments),the asphyxiation of cattle, the suspension of pub-lic transport, and even the suspension of an operaperformance when smog in the auditorium madeconditions intolerable for the audience and per-formers. The Clean Air Act of 1956 was consid-ered a success, and has been followed by anumber of examples of helpful policy interven-tions. In general, though, there has been a changefrom permissive to mandatory legislation with thesetting of specific air quality standards.

The fourth chapter (Chapter 27) by AndrewBall addresses terrestrial environments and the


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potential arising from bioremediation to solve dif-ficult environmental problems. In soils, decompo-sition of organic compounds returns them to theirinorganic form, thus making them available toplants for uptake. But what if compounds in thesoil are not naturally present? Will they be brokendown, or persist? If they are toxic, what effect willthey have on the biotic community? There existsin the natural soil community the potential for the breakdown and recycling of a wide range ofcompounds by microbes. If this potential can beidentified, new technological options may follow.

Boiremediation is the use of microorganisms toreturn an object or area to a condition which is notharmful to plant or animal life. One of the advan-tages of bioremediation centres on the possibilityof treating a polluted soil without having toremove it elsewhere, thus reducing the cost oftreatment. A range of options are available,including biodegradation, biostimulation, bioaug-mentation and biorestoration. The increasingsophistication of chemical industries, combinedwith a growth in complexity of waste materials,means that the opportunities for bioremediationare large. However, efforts have to be paid to ques-tions of social acceptability of these methods, as afailure to anticipate public concerns can derailpotentially beneficial technologies. Key dimen-sions centre on types of dialogue, attention to con-stituents affected and interested, and the details ofthe physical, social and institutional context.There are many areas of land heavily contaminated,and bioremediation is a growing and relativelycheap and effective set of technologies.

The fifth chapter (Chapter 28) by Stuart Buntingcontains an analysis of the environmental prob-lems brought about by aquaculture systems, andoffers guidance for their reconfiguration to makethem productive, environmentally sensitive andequitable. Aquaculture has emerged in recentdecades as an important food production sector,now worth some $60 billion annually. However,aquaculture appropriates a wide range of environ-mental goods and services, and where demandexceeds carrying capacity, then adverse impactscan occur. The consequences of such negativeenvironmental impacts include self-pollution,restricted amenity, reduced functionality, andimpacts on option and non-use values. In somelocations, social tensions and conflicts havearisen, especially where traditional access rightsand resource-use patterns are disrupted.

There are, however, a range of regenerationstrategies and policies that can be employed.These include using resources more efficiently,especially for neighbouring production systems,horizontally integrated production, again to better use of wastes, and efforts to increase thesustainability of both feed and seed supplies.

Community-based management is a crucial optionin many locations, yet many past efforts haveignored the involvement of local people and theirinstitutions. There are relatively few helpful poli-cies, yet these could help to reduce negativeimpacts and improve access to benefits. A widerange of institutions need to be involved, includ-ing national and local government authorities,extension agents, development practitioners, education establishments and communities themselves.

The final chapter in this section (Chapter 29),by Peter Oosterveer, Julia S. Guivant and GertSpaargaren, addresses the emergent issue of sus-tainable food consumption, one of the key featuresin the green consumption trends. Starting in the1990s, this trend has been consolidated throughthe role of a new global actor: the supermarkets.Recent data show how countries where mostorganic products are sold via supermarket chainstend to be the countries where the organic marketshares are the highest as well. But what is the roleof supermarkets in possible transitions to moresustainable food systems? This is a topic still notsignificantly recognized in social sciences in itsrelevance for the transformation of the horizon ofthe provision of green food-products and also thechanging profile of the consumer. The authorstake this challenge and elaborate an original theo-retical framework in dialogue with the current per-spectives on the sociology of consumption and theecological modernization theory.

The retail outlet is considered as a specialexample of the meeting point of different rational-ities (production, distribution and consumption)and as the ‘locale’ constitutive for their interac-tion. The transitions are characterized in a non-essentialistic way, opening the analysis to identifynew developments within the global network soci-ety. The authors also identify plural and complexprofiles of sustainable consumers, suggesting fourdimensions that are not mutually exclusive: natu-ralness, food safety, animal welfare and environ-mental related. Examples are presented fromdifferent countries and special incidences dis-cussed, such as food scares, and this globalapproach allows the authors to translate their the-oretical proposal into an outlook of variables thatcould be part of a future research agenda.

