Craig R. Humphrey and Tammy L. Lewis

 

Environmental sociology is the study of the interrelationships between society and the natural environment. “The basic essence of environmental sociology,” Fred Buttel writes,” has been to recover, and uncover, the ‘materiality’ of social structure and social life, and to do so in ways that yield insights relevant to solving environmental problems.”1 Materiality, in the context of environmental sociology, involves the dependence of human societies on natural resources and the biophysical conditions necessary for human and other forms of life – clean air, safe drinking water, productive soil, freedom from the risk of exposure to toxic chemicals, affordable gasoline and natural gas, and so on.

Environmental sociologists look for the social causes and consequences of environmental problems of vital importance not only to human societies, but to life on the earth. They study tropical deforestation, the build-up of toxic waste in communities of people of color, world population growth, people’s attitudes about global warming, and more. They ask, what are the social causes of these problems? Is modern capitalism the cause of these problems? Can capitalism be the solution to these problems? Can government officials pass and enforce laws to protect the environment? Are state officials at the beck and call of powerful capitalists? What is the role of culture in creating or, perhaps, preventing these problems? How do people’s beliefs and values, the norms that shape the collective consciousness of a society, influence how they treat the environment? Are those values now changing because of environmental movements throughout the world?

What’s new in environmental sociology?2 The answer to that question is everything! Sociology, as an academic field, is over 125 years old. The American Sociological Association’s Section on Environment and Technology, however, celebrated a 25th anniversary in Annaheim, California, August, 2001. How could sociologists overlook the objective study of interrelationships between societies and the natural world upon which societies depend for close to 100 years?

This question is the first one we will tackle in this chapter. Then we will show how environmental sociologists interested in social theory are working to take three influential classic social theories, discussed in Chapter 1 and throughout this text, and turn them “green” – making them pertinent to the materiality of society. In the third part of the chapter, we will show how these environmental social theories can be used to understand more fully an environmental problem of global ecological significance: contemporary tropical deforestation. Finally, we will present recent sociological work on modern environmental movements’ responses to tropical deforestation around the world.

The Sociological Problem of Human Exemptionalism

William Catton and Riley Dunlap’s work on the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm and the need for a New Environmental Paradigm is a formative influence on the development of environmental sociology. A paradigm is a mental lens derived from the culture of a society. Paradigms influence how people see and act in different situations throughout their lives. As Marvin Olson and his colleagues write, “The principal parts of all such mental lenses are the beliefs about the nature of social reality and values concerning desirable and undesirable social conditions.”3 Appropriate beliefs and actions of people in the United States as members of a democracy, as capitalists, or, as users of natural resources all involve paradigms that affect people’s perceptions of the world and their daily routine behavior.

At the heart of Catton and Dunlap’s environmental sociology is their observation that “ostensibly diverse and competing theoretical [paradigms] in sociology are alike in their shared anthropocentrism.”4 By this, they mean that the paradigms have a human- centered bias. Catton and Dunlap insist that theoretical perspectives as diverse as functionalism, conflict theory, and postmodernism explain how societies are organized and change, but they do so strictly in the context of human social institutions such the economy and government (hereafter, the state). The anthropocentric paradigm embedded in both classical and contemporary social theories is what Catton and Dunlap call the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm (HEP). No matter what social theory Catton and Dunlap examined, the theory contained the following four major assumptions:

1. “Humans have a cultural heritage in addition to (and distinct from) their genetic inheritance and thus are quite unlike all other animal species.”
2. “Social and cultural factors (including technology) are the major determinants of human affairs.”
3. “Social and cultural environments are the crucial context for human affairs, and the biophysical environment is largely irrelevant.”
4. “Culture is cumulative; thus technological and social progress can continue indefinitely, making all social [and environmental] problems ultimately soluble.” 4

Because of these assumptions, sociology developed without any consideration of the essential material links between society and the environment.

