Search

Existing sociological analyses express differing expectations about state control over economic actors and the political feasibility of environmental regulation. Recent literature on the environmental state sees environmental protection as becoming a basic responsibility of postindustrial states, with economic actors no longer having the autonomy they once enjoyed. In contrast, much of the work in environmental sociology expects commitments to environmental state responsibilities to be largely symbolic. Scholars working from this perspective tend to see environmental damage as proportionate to economic prosperity. To assess the differing expectations, we analyze actual environmental performance among the most prosperous nation-states focusing on national-level emissions of carbon dioxide. The strongest predictors of emissions are found to be measures of ecological efficiency, which tend to be associated with potentially less symbolic policy decisions. For the future, there is a need to move beyond broad assertions, devoting greater attention to the conditions under which states are more or less likely to impose constraints on economic actors.

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on these a priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be "physical facts" are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be "strictly social" will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature--a mountain--that has undergone little oven physical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of bath the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be "physical" and "social" factors can be conjointly constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]