Environmental Sociology - History

History

Modern thought surrounding human-environment relations can be traced back to Charles Darwin. Darwin’s concept of natural selection suggested that certain social characteristics played a key role in the survivability of groups in the natural environment. Although typically taken at the micro-level, evolutionary principles, particularly adaptability, serve as a microcosm of human ecology. Work by Craig Humphrey and Frederick Buttel (2002) traces the linkages between Darwin's work on natural selection, human ecological sociology, and environmental sociology.

Sociology developed as a scholarly discipline in the mid- and late-19th and early 20th centuries, in a context where biological determinism had failed to fully explain key features of social change, including the evolving relationship between humans and their natural environments. In its foundational years, classical sociology thus saw social and cultural factors as the dominant, if not exclusive, cause of social and cultural conditions. This lens down-played interactive factors in the relationship between humans and their biophysical environments.

Environmental sociology emerged as a coherent subfield of inquiry after the environmental movement of the 1960s and early 1970s. The works of William R. Catton, Jr. and Riley Dunlap, among others, challenged the constricted anthropocentrism of classical sociology. In the late 1970s, they called for a new holistic, or systems perspective. Since the 1970s, general sociology has noticeably transformed to include environmental forces in social explanations. Environmental sociology has now solidified as a respected, interdisciplinary field of study in academia.