In contrast to the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm, Catton and Dunlap advance a “New Environmental Paradigm” that they see as a competing mental lens and the basis for revamping social theory. The principal assumptions of the NEP include the following:

1. “Even though humans have exceptional characteristics (culture, technology, etc.), they are but one among many species that are interdependently involved in the global ecosystem.”
2. “Human affairs are influenced not only by social and cultural factors, but also by intricate linkages of cause, effect, and feedback in a web of nature; thus purposive human actions have many unintended consequences.”
3. “Humans live in and are dependent upon a finite biophysical environment that imposes potent physical and biological restraints on human affairs.”
4. “However much the inventiveness of humans or the powers derived therefrom may seem for a while to transcend carrying-capacity, ecological laws cannot be repealed.” 5

The New Environmental Paradigm, the ecological alternative to the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm, as we will explain in the following section, provides the basis for “green” revisions to three major theories in sociology.

Greening Social Theories

Durkheimian Functionalism in Environmental Sociology

As discussed in Chapter 1, the functionalist paradigm, derived from Durkheimian social thought, generally regards the basic composition of a society as having beneficial social institutions that evolve over time. Functionalists assert that recurrent forms of social behavior, such as the occupational division of labor in society, persist because the behavior represents the best possible human adaptation to the social and biophysical environment. This regard for existing social arrangements as performing some positive function for society as a whole causes functionalists to be conservative about promoting major structural changes in society.

Functionalist environmental sociologists, following the Durkheimian paradigm, emphasize the importance of cultural values in leading to and providing for eventual solutions to problems with natural resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Functionalist environmental sociologists claim that environmental problems are the unanticipated consequences of the pursuit of Western cultural values such as individualism and the pursuit of wealth during the course of social modernization which includes industrialization, urbanization, an improved standard of living, and related social changes

Functionalist environmental sociologists maintain that culturally transmitted values associated with modernization developed during a historical period that William Catton and Riley Dunlap call “the era of exuberance.”6 Catton and Dunlap’s functionalist environmental paradigm, these values developed when the New World was new and seemed to offer a “limitless” frontier of natural wealth. These values also include “exemptionalism” or, in Catton and Dunlap’s words, the belief that “the history of humanity is one of progress; for every problem there is a solution, and thus progress need never cease.”7

If the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm is the basic causal force bringing about the modern environmental crisis, according to Catton, then the solution to that crisis is the development of a new form of collective consciousness, a new form of social glue.8 Existing social institutions such as education, religion, and science can serve as the principal agents promoting this change in collective consciousness to reflect the NEP. For functionalists such as Catton and Dunlap, Western values, not capitalism or the decisions of powerful bureaucratic elites, are the basic causal force behind natural resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Catton’s early work in environmental sociology illustrates his perspective. Writing about the wastefulness of the modern Western lifestyle, he states:

The steel industry has used trainload after trainload of iron ore and coal, gouged from gashes on the face of the earth. So the steelmakershave been prodigal. But modern people have wanted steel in vastquantities, for buildings, machines, tools, playthings, weapons.The prodigality has been collective; it was not just a characterdefect in the corporate executives of United States Steel.9

Unlike Marxian environmental sociologists who believe the capital accumulation process is the cause of the contemporary environmental crisis, Catton reverses the Marxian causal reasoning. For Catton, the capital accumulation process is a response to culturally perpetuated, human exemptional material needs and demands such as widespread consumerism in the United States. For environmental problems to be solved, according to green functionalists, cultural values must shift.

Weberian Conflict Theory in Environmental Sociology

Weber, as discussed in Chapter 2, was interested in how modern industrial societies perpetuate social inequality. An important dimension of social inequality, for Weber, was power. Recall that Weber defined power as the ability of a person within a social relationship to carry out his or her own will despite resistance from others. Those who are the most powerful in modern industrial societies, according to Weber, hold elite positions in large scale bureaucracies that give the office-holders access to immense resources - capital, public revenues, scientific information, and so on. The bureaucracies can be state agencies at any level of government, transnational corporations, or, in relation to environmental concerns, national and international environmental organizations such as Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.

