Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 62

However, the crucial transformation that makes the notion of the
growing autonomy of an ecological rationality especially relevant is
of more recent origin. After an ecological rationality has become rela-
tively independent from the political and socioideological rationalities
(in the 1970s and 1980s), this process of growing independence began
to extend to the economic domain in the 1990s. And because, according
to most scholars, this growing independence of the ecological rational-
ity from its economic counterpart is crucial to 'the ecological question',
this last step is the decisive one. It means that economic processes of
production and consumption are increasingly analysed and judged, as
well as designed and organised from both an economic and an eco-
logical point of view. Some profound institutional changes in the eco-
nomic domain of production and consumption have become discern-
able in the 1990s. Among these changes are the widespread emergence
of environmental management systems in companies; the introduction
of economic valuation of environmental goods via the introduction of
ecotaxes, among other things; the emergence of environment-inspired
liability and insurance arrangements; the increasing importance
attached to environmental goals such as natural resource saving and
recycling among public and private utility enterprises; and the articula-
tion of environmental considerations in economic supply and demand,
for instance by ecolabels. Within ecological modernisation ideas, these
transformations are analysed as institutional changes, indicating their
semipermanent character. Although the process of ecology-induced
transformation should not be interpreted as linear, evolutionary and
irreversible, as was common in the modernisation theories in the 1950s
and 1960s, these changes have some permanency and would be difficult
to reverse.
Some environmental sociologists and commentators in the environ-
mental reform tradition go even one step farther. They suggest that
environmental considerations and interests not only activate institu-
tional transformations in contemporary industrial societies, but even
evolve into a new Grand Narrative (cf. de Ruiter, 1988 ; various deep
ecologist scholars). The traditional Grand Emancipatory Narratives of
modernity (e.g., the emancipation of labour, the dissolution of poverty)
place us in history as human beings who have a definite past and
a more or less predictable future. Now that these traditional narra-
tives have ceased to perform as overarching 'story-lines', some believe
the ecology (or, alternatively, sustainability) will emerge as the new