While the environment has been a perennial theme in human thought, the environment and how humans value, use
and think about it has become an increasingly central and important aspect of recent social theory. It has become
clear that the present generation is faced with a series of unique environmental dilemmas, largely unprecedented
in human history. Environment and Social Theory outlines the complex interlinking of the environment, nature and
social theory from ancient and pre-modern thinking to contemporary social theorising.
It explores the essentially contested character of the environment and nature within social theory, and draws attention
to the need for critical analysis whenever the term 'nature' and 'environment' are used in debate and argument.
Drawing on a broad understanding of social theory, the book examines the ways major religions such as Judaeo-Christianity
have and continue to conceptualise the environment as well as analysing the way the nonhuman environment plays
important roles in Western thinkers such as Rousseau, Malthus, Marx, Darwin, Mill to Freud, Horkheimer and the
Frankfurt School. It also discusses major contemporary thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas, Anthony Giddens, Richard
Dawkins and Jared Diamond, and the controversy around Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The book also explores the relationship between gender and the environment, postmodernism and risk society schools
of thought, and the dominance of orthodox economic thinking (which we ought to view as an ideology) in contemporary
social theorising about the environment. It concludes with an argument for an explicitly interdisciplinary green
social theoretical approach whichcombines insights from the natural sciences such as evolutionary biology, physics
and ecology with social scientific knowledge drawn from social, political and ethical theories and ideas. Written
in an engaging and accessible manner, Environment and Social Theory provides the student with an indispensable
guide to the way in which the environment and social theory relate to one another.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Series editors' preface
Preface to second edition
Introduction: the environment and social theory
'Nature', 'environment' and social theory
The role of the environment historically within social theory
The uses of 'nature' and the nonhuman world in social theory: pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment accounts
Twentieth-century social theory and the nonhuman world
Right-wing reactions to the environment and environmental politics
Left-wing reactions to the environment and environmental politics
Gender, the nonhuman world and social thought
The environment and economic thought
Risk, environment and postmodernism
Ecology, biology and social theory
Greening social theory
Glossary
Internet resources and sites
Bibliography
Index