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There is a gap between concern about environmental degradation such as climate change and effective action taken against the forces that drive degradation. This paper argues that real helplessness, a social condition producing powerless, stupefied, and repressed actors, is a fortified barrier between climate concern and effective climate action. Political‐economic analysis has theoretical and methodological implications for environmental social science and helps explain a current conundrum in critical sociology: Why are alternatives to a system that drives climate change and other catastrophic risks still seen as unrealistic? We suffer from a political‐economic system impervious to transformation before we suffer from a lack of alternative ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the gendered politics of care in global environmental activism. Drawing on interviews with 96 Extinction Rebellion activists worldwide and a close analysis of 10 older women within this dataset, we contend that 'care' both replicated and contradicted the patriarchal order. Older women in Extinction Rebellion have often been relied upon to take on much of the caring labour involved in the maintenance of the movement at local and national levels. However, care also involved these women undertaking powerful—and empowering—forms of political action, often grounded in their knowledge and experience of organising social justice movements over decades. In contrast to prior research in the area, we found that women's participation in leadership roles within the movement against climate change appears to have increased over time. Using Sara Ahmed's (2004) concept of affective economies, we argue that the emotion of care came to be accumulated and attached to older women within Extinction Rebellion, producing inequalities in expectations for who would 'care for the movement' while also opening up opportunities for empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies estimate that the US military it is a bigger polluter than 140 individual countries, having emitted hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases in the twenty‐first century. Despite this, the military is also one of the organizations most affected by climate change, given its global infrastructural reach, and one that is positioning itself to grapple with the social and political upheavals resulting from the climate crisis. Thus, paradoxically, despite its role as a major driver of ecological degradation, the military is one of the few influential institutions in the US that has demonstrated a willingness to grapple with the effects of climate change. In this paper we explore these two sides of the relationship between the military and climate change. Combining perspectives from the military and environmental sociology literature, we review the military's role as a polluter as well as a stakeholder. We examine the military's attempts to reconcile those two approaches through the adoption of a philosophy of "winners and losers" of climate change, highlighting the limits and possibilities of this approach. To make sense of the military's response, we review the conflicting institutional logics guiding the Pentagon's efforts. We conclude by suggesting that policymakers resolve these tensions through a strategic retreat from its globe‐spanning presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research lays out the debates and contradictory findings regarding the impacts of corruption on forest loss in a cross‐national context, specifically in low‐ and middle‐income nations. After, I describe how these inconsistent findings may be due to difficulties in untangling the complexities of corruption definitionally and then operationalizing it in a cross‐national context. Then, I review the advances in corruption data collection and measurement. Finally, I discuss how these developments in data collection and operationalization have led to an expansion of research on corruption to other aspects of governance, bringing forward several avenues for future research, but also potentially conflating definitions of corruption with governance. Overall, I aim to capture how scholars are studying corruption and forest loss from a cross‐national context and what their findings tell us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip Lowe died in February 2020, and so an academic career spanning five decades in environmental and rural social science and the sociology of knowledge came to an end. A pioneer of the social science of environmentalism, since the early 1990s, Philip Lowe had been closely associated with the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University in the UK and had been the intellectual force behind establishing rural economy as both a subject and mode of social science analysis. This article reflects on a career and the evolving concept of 'rural economy' as an economic form, a policy realm and a knowledge practice. Through this history, it presents an account of the contribution of Philip Lowe's research and writing that, as a result of his death, now stands as a bounded and complete body of work for the benefit of future generations of scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central premise of environmental sociology is that social and environmental processes influence one another in fundamental ways. Here we build upon that insight and develop the concept of "environmental precedent" to better incorporate the full range of environmentally consequential law ‐ even law that is not "environmental" per se ‐ in sociological analysis. Environmental precedent refers to the environmental consequences of legal processes, consequences that become the new, enduring, dynamic material reality for future legal processes. Unlike legal precedent, which may be amended to suit immediate needs through judicial or legislative action, environmental precedent can have interpretive and material consequences that may be impossible for any social process to predict, amend, or reverse. To demonstrate the concept's usefulness, we illustrate the varied, dialectical environmental and legal relationships that exist in three case studies; the Flint water crisis, the federal passage of a suite of environmental laws in the early 1970s, and how some preconditions to the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina came to pass in New Orleans. In addition to foregrounding the benefits to sociology of a sharper understanding of environmental legal theory and practice, our aim is to encourage collaboration between social scientists, environmental lawyers, and legal scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]