SECTION VI: REDESIGNING NATURES

If things have become bad in many environmentsacross the world, what are the prospects for mak-ing improvements? Are there options for redesignof sectors and relationships? The fact that someenvironments can be rehabilitated does not justifytheir damage in the first place, nor does it suggest


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that complacency is acceptable when environ-ments are further threatened. However, given our current knowledge about harm to all types ofenvironments across the world, combined with thelosses of key environmental goods and services,then redesign is a crucial challenge.

This section begins with a chapter by DavidRapport (Chapter 30) on the evolving paradigm ofhealthy ecosystems. The chapter reviews the evolution of the concept of ecosystem health andits potential to motivate and guide the politics ofthe environment. The timetable is, of course,pressing, as harm to the world’s environment maysoon be a challenge to humanity’s future. The con-cepts of health and illness offer new perspectives,and these lead to the development of diagnosticindicators to aid assessment of the state of theenvironment. The term health is, however, some-what enigmatic, and many argue it is too subjec-tive a term to provide real utility. On the otherhand, it does aid the identification of stressors onsystems and their capacities to self-regulate andfunction.

For ecosystem health, there are three key meas-ures: vitality (or productivity), organization andresilience. All of these involve analyses of theconnections between social and biologicalaspects, and therefore must transcend the bound-aries of single disciplines. This further suggeststhe need to understand the interfaces betweenhuman health and ecosystem health, between cul-tural health and ecosystem health, and betweengovernance and ecosystem health. Design forregional eco-cultural health will have to be proac-tive, if there is to be a lighter human footprint onthe planet.

The second chapter (Chapter 31) is by LauraLittle and Chris Cocklin, and addresses the ques-tion of environment and human security. Whileconsensus over definitions remains elusive, manydiscourses on sustainable development haveshared a greater recognition and understanding ofthe interdependence of human societies and thenatural environment. This chapter asks specifi-cally what can the viewing of environmentalissues through the lens of security contribute, bothto the understanding of the current relationshipbetween human societies and the environment,and to recognizing what must be done to shapefuture transformations. Definitions of securityvary, depending on what activities are trying to bemade secure, and what are defined as threats tosecurity.

The authors indicate that the security discourse isa powerful political tool to channel energy andresources in particular new directions.Environmental degradation can clearly be seen as athreat to human security, either in terms of welfareor development, or to survival itself. A number

of perspectives are relevant, including the militaryand security, national economic interest and secu-rity (played out on both domestic and interna-tional arenas), and the links between security and sustainable development. A human securityperspective focuses specifically on the intercon-nections between environmental and social, polit-ical and cultural issues. Thus, environmentalconcerns are human social and political problemsas much as scientific and economic ones.

The third chapter (Chapter 32) by Jules Prettyaddresses key questions of redesign in agriculturaland food systems. Concerns about sustainabilityin agricultural systems centre on the need todevelop technologies and practices that do nothave adverse effects on environmental goods andservices, that are accessible to and effective forfarmers, and that lead to improvements in foodproductivity. Despite great progress in agriculturalproductivity in the past half-century, with cropand livestock productivity strongly driven byincreased use of fertilizers, irrigation water, agricultural machinery, pesticides and land, itwould be over-optimistic to assume that theserelationships will remain linear in the future. Newapproaches are needed that will integrate biologi-cal and ecological processes into food production;minimize the use of those non-renewable inputsthat cause harm to the environment or to the healthof farmers and consumers; make productive use ofthe knowledge and skills of farmers, so substitut-ing human capital for costly external inputs; andmake productive use of people’s collective capac-ities to work together to solve common agricul-tural and natural resource problems, such as forpest, watershed, irrigation, forest and credit man-agement.

These principles help to build important capitalassets for agricultural systems: natural, social,human, physical and financial capital. Improvingnatural capital is a central aim, and dividends cancome from making the best use of the genotypesof crops and animals and the ecological conditionsunder which they are grown or raised. Agriculturalsustainability suggests a focus on both genotypeimprovements through the full range of modernbiological approaches, as well as improved under-standing of the benefits of ecological and agro-nomic management, manipulation and redesign.The ecological management of agroecosystemsthat addresses energy flows, nutrient cycling, pop-ulation regulating mechanisms and systemresilience can lead to the redesign of agriculture ata landscape scale. Sustainable agriculture out-comes can be positive for food productivity, forreduced pesticide use and for carbon balances.Significant challenges, however, remain todevelop national and international policies to sup-port the wider emergence of more sustainable


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forms of agricultural production across bothindustrialized and developing countries.

