Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 77

for groups, actors and organisations to whom access is denied or who
do not manage to establish links with the relevant global networks.
Such an operationalisation would reorient conventional environmen-
tal flow studies, as currently conducted mainly from a natural science
perspective (e.g., material flow analysis, industrial ecology, etc.). It also
would enrich present additions-and-withdrawals studies, as power and
inequality are being linked to flows in a more direct way (see the discus-
sion in Mol and Spaargaren, 2005 ). Power is thought to reside in the
'additions and withdrawals' themselves, and not only in the social prac-
tices of production and consumption. Second, power and inequality in
an environmental sociology of flow perspective also would relate to the
flows of capital, information, images and persons that structure, con-
dition and enable environmental reforms. The power and inequalities
related to nonenvironmental and nonmaterial flows affect environmen-
tal reform trajectories. Those with access to and in (partial) control of
the key economic and informational flows can be said to dominate the
new informational world order, at the expense of the place-bound local
actors outside the core nodes of the global networks.
5. Conclusion: information flows and environmental reform
With the emergence of a perspective of environmental networks and
flows in environmental reform, information starts to move to the cen-
tre of environmental reform studies. Information flows are a crucial
category in the sociology of networks and flows as originally devel-
oped by Castells, Urry and others (cf. Chapter 2 ) and can thus not be
left marginalised in understanding processes of (failing) environmental
reform in the twenty-first century.
Of course, knowledge and information has never been absent in the
social sciences studies on environmental reform (as much as environ-
ment has never been completely absent from the Information Society
literature; see Chapter 2 ). In the first-generation environmental reform
studies, environmental information was interpreted as a rather unprob-
lematic and mostly undisputed category. Scientific information on the
environment and on environmental deterioration was seen as a cru-
cial resource for the environmental movement in their struggles with
states and economic elites. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) was,
of course, the role model of scientific information for environmental
campaigns. Through in-depth and detailed scientific investigations, the
devastating environmental consequences of conventional development