Ecological transformation • When ecological knowledge and transformation in the social practices as the goal of environmental studies • ------- • Ecological transformation is best understood as an ongoing process of wide-ranging and interactive cluster of ideas and activities [Jamison, 2000] • Ecology and environment as a distinct combinations of thought and action, of intellectual and practical developments, of cultural struggles and tensions.
3 • Environmental concern has become a living source of identity not only for a wide of range of activists and scientists and activists in the field but also a more variegated, source of inspiration for society as a whole. • What had previously been a social movement, protesting against industrial society and its waste and artificiality, has come to be supplanted by a much more differentiated and contested set of symbols, ideas, slogans and practices , as represented in the western and non western traditions , and across scientific fields.
4 • The emblematic depiction of doom, identifying ‘limits to growth’ and ‘population bombs’, has tended to be replaced by more upbeat messages: • ‘‘greening of industry’, ‘ecological modernization’, sustainable development and so on.
5. Transformation in the professional scientific field • Already in the 1970s, it was apparent to many educators that ecological issues required for their solution something more than a traditional natural scientific expertise, but it has proved difficult to develop a meaningful way to understand and deal with the multifarious social and technical dimensions
6. Transformation in the sociological discipline • the societal context in which sociology and its unique disciplinary traditions developed was initially indifferent to environmental issues and environment was not considered as proper field of sociological studies ; • Environmental problems were thought to be a variant social problems rather than environmental.
7. Neglect of the biophysical world in sociological discipline • Sociology as a discipline, till 1970s moved away from explanations of sociological phenomena [ for example, racial and cultural differences ] in terms of biological and geographical factors, respectively. Emphasis was on explaining social phenomena in terms of “social facts”. -This aversion to excesses of biological and geographical “determinisms generally led sociologists to ignore the biophysical world .
8 [sharp distinction between nature and society ] • In the process of developing distinctively social explanations for societal phenomena, discipline replaced older determinisms with socio-cultural determinism. Moreover, the general focus on increased urbanization, which reduced direct contact with the natural environment, and with industrialization and modernization, societies appeared to be increasingly disembedded from the biophysical world; --as there was greater stress on the cultural and social aspects in the formation of society, human society was thought be exempt from natural constraints.
9. Transformation in sociology as a discipline • Transformation in the discipline began with a critique of the discipline’s blindness to biophysical world; • Since 1980s, attempts have been made to codify the field of environmental sociology; • Most importantly, it was accompanied by an explication and critique of the so-called “Human Exceptionalism Paradigm(HEP]- a worldview represented by extreme form of anthropocentricism .
10. HEP • . Humans are unique among the earth’s creatures, for they have culture • 2. Culture can vary almost infinitely and can change much more rapidly than biological traits • 3. Thus many human differences are socially induced rather than inborn, they can be socially altered and inconvenient differences can be eliminated • 4. Thus, also, cultural accumulation means that progress can continue without limit, making all social problems ultimately soluble
11 • environment’s carrying capacity is always enlargeable as needed—thus denying the possibility of scarcity • So the call for mainstream sociology’s dominant paradigm to be replaced with a more ecologically sound one. • .
12 • Recognizing humans’ dependence on the eco- system , [Catton and Dunlap] suggested that the HEP should be replaced by a new paradigm , what they called : New Ecological Paradigm [which they earlier named as `New Environmental Paradigm]. • While they do not deny the special abilities of humans , they generally stressed that humans are not exempt from biophysical /natural constraints with respect to what they want to achieve; • In other words, there are always some constraints imposed by nature.
13 • New Ecological Paradigm • 1. Humans are but one species among the many that are interdependently involved in the biotic communities that shape our social life • 2. Intricate linkages of cause and effect and feed backs in the web of nature produce many unintended consequences which are distinct from positive human action • 3. The world is finite, so there are potent physical and biological limits constraining economic growth, social progress, and other societal phenomena
14 [institutionalization of the environmental practice in sociology • The rise and institutionalization of environmental sociology represents one of the most significant changes to the discipline of the past quarter century Now environmental sociologists are producing rapidly expanding bodies of both empirical literature on the relationships between societal and environmental variables; • And sociology now gives importance to bio-physical environment
15 • The modifications have occurred through a process of extension – i.e., integrating previously ignored concerns into the fabric of the existing theories. • The basic outline of sociology’s theories – be its social constructivist approaches, Marxist perspectives, cultural studies, or whatever – remain unchanged with respect to their core framework, but now extended to environmental considerations.
16 • The defining characteristic of the NEP is a concept borrowed from biology – the notion of carrying capacity – or the existence of biophysical limits on human society; • Thus, environmental sociologists have embraced biology’s orientation toward scarcity (in contrast to the economic conception traditionally held by the discipline) • And in “greening” sociological theory rather than radically revising it.
18 • The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment - • is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment. • The carrying capacity could support a positive natural increase, or could require a negative natural increase. Thus, the carrying capacity is the number of individuals an environment can support without significant negative impacts to the given organism and its environment.
19 • Assumptions about the biophysical limits were influenced by Malthusians which hold that the demand for resources, stemming from population growth and the increasing standard of living, grows exponentially while the ability to provide them grows arithmetically. • As a result, there exist strict biophysical limits on resource supply and the carrying capacity of an ecosystem or the biosphere.
20 • The distinction between the HEP and the NEP reflects a division between economic and biological conceptions of scarcity. • The economic optimists argue that social arrangements – typically free markets, science and liberal democracy – provide the institutional arrangements that allow humans to solve any problem they confront . • Economic markets raise capital and provide incentives for entepreneurs to solve problems; science provides knowledge about the functioning of the natural world, knowledge that can be applied to the problem and democracy allows participation by wider segments of the public, thus enhancing the probability that a solution will be found
21 • The another limiting factor[in moving towards environmental thinking] involves sociology’s traditional attitude toward system thinking • - Functionalism treated social systems as a self-regulating equilibrium in which, when confronted with pressure to change, a mechanism acts to restore the system to a state of balance.
22 • This approach, exemplified in the highly influential work of Talcott Parsons (1951), was beset with a number of problems; an excessively rigid relationship between parts and the whole and an inability to deal with either a) sudden change or b) diversity. • Unable to overcome the objections, sociology largely abandoned this traditional systems theorizing
From a linear to non-linear paradigm • The study of development has mainly proceeded within a linear paradigm, although change in thinking on the way, reducing economic development to distinct stages [for instance in Rostow’s [ 1960] model; Development was treated as a reasonably predictable activity that should respond to laws of universal applicability
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