In the fourth chapter (Chapter 33), HenryBuller and Carol Morris explore questions relatingto animals and society. Animals and humans arerarely wholly apart, even thought the spaces theyoccupy are increasingly differentiated. They sharecommon origins, common biologies, and a longhistory of interaction and interdependence, yet inmodern industrialized settings are increasinglydisconnected, continuing the lengthy process ofanthropocentric disassociation from nature andthe wild. Animals and humans are usually studiedseparately, yet an ethnoethology would bringtogether contemporary approaches to help under-stand relations between human and non-humananimal society. The article explores a variety of issues. Humans are animals, and much ofhuman social organization and behaviour to non-human animals can be explained by this humananimality. Although the otherness of animals isstill commonly evoked, there is a need to developless anthropocentric conceptualizations of thenon-human world.

The modernist legacy has been separation, yetthis chapter analyses recent and less dualisticapproaches to human–animal relations by assess-ing humans as animals, animals as others, andhuman–animal hybrids. The common theme isthat interactions, such as use, enjoyment, observa-tion, killing and eating of animals, are so unavoid-able and so universal that they have been centralconstituents of human society from it origins.These relationships do not break down clearly intobinary categories, and so it is better to think ofthem as part of a network, permitting perhaps theintermixing of humans and non-humans in prac-tice and thought, and perhaps too ways to linksocial, natural, constructed and realist conceptionsof the living world.

Madhav Gadgil explores questions of socialchange and conservation in the fourth chapter(Chapter 34). Human society has been both pru-dent and harmful to the natural environment overthousands of generations, and Gadgil uses theconcepts of ecosystem people and biosphere peo-ple to explore the continuum between those whorely mostly on local resources and those that haveexploitative access to additional sources of energyand resources from outside. Ecosystems people inmany parts of the world continue to exhibit a vari-ety of cultural traditions of conservation practices,in spite of widespread loss of control over theresource base. However, there are now very fewexamples of entirely autonomous people, fully incontrol of their local ecosystems with very lighthuman demands.

But when control is lost, local communities caneasily lose their motivation for sustainable use,

together with their local institutions that arrangerules, sanctions and behavioural norms. Politicaland economic subjugation, combined with marketforces, have made it progressively more difficultfor local communities to continue practices thatmay have been sustainable over many generations.As a result, the costs of conservation can increase,even to the point where the state intervenes, feelingit can do better. Ultimately, options for ecodevel-opment will have to arise from below, but will neednew forms of external support if they are to suc-ceed in providing both livelihood options and pro-tection for the natural environment.

The final part of this section (chapter 35) movesfrom the terrestrial domain to the highly biodi-verse and now threatened environments of coralreefs, in which David Smith, Sarah Pilgrim andLeanne Cullen address a range of issues relatingto human pressures, valuation and management.Coral reefs represent one of the largest naturalstructures on the planet, and are home to morespecies than any other marine system. They arealso important for the welfare of millions of peo-ple, providing a range of vital environmentalgoods and services. However, the majority ofcoral reefs worldwide are now overexploited, and 60% show severe signs of decline. During the course of the next century, pressures are likely to increase, with some estimates suggestingthat 70% of coral reefs could be completely lostby 2050.

Despite the value of coral reefs to local commu-nities, and their long-term dependence on them, ithas become clear that efforts to govern and sustainreef fisheries have frequently failed. Yet manyself-management systems have been very success-ful at maintaining resource levels over long peri-ods. Local knowledge of species and ecologicalinteractions, combined with institutions to setnorms and rules, have been successful in manyparts of the world. But centralized conservation,where ownership changes hands, or responsibilitytowards local resources is lost or abandoned, doesnot always work. Government-imposed authorityfrequently backfires, even if it is originally drivenby a desire to protect resources sustainably. Thedynamics of reefs systems can never be fullyunderstood by those external to it, and thus co-management options need to be developed andimplemented.

SECTION VII: INSTITUTIONS ANDPOLICIES FOR INFLUENCING THEENVIRONMENT

The final section of the Handbook explores howinstitutions from local to national level shape andinfluence environmental outcomes. What are the


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best options for those with different types ofknowledge? How do social–ecological systemsdevelop over time, and what are the bestapproaches for community-based natural resourcemanagement? At the national level, how do ques-tions of precaution affect policy development, andfinally, in what form do environmental risks man-ifest themselves in the configuration of society?

