The social structural forces that influence GCC and other environmental problems can be conceptualized
as those that affect the scale of human exploitation of natural resources and those that affect qualitative features
of the human-environment interaction, such as metabolic exchanges between society and nature. Schaniberg’s
Treadmill of Production (ToP) points to the dynamic processes present in modern, particularly capitalist,
economies that incessantly drive expansion. This economic growth is clearly linked to expanding energy and
material consumption, and thus environmental degradation, including GHG emissions and consequently GCC.
Foster’s (extended from Marx’s) Metabolic Rift points to the way in which modern, urbanized, particularly
capitalist economies disrupt natural cycles, and thus undermine sustainability. The metabolic rift points to
how sustainability can be compromised even before absolute scale of resource extraction and waste emissions
overwhelm ecosystems. Thus, sociological theory points to how fundamental structural changes in the economic
order are necessary to curtail the modern environmental crisis. In particular, economic structures that necessitate
incessant growth (the ToP) and those that disarticulate processes of material and energy exchanges between
society and nature (the Metabolic Rift), need to be replaced with economic structures that provide for human
needs in a fashion that fits within the biophysical capacity of the Earth. In short, environmental problems cannot
entirely be separated from social processes more generally.
What do we need to know: What are the major sociological research questions?
Despite this broad and general understanding of the forces that contribute to environmental problems, including
GCC, that sociological theory provides us with, there is still much that we do not know. Although some of the key
features of modern societies that contribute to GCC (and unsustainability more generally) have been identified, it
remains unclear how those features are to be replaced and exactly what they should be replaced with. Although
anthropogenic GCC is a problem that has emerged only in the modern era, anthropogenic environmental problems
are age old. It is not the case that modern societies uniquely degrade the environment. We should not assume that
the absence of the key structural features of our modern social order represents the presence of sustainability.
We are far from understanding how to structure a society so as to make it sustainable, while providing a high
quality of life for all people. Thus, the key challenge before sociology is not only to identify the forces that have
contributed to the modern environmental crisis and unsustainability, but to identify how it is that societies can
be restructured so as to become sustainable. This is no small challenge, but it is indeed a sociological one. The
technical forces that contribute to environmental problems cannot be separated from their social substrate. Thus a
sustainable social order must be found before a sustainable technical order will emerge.
ReferencesClark, Brett and Richard York. 2005. “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the
Biospheric Rift.” Theory and Society 34(4): 391-428.
Foster, John Bellamy. 1999. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundation for Environmental
Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 105(2):366-405.
Schnaiberg, Allan. 1980. The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity. New York: Oxford University Press.
York, Richard. 2006. “Ecological Paradoxes: William Stanley Jevons and the Paperless Office.” Human Ecology
Review 13(2): 143-147.
York, Richard and Philip Mancus. Forthcoming. “Critical Human Ecology: Historical Materialism and Natural
Laws.” Sociological Theory.
York, Richard, Eugene A. Rosa, and Thomas Dietz. 2003. “Footprints on the Earth: The Environmental
Consequences of Modernity.” American Sociological Review 68(2): 279-300.