Canadian sociologist Raymond Murphy’s Rationality & Nature is a contemporary, ecologically-oriented extension of Weber’s work.10 Murphy asserts that the contemporary environmental movement is an attempt by environmentalists to re-rationalize the decision making of bureaucratic elites who control powerful corporate and state bureaucracies. These elite groups are trained (rationalized) in schools of law, business, and public administration. The schools rationalize potential bureaucratic elites to make decisions about production or state management that are uncoupled from any thinking about the impact of their institution’s activities on the environment. Because of the power that these bureaucrats yield, and their lack of environmental education, unprecedented numbers of people, consequently, now are exposed to environmental degradation posing risk to their health and safety. Environmental politics, for Murphy, is a field of social conflict where groups share different chances of benefiting from, contributing to, or being victimized by waste accumulation and environmental degradation caused by state or corporate actions.

In the Weberian account of environmental politics, divisions within society go beyond the traditional conflict between workers and capitalists identified in the Marxian conflict paradigm. The driving forces in environmental politics are the principal contributors and beneficiaries of environmental waste generation. “Almost without exception,” Murphy writes, “they involve bureaucracies, public and private, that decide to introduce products that degrade the environment.”11

As societies advance on the cumulative curve of unpaid waste costs and environmental degradation, according to Murphy, classes of people exposed to environmental risks or potential risks engage in social conflict through the environmental movement. Reflexivity and reflection are the underlying processes in this growing social movement. The environmental movement thus becomes a coalition of actors who reflect on the risks of victimization they encounter or could encounter in the future. Their reflections, in turn, leads them to reflexive action. They organize or join environmental groups that use their financial and scientific resources, and, at times, civil disobedience to try redirecting bureaucratic decision making through laws and governmental regulation to reflect the New Environmental Paradigm. Environmental justice groups that fight against having unwanted waste dumped in their community exemplify these processes.

Marxian Conflict Theory and Environmental Sociology

Sociologist James O’Connor’s work provides a contemporary elaboration of the radical Marxian conflict paradigm in environmental sociology.12 O’Connor raises the question: Is capitalism environmentally sustainable? His answer is, “Not unless and until capital changes its face in ways that would make it unrecognizable to bankers, money managers, venture capitalists, and CEOs looking at themselves in the mirror today.”13 O’Connor’s statement conveys the reason that his work is radical. While the Weberian conflict paradigm endorses the idea that new laws and regulation can lead to a sustainable society, the Marxian conflict paradigm advocates a restructuring of the very foundations of society, especially capitalism.

The fundamental cause of social and environmental problems, according to O’Connor, are the two contradictions of capitalism. The first contradiction is internal to free market economies - the alienation of labor. Capitalists, the owners of the means of production, maximize their profits by paying workers less than the full economic value of what laborers create in the workplace. Marxian theory asserts that low wages alienate workers from the value of what they produce. Capitalists, in turn, reinvest their profits to reduce labor costs by automating their plants or moving to other countries where labor is cheaper.

Capitalists’ reinvestment of profits, according to O’Connor, ironically leads to declining profits. O’Connor elaborates on this point by saying, “When individual capitals attempt to defend or restore profits by increasing labor productivity, speeding up work, cutting wages, and using other time-honored ways of getting more production from fewer workers, meanwhile paying them less, the unintended effect is to reduce the final demand for consumer commondities.”14 If workers do not have incomes, they cannot purchase goods. This internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the problem of overproduction with glutted markets and declining profits.

The problem of underproduction perpetuated by rising production costs is the second contradiction of capitalism. Capitalists encounter underproduction when they disregard the material conditions of the environment: worker health and safety, the productivity of forests and farms, urban traffic congestion, pollution, and rising housing costs. For example, if capitalists degrade the quality of forests by over-harvesting, it becomes increasingly costly to obtain the raw materials from forest to build affordable homes.

