Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 55

3 Social theories of environmental
reform

1. From environmental crises to environmental reform

The Information Society literature and the studies on the Information
Age paid only marginal attention to environmental questions. During
the 1970s and 1980s, this 'environmental omission' can be seen as
representative for the wider social sciences, rather than an anomaly
of this particular literature. 1 But 'the environmental question' was not
completely absent from the social sciences. During the late 1960s, and
especially the 1970s - that is, parallel in time to the emerging Informa-
tion Society debate - several social sciences witnessed the emergence of
relatively small environmental subdisciplines: within sociology, polit-
ical sciences, economics, and later also within anthropology and law.
Strongly triggered by social developments in Western industrialised
societies, social scientists started to reflect on a new category of phe-
nomena: the changing relations between nature and society and the
reflection of modern society on these changing relations.
In retrospect, the framing of environmental questions within sociol-
ogy and political sciences during the 1970s and 1980s was of a par-
ticular nature. The emphasis was primarily on the fundamental causes
of environmental crises in Western industrialised society and the fail-
ure of modern institutions to adequately deal with these environmen-
tal crises. Environmental protests and movements, state failures, the
capitalist roots of the environmental crisis, and environmental atti-
tudes and (mis)behaviour were the typical subjects of environmental
sociology and political sciences studies in the 1970s. Many of these
studies were strongly related to neo-Marxist interpretation schemes
(cf. Enzensberger, 1973 ; Schnaiberg, 1980 ; Pepper 1984 ), and even

1

See, for sociology, Catton and Dunlap ( 1978a ; 1978b ), Buttel ( 1978 ) and
Spaargaren ( 1987 ); see, for anthropology, Milton ( 1994 ).

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