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Ecosystem service valuation (ESV) attempts to transform the opposition of human economic necessity and ecological conservation by valuing the latter in terms of the services rendered by the former. However, despite a number of ESV-inspired sustainability initiatives since the 1990s, global ecological degradation continues to accelerate. This suggests that ESV has fallen far short of its goals of sustainable social transformation—a failure which has generated considerable criticism. This paper reviews three prominent lines of ESV criticism: 1) the neo-Marxist criticism, which emphasizes the “fictitious” character of ecosystem commodities; 2) the liberal criticism through Friedrich Hayek's concept “scientistic objectivism”; and 3) the pragmatist criticism of “value monism”. Although each form of criticism provides insight into the limitations of ESV, all share ESV's inability to discern what kind of social transformation is possible . Unable to provide an account of their own immersion in social and historical context, these approaches operate in the hypothetical . In light of these shortcomings, this paper advances a critical theory approach, which we contend provides conceptual tools uniquely well-suited to more adequately address the question of social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, to perceive the link between society and environment does not require that we engage in an effort of great abstraction. What remains paradoxical is that the intensity and scale of societally induced environmental degradation, which rose to historically unprecedented levels during the latter half of the 20th century, is synchronous with an equally impressive increase in public concern for and attention to the biophysical world. This article examines values-based and traditional Marxist-oriented approaches to environmental sociology in the USA in order to assess whether or not – and if so, how exactly – these approaches help us make sense of the aforementioned paradox. Against this background, the necessity of critical theory for environmental sociology is illuminated. In order to further research efforts accordingly, this article advances the concept of sociobiophysicality, which allows us to grasp objective drivers of human-ecological transformation and forms of subjectivity as synchronous with the commodity form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]