This external contradiction, combined with the internal contradiction of capitalism, can lead to social crises. Transformative agents such as labor unions, feminists, racial minorities, and environmentalists can coalesce and demand that wages and the material conditions of production and the environment be restored. The massive demonstrations by such groups at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle during the fall, 1999 exemplify what can happen because of the contradictions of capitalism. Through direct action and political pressuring, these transformative agents can demand better working conditions, fair trade, policies that limit exposure to toxic chemical at home and work, land restoration to protect wildlife, and better urban planning so neighborhoods are not threatened by the din and dirt of heavily traveled roads. Commenting on the impact of the contradictory nature of capitalism, O’Connor writes, “There is a kind of war going on between capital and the environmental movements, a war in which these movements have the effect of saving capital from itself in the long run by forcing it to deal with the negative short-term effect of cost shifting.”15 Unlike Murphy who sees environmental social conflict as the result of bureaucratic decision making in general, O'Connor sees environmental social conflict as the primary result of capitalist contradictions in pursuing profit-making.

Discussion

More environmentally focused social theories include Catton and Dunlap’s work on the Human Exemptionalist and the New Environmental Paradigms. They advocate change in Western collective consciousness to avoid the ecological collapse of natural ecosystems and the dire environmental problems associated with world population growth and rising per capita consumption. Weberian sociologists, such as Murphy, focus on bureaucratic elites in corporations and government. These elites share power through their command of financial and legal resources. Their human exemptionalist decision making invites environmental movements to make bureaucratic elites re-rationalize their actions, according to environmental Weberians. For scholars such as Murphy, this re-rationalization can be attained within existing social institutions such as reforms of law and environmental regulation. Marxists, such as O’Connor, advocate a restructuring of decision making by capitalists. The contradictions of the capitalist system itself becomes the target of workers, civil rights groups, feminists, and environmentalists. For a more sustainable form of modern society, according to O’Connor, the contradictions of capitalism can only be resolved by more democratic forms of planning and decision making. To illustrate how these paradigms are used, we turn to a environmental problem of global proportion: contemporary tropical deforestation and the mass extinction of species.

Exemplifying Environmental Sociology:
Paradigms Explaining Tropical Deforestation

One way to show how environmental sociologists and scholars in related fields work is to compare their accounts on a single environmental problem such as tropical deforestation. Enough scholarly work now has been done on tropical deforestation to identify Durkheimian, Weberian, and Marxian explanations of this vital ecological problem.

Tropical forests, as shown in Figure 1, grow in areas twenty degrees of latitude north and south of the equator. These forests represent some of the oldest, most complex ecosystems known. Tropical forests provide habitat for forty percent of all living plant and animal species on earth.16 These forests serve as a primary source of knowledge about domestic plants and animals, about important pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals, about energy generation through methane production, and about forest ecological processes themselves. Tropical forests provide an array of important environmental services for the earth. For example, they regulate the discharge of rainfall, slowing the water discharge in rainy seasons and stretching the flow when the weather is dry. Tropical forests protect moisture through water evaporation, cloud build-up, and reduce warming from the hot tropical sun. They also are a sink for greenhouse gasses.

Figure 1: The Distribution of Tropical Forests Among Countries of the World

Whether the integrity of the earth’s remaining tropical forests is protected depends on the ability of national and international organizations to manage the challenges now presented to these forest ecosystems. These challenges are best understood through the three sociological paradigms already discussed. In what follows we will exemplify how these paradigms appear in the tropical deforestation literature. We will discuss work by Norman Myers, an internationally recognized biologist. We also discuss two sociological accounts of tropical deforestation. Tom Rudel and Bruce Horowitz present research on tropical deforestation in Ecuador. British environmental sociologist, Michael Redclift, presents research on rainforests in Bolivia.