In the first chapter (Chapter 36), Jon Hastieassesses the role of science and scientists in envi-ronmental policy, and shows how there is nostraightforward relationship between science andpolitics. There are four institutional norms charac-teristic of science: organized scepticism (judge-ment is suspended until evidence if convincing),universalism (knowledge claims are tested withuniversal criteria), disinterestedness (scientistssupport ideas on the basis of merit, not self-interest)and communism (findings are shared in order forknowledge to progress). Scientists, of course,have differing opinions and hypotheses, yet wherescientists disagree, so policy makers and interestgroups may take advantage, using only those find-ings that support their pre-existing preferences.Sometimes, political interests use the products ofscience after their generation, on other occasionsthey seek to intervene during the assessment orfunding process. In a variety of ways, therefore,science does not linearly produce evidence thatpolicymakers simply then adopt. Scientific knowl-edge can be exploited, influenced or even ignored.

Scientists themselves may, too, become activelyinvolved in political struggles, seeking to promotecertain policies, either as individuals or groups.Today, appointed scientific advisors themselveshave great power. Epistemic communities theoryaccepts the notion that scientists are far from dis-interested, and examines how they build consen-sus to gain authority. In a similar way, discoursecoalitions can focus around sets of shared ideasand principles. In this way, a constructivist (com-pared with a positivist) model of science in soci-ety sees scientific knowledge as constructedwithin a social process. In observing environmen-tal policy, it is important therefore to study sci-ence, policy and the shifting boundary betweenthe two with equally intensity.

The second chapter (Chapter 37) by Carl Folkeand colleagues analyses the characteristics ofsocial–ecological systems. They seek to provide arich understanding of not just human–environ-ment interactions but of how the world we live inactually works and the implications it has for cur-rent policies and governance. The chapter empha-sizes that the social landscape should beapproached as carefully as the ecological in orderto clarify features that contribute to the resilienceof social–ecological systems. In this context,Pretty and Ward (2001) find that relations of trust,

reciprocity, common rules, norms and sanctions,and connectedness in institutions are critical.Folke et al. have similar findings that includevision, leadership and trust; enabling legislationthat creates social space for ecosystem manage-ment; funds for responding to environmentalchange and for remedial action; capacity for mon-itoring and responding to environmental feed-back; information flow through social networks;the combination of various sources of informationand knowledge; and sense-making and arenas ofcollaborative learning for ecosystem management.Their work illustrates that the interplay betweenindividuals (e.g. leadership, teams, actor groups),the emergence of nested organizational structures,institutional dynamics and power relations tiedtogether in dynamic social networks are examplesof features that seem critical in adaptive gover-nance which allows for ecosystem managementand for responding to environmental feedbackacross scales.

An important lesson from the research is that itis not enough to create arenas for dialogue andcollaboration, nor is it enough to develop net-works to deal with issues at a landscape level.Further investigation of the interplay between key individuals, actor groups, social networks,organizations and institutions in multilevel social–ecological systems in relation to adaptive capacity,cross-scale interactions and enhancement ofresilience is needed. We have to understand, support and perhaps even learn how actively tonavigate the underlying social structures andprocesses in the face of change. There will beinevitable and possibly large-scale environmentalchanges, and preparedness has to be built toenhance the social–ecological capacity to respond,adapt to and shape our common future and makeuse of creative capacity to find ways to transforminto pathways of improved development. Theyconclude that the existence of transformativecapacity is essential in order to create social–ecological systems with the capability to manageecosystems sustainably for human well-being.Adaptive capacity will be needed to strengthenand sustain such systems in the face of externaldrivers and events.

In the third chapter (Chapter 38), StephenBrechin, Grant Murray and Charles Benjaminanalyse the current challenges and opportunitiesin community-based natural resource manage-ment. The article links four bodies of work. Thefirst concentrates on the social and political issuesrelated to demarcated land-based conservation ini-tiatives, particularly focusing on managementissues involving local people. The secondaddresses similar issues in marine protected areas.The third addresses questions of state-centreddevolution of responsibilities that are redefining


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community-based efforts, and the last reviews thesocial promises and pitfalls of ecotourism. Theevidence clearly now shows that the future of bio-diversity conservation rests on finding more effec-tive and connected ways of integrating localpeople and communities into the conservationprocess, and not in their greater separation.

There are many questions, though, on how toensure greater social justice, how to address thespecific needs of indigenous people (who somecommentators have called the ‘danger within’),the rise of private parks, the growth of big interna-tional NGOs (BINGOs), and the challenges ofdeveloping processes that are effective acrosswhole landscapes. Community-based conserva-tion is increasing in relevance and importance,partly through decentralization, and partly becauseof the emergence of strong evidence to show itseffectiveness when the social, ecological and polit-ical conditions are right. The future of biodiversityconservation must rest largely on working togetherwith people and communities, both in developingand industrialized countries.

