Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 75

theory of Anthony Giddens - for overemphasising agency over (tech-
nological) structure in this respect. When, for example, the car-system
is at (environmental) stake, the best way to make sense of the future
development of these kind of systems is to conceive of them as hybrid
systems ,assystems in which material and social entities can no longer
be separated in a meaningful way.
This challenging view could perhaps be neglected when working
in thoroughly social fields such as labour relations, schooling or gen-
der; but not when working in the environmental field. Since its incep-
tion, environmental sociology and other environmental social sciences
have been struggling with society-nature/social-material interactions
and the ways in which these interactions could best be conceptualised.
Schnaiberg ( 1980 )isexemplary in his arguments against the partial or
total fusion of the material/natural and the social, because the social -
according to Schnaiberg - is different from the natural in some crucial
respects. Societies are 'dependent from' the sets of ecosystems they
rely on for their proper functioning, but they do not function in the
same (mechanistic) ways ecosystems do. Because the social is different
from the natural, the sciences of ecology and sociology also should be
kept separate, so Schnaiberg argued. Sociology - or the social sciences
in general - should not become mixed up with ecology or the natural
sciences. This plea for separate tasks and identities of the social and the
natural sciences also can be found in Giddens's structuration theory, as
it became very influential in sociology from the 1980s onward. When
discussing epistemological issues, Giddens argued that 'those looking
for natural science-based laws and explanations in the social sciences
did not just pick the wrong platform, but were also waiting for a train
that is never going to arrive' (Giddens, 1976 ).
With the arrival of the sociology of networks and flows, the ongo-
ing debate in environmental sociology on the relationship between the
social and the material has taken a new direction and radicalised. John
Urry - also following Ulrich Beck in this respect - argues that some
of the well-defined 'units of analyses' so frequently used in contempo-
rary sociology, turn out to be valid only in relation to societies of the
first or 'simple modernity' phase of development. Key concepts such as
'nation-state' or 'environment' - when used under conditions of sec-
ond, reflexive or global modernity - seem to have lost most of their
validity. The concept of environment or nature during second moder-
nity can no longer be used in isolation from society, because nature