A Durkheimian Account

The focal point of Norman Myers’ work is slash-and-burn agriculture in tropical forests.17 Forest dwellers, for centuries, burned trees in the tropics to enrich soil for farming. Forest dwellers farm their cleared land until it is no longer productive. They then shift to a new clearing, repeating their farming practices. Provided the abandoned land remains fallow for a period of time, usually 15-20 years, slash-and-burn agriculture is sustainable; the practice can be repeated again and again. Since the 1950’s, however, the less-developed countries of the Global South, including those in the tropics, experienced rapid human population growth – a problem discussed in Chapter 19. Because of population growth, farmers and forest farmers encounter growing competition for tropical forest land, reducing the fallow period, and accelerating deforestation.

Myers recognizes that increased competition among farmers in tropical countries is an outcome of complex social processes. Strapped with foreign debt from efforts for national economic development through road building and the construction of reservoirs for hydroelectric power projects, state officials in these countries encourage the commercial development of export crops such as soybeans, bananas, and coffee. Exporting these cash crops captures foreign currency for debt repayment to the more-developed countries of the Global North. Large corporate commercial farmers often produce the export crops in the Global South. In doing so, they buy out small farmers or displace those without legal title to their land. Once the small farmers are displaced, they migrate into forests where they compete with traditional slash-and-burn cultivators for the best farm land.

The problem of land displacement for small farmers in the tropics is exacerbated by rapid population growth. The Population Reference Bureau, a think tank for population experts, reports population growth for the 1990-2000 period to be 18 percent in Brazil, 17 percent in Mexico, and 16 percent in the Philippines.18 Myers writes, “There is vast scope in population growth of the future for still larger numbers of [displaced] cultivators to accelerate deforestation in many sectors of the biome.” 19The population problem is compounded by the fact that where there is rapid population growth, a country will have a large young population. Even if there is a shift in family expectations about desired family size so couples want only two children, the population will grow. There will be an unprecedented number of young couples wanting their two children.

Myers’ work is Durkheimian because of the way he envisions curbing future tropical deforestation. He argues that if countries in the tropics could expand their commercial and industrial sectors, there would be more avenues for social mobility for poor farmers in the tropics. With more opportunities to consume the goods of an economically growing urban, industrial society, people’s values will change. They are more likely to forego some of their childbearing either for improving their own material well-being or for the well-being of their children through longer, better education. In other words, changing values with the acceleration of the cultural tradition of Western capitalism – Myers’ Durkheimian, functional line of reasoning – will solve both the population problem and future tropical deforestation in the Global South.

A Weberian Account

Environmental sociologists Rudel and Horowitz argue that Myers’ account of the causes leading to deforestation is one of several different paths to deforestation, as shown in Figure 2. Through the process of immiseration, rural cultivators without a secure legal title to their farm land can be transformed into landlessness in one of two ways. They may become landless proletarians working for low wages as tropical forests are cleared by wealthy rural elite farmers. Or, they may choose to migrate into tropical forests where they will compete with the traditional slash-and-burn cultivators for more farm land. That process, combined with rapid population growth, forces displaced rural farmers into deforestation to regain arable land in a process identical to Myers’ account.

Figure 2: Rudel and Horowitz's Theoretical Models of Tropical Deforestation

However, the dynamics of tropical deforestation, according to Rudel and Horowitz, changed after 1960. Beginning even earlier, in the 1950s, state-based multinational lending bureaucracies in the Global North began providing loans for the development of public services: roads, electrical generating facilities, and seaports to help with exports. The lending agencies intended for these services to be the first step for enticing private foreign capital investment from the Global North into the Global South.20 Key players were and still are the World Bank and regional multinational government agencies such as the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the African Development Bank. Thus, what triggers developments leading to deforestation in many instances are internationally coordinated government lending projects, not the work of transnational private capital.

Once these major government-backed projects began coming to fruition in the 1960s, according to Rudel and Horowitz, tropical deforestation accelerated worldwide. As Figure 2 shows, lead institutions, growth coalitions, and free riders cause tropical deforestation. Lead institutions such as the governments of the Global South or private energy and logging companies use their substantial financial resources to build roads into forests, gaining access to tropical timber, oil, or other valuable resources for export to the global North. “In one sequence of events, documented on all three continents,” Rudel and Horowitz write, “loggers construct a network of logging roads and extract the most valuable timber from the area.”21 Since the resource extraction companies do not control access to their roads, colonists “ride free,” settling at the edge of vast stands of otherwise closed tropical forests. Some colonists work independently, often failing to make a living from logging after a period of time because they must obtain food as well. Those colonists with the financial backing of wealthy relatives, urban investors, or government colonizing agencies – what Rudel and Horowitz call growth coalitions – are more likely to persist. They can use wages to buy food and other necessities as they log and blaze trails in the tropical forest.

In Rudel an Horowitz’s sociological modeling of deforestation, there is a causal sequence involving private capital investments, lead institution road building, free riding, deforestation, and profit-making that parallels Marxian conflict analysis. This sequence of events, however, often begins with post-World War II multinational bureaucratic lending initiated by governments in the Global North, making this a Weberian account. Moreover, royalties paid to government bureaucracies in the Global South by energy and logging companies for natural resource extraction rights become the source of revenue for governments in the Global South to play the role of a lead institution in tropical deforestation. The Trans-Amazon Highway in Brazil exemplifies a state-based cause of tropical deforestation.

A Marxian Account

Bolivian tropical deforestation, in Michael Redclift’s account, results from “the inexorable pressure to open up more land to the market.”22 The root of that pressure, according to Redclift, is capitalist international trade. Countries such as Bolivia promote commercial logging, mining, ranching, and agriculture for export commodities. With the financial returns from exports, Bolivian officials and private investors seek to modernize their economies through urbanization and industrial growth. Bolivia, even more recently, began exporting tropical rainforest commodities to escape from international debt incurred to finance their economic development efforts.

Efforts on the part of Bolivian state officials to gain political legitimacy, in Redclift’s analysis, involves social welfare efforts for the poor. These efforts often are subverted by contradictory alliances between powerful capitalists and public officials. Bolivian officials, as early as 1962, embarked on a colonization program financed by the Inter-American Development Bank. The goal of the program was to settle almost one-half million landless campesinos into the lowland tropical frontier. By the early 1980s, however, three percent of the lowland owners controlled over fifty percent of the tropical forests in parcels ranging in size from 500 to 10,000 hectares.

Because the productivity of the land in the long-run is less important to these forest land owners than the short-term value of their land as a profitable commodity, the deforestation process involves extensive ecological degradation. Among the colonistas that means, with a noteworthy exception, they inevitably encounter the barbecho crisis: (1) the loss of soil fertility within five years after initiating slash-and-burn agriculture; (2) rapid invasion of weeds among the stumpage; and (3) an acute shortage of labor or capital to deal with these possibly life-threatening ecological problems. Redclift identifies four possible resolutions to the barbecho crisis in frontier Bolivia. Modernization of the colonistas farms is one possible resolution. Frontier farmers modernize by using tractors to remove tree stumps and clear their land. Then they raise a monocrop such as state-subsidized rice. The expensive tractors, herbicides, and pesticides necessary for modern farming, however, mean financial debt to the already poor colonistas. In addition, plowed fields without ample vegetation cause serious problems with soil erosion because of the heavy rainfall endemic to rainforests. Redclift also questions the future of state subsidies to cash crop farmers with the growing Bolivian foreign debt crisis.

A second option for the colonistas is either the sale or abandonment of their frontier farms. This resolution, unfortunately, is a common one. It is unfortunate ecologically because the practice simply shifts responsibility for environmental problems associated with modern agriculture in the tropics from one class of farmers to another. The practice also puts landless colonistas in a dilemma. Either they resume the arduous task of clearing more of the rainforest, or they become low wage farm workers. Becoming low wage workers is more likely, since as tropical deforestation scholars say, “few men over the age of 40 even attempt [recolonization], and fewer still return to try a third time.”23

Some colonistas successfully solve the barbeco crisis through small scale, ecologically sustainable agriculture. Successful Bolivian colonistas tend to be married couples with four to six children living in homogeneous ethnic nucleos. The nucleos consist of 35 to 40 households sharing a common school, general store, and a water supply. The key to the success of these nucleos is mixed, labor intensive farming. People in the villages raise annuals such as rice and corn interspersed with rows of nitrogen-fixing clover or chick peas. Villagers also raise perennial cash crops such as coffees, cocoa, or plantains, and chickens, sheep, and pigs fed with household food scraps.

