ideology,’’ environmental political thought can be understood as what I’d like
to term apost-exuberantmode of inquiry. 5 By labeling it in this manner, I do
not wish to suggest that it has (or should have) lost interest in meaningful—
or radical—social or political change. The environmental and political chal-
lenges that we face demand that we reject complacency, and many environ-
mental political thinkers have retained the critical edge needed for such a
task. Instead, it is to suggest that it is no accident that environmental political
theory’s emergence as a distinct form of analysis is concomitant with the loss
of the innocent conviction that such change can be accomplished in the
absence of close and careful consideration to relationships of political and
economic power and inequality within the human community, as well as the
role of current political ideas, values, and institutions in either challenging or
reinforcing these.
Despite this common tendency, Hay is surely correct to note the prolifer-
ation of voices, approaches, and concerns within environmental political
theory and so we must attempt to sort these out in order to get a handle
on the diversity. Hay sorts these theories using familiar ideological categories,
identifying authoritarian, conservative, liberal, and socialist variants of en-
vironmental political theory. In what follows, I discuss two other ways in
which recent discussions of environmental political theory might be surveyed
and sorted. TheWrst is primarily attentive to categories of method or ap-
proach, while the second focuses more upon the substantive controversies
that have emerged within environmental political theory.
3 Formal Categories
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In a brief ‘‘Afterword’’ to a 1993 collection of essays entitledThe Politics of
Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory, Andrew Dobson identiWes
5 I am borrowing the term, butnotthe meaning of, ‘‘post-exuberant’’ from a classic essay by
environmental sociologists William R. Catton, Jr. and Riley E. Dunlap, ‘‘A New Ecological Paradigm
for Post-Exuberant Sociology.’’ In Catton and Dunlap’s telling, the exuberance of mainstream soci-
ology is a reXection of its failure to acknowledge society’s embeddedness within the larger non-human
world. By contrast—although these claims arenotmutually exclusive—I suggest that the exuberance of
much environmental theorizing (including Catton and Dunlap’s ‘‘new ecological paradigm’’) is a
reXection of its failure to grapple adequately with social and political ideas and practices.
political theory and the environment 777