Harini Nagendra and Elinor Ostrom explore arange of institutional and collective action ques-tions in the fourth chapter (Chapter 39) of this sec-tion of the Handbook. Until recently, the dominanttheory predicted that individual users of commonpool resources would always overuse and/orunderinvest in the resources unless these wereowned privately or by government. In this chapter,the theoretical perspectives are first reviewed, andthe central principles of alternative positions sum-marized: with the right institutions, rules andboundary conditions, it is possible for communi-ties to manage common pool resources over verylong periods. There is, however, a need for flexi-ble rather than blueprint thinking, a recognition ofthe importance of differing contextual variables,an understanding of how financial benefits canserve as incentives for effective management, andan acknowledgement that heterogeneity can bepositively associated with successful collectiveaction.

The case of Nepal is analysed in detail, and theparticular problem of blueprint thinking identi-fied. A consequence of the growing appreciationof the value of community-based efforts for forestconservation has resulted in their increased pro-motion by government, with over 8500 forest usergroups now formed in the hills and plains. Butwhere models are applied from above rather thandeveloped iteratively from below, then successfulmanagement may be threatened. At the same time,financial benefits are rarely evenly sharedbetween communities, especially those in bufferzones of parks bringing in substantial ecotourismrevenue. In conclusion, scholars interested inenvironmental policies will need to pay more

attention to the need for adaptive development ofinstitutions to fit the ecological system of interest.

The fifth chapter (Chapter 40) is by AlbertWeale, and contains a clear analysis of the precau-tionary principle in environmental politics. Thereis an interesting conflict in environmental policy –on the one hand, there is widespread agreement onthe need to act to protect biodiversity and encour-age sustainable development. On the other, thereremains controversy as to what to do to attainthese apparently consensual goals. Uncertainty isa central element of contemporary environmentalpolicy, with many key questions on the frontier of scientific knowledge and understanding.Sometimes uncertainty seems to suggest taking noaction, and on other occasions it appears to com-mend immediate action. The precautionary princi-ple has received widespread attention in manypolicy instruments, and again has been invoked inmany different ways. Thus, governments disputeits formulation and contest its applications, andpolicy commentators and activists are divided onwhether it is useful or not.

Discussions of the precautionary principle centre on three interrelated questions. How is theprinciple defined and what claims are beingasserted? How should policymakers deal withinevitable uncertainties about cause and effect?How do the values protected by the application ofthe principle of precaution stand relative to othervalues? The varying conceptions of precautionsuggest that there is not one precautionary princi-ple, rather a precautionary attitude, characterizedby a willingness to act on threats, even when therisk is unclear or unlikely, and to the differingdegrees to which threats and costs are evaluated.Proponents of a strong conception will act withless evidence than those who hold to a weakerconception of the principle. The bigger question,however, centres on whether it is possible todemocratize decision on precaution.

The final chapter of this section and of theHandbook (Chapter 41) is by Ulrich Beck andCordula Kropp, and explores issues relating toenvironmental risks and public perceptions. Thebackdrop is Beck’s concept of the world risk soci-ety. Global approaches to problems can work, butface three problems: relevant (both lay and expert)knowledge is rarely clear about global hazards,global definition of environmental problems can be seen itself as a kind of ecological imperial-ism, and the very idea of nature conservation canbe perverted into a new kind of world manage-ment. Underpinning these questions are issues ofuncertainty – existing ones and self-generatedmanufactured ones. Can risks be brought undercontrol, or will they always escape, leading per-haps to ecological flashpoints? In the world risksociety, therefore, industrial projects become


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political ventures. Thus, what is required is globalaction from above, such as through internationaltreaties and institutions, and globalization frombelow, such as through new transnational actorsoperating beyond the system of parliamentary politics and challenging established politicalorganizations and interest groups.

In the crisis of global interdependence areglobal financial risks, the threats from terroristnetworks and ecological risks. All three have thepotential to cause cross-border conflicts, thoughenvironmental ones have particular features, suchas having long periods of latency, the need to passscientific, media and public attention to come intoexistence, and the difficulty of individualizingrisks which generally spread over and undernational borders. Global environmental risks arepotentially transformative, especially where thedesire for sustainability has eclipsed or displacedthe long-held notions of economic and technicalprogress.

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