While Bolivian frontier nucleos indicate that sustainable agriculture offering equal opportunity to poor colonistas is possible, the nucleos do not promise a certain future for these practices. Many Bolivian colonistas will become part of the growing ranks of the frontier semi-proletariat. They engage in multiple survival strategies: clearing the rainforest, engaging in part-time farming, selling depleted land to elite planters and ranchers, and engaging in the lucrative, illegal preparation of coca leaves for processing into cocaine. A night’s work preparing the coca leaves into a paste pays a low wage farm worker the equivalent of a week’s pay in agriculture.

Redclift’s work with the Marxian paradigm points toward a process of tropical deforestation driven by large scale capitalist farmers and ranchers. His account differs from Rudel and Horowitz’s account where state bureaucrats’ power and decision making initiates deforestation. The farmers and ranchers, according to Redclift, are supported by national and international capital investors and a growing supply of low wage labor along the Bolivian tropical frontier. Given the ecological problems associated with modern tropical agriculture, especially soil erosion, the landed elite increasingly controlling the frontier share a common interest. They continually lobby for public subsidies in the form of agricultural price supports, tax incentives for the mechanization of farming, road building, and other public service developments that will continue penetrating deeper and deeper into the Bolivian tropical rainforests.

Discussion 

The tropical deforestation scholars we discussed differ in the aspects of tropical deforestation they highlight For Myers, a biologist, tropical deforestation reflects rapid population growth in the Global South. Human population pressure perpetuates more deforestation as growing numbers of farmers compete, increasing slash-and-burn agriculture in the process to meet the rising demand for food and housing. Rudel and Horowitz, as well as Redclift, all environmental sociologists, provide a different interpretation of why deforestation occurs. For Rudel and Horowitz, the nature of tropical forests with their massive height, density, and wild rivers limits the paths of deforestation to areas made accessible by organized, often state-subsidized road building and financing. For Redclift, the question is whether ecologically sustainable forms of human social organization will survive in countries of the Global South such as Bolivia. Competing alternative forms of social organization such as short-term profit-making with modern agriculture, semi-proletarianization of unsuccessful colonistas, and the cocaine trade offer alternatives for human survival in tropical forests.

What can we learn about the three paradigms from their application to the study of tropical deforestation? Which has the most credence? We would argue, like Rudel, Horowitz, and Redclift that a combination of Durkheimian and Weberian state management best explain the historical origins of tropical deforestation. The process involves state-controlled forest land management aimed at accomplishing Western capitalist economic development. State officials try to accomplish this goal by acquiring multinational government loans. Officials invest this financial aid in the development of public services, especially road building, into the tropical forest frontier. This public effort precedes private capital investment in logging, mining, ranching, and agriculture in tropical forests.

In addition, tropical forests, by definition, are the disputed territory of states that have colonized pre-capitalist, indigenous tribal cultures. How state managers choose to distribute forest land use rights is the driving force at work in shaping who initially gains access to the forest and who benefits economically from initial deforestation and subsequent land uses. Moreover, tropical deforestation initially occurs to settle national frontiers. The process provides concrete evidence for the political control of a tropical developing nation’s land. Power, not profits, are at stake in early tropical deforestation.

Once the infrastructure necessary for private capital investment is in place in a tropical country, Redclift’s analysis appears to make sense. Whether capitalism and tropical deforestation go on unabated, even in the presence of a growing international environmental movement, remains to be seen. How the growth of environmental movements in the Gobal South affects tropical deforestation is a key issue here , not only for environmental sociology, but also for the future direction of the environmental movement, and for