Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 67

continuity of a capitalist order that does not allow any environmen-
tal reform beyond window dressing. 9 Deep ecology-inspired scholars
argue against the reformist agenda of ecological modernisation, as it
opts for a light green reform agenda, instead of a deep green fundamen-
tal and radical change of the modern order, sometimes even towards
postmodernity. Human-ecologists, inspired by neo-Malthusianism and
sometimes in remarkable alliances with neo-Marxists (cf. York and
Rosa, 2003 ), blame an ecological modernisation perspective for the
neglect of quantities, not in the last place population growth and ever-
growing consumption quantities. Consequently, ecological modernisa-
tion perspectives are blamed to be inadequate, overly optimistic/naive
and incorrect. It is not so much that these objections are completely
incorrect. From their starting points and the basic premises of these
schools of thought, the points raised against ecological modernisation
are internally logical, consistent and coherent. In various publications
(Mol and Spaargaren 2000 , 2002 , 2004 ), however, we have argued
that their focus is too narrow, limited and one-sided, by claiming that
there is nothing new under the sun. Although ecological modernisa-
tion scholars would not deny that in various locations, practices and
institutions environmental deterioration is still there, they object to
the conclusion of these critics that no reforms can be identified in the
institutions dealing with environmental challenges.
Third, and finally, there is a category of comments that is less eas-
ily either incorporated or put aside if we want to analyse and under-
stand environmental reform in late modern society. These issues have to
do with the nation-state or national society centeredness of ecological
modernisation, the strong separation between the natural/physical and
the social in ecological modernisation, and the continuing conceptual
differentiation in state, market and civil society actors and institu-
tions. Here it is especially the changing character of modern society -
especially through processes of globalisation - that makes new, early-
twenty-first-century environmental reform dynamics not always easily
fit ecological modernisation conceptualisations of the 1990s. This is
not too dissimilar to the fact that the environmental reform dynamics
of the 1990s did not fully fit the 'policy and protest' conceptualisations
of the 1970s environmental reform studies. It is especially these com-
ments and discussions on ecological modernisation that have started

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See also the work of Pepper ( 1999 ), Blowers ( 1997 ) and Foster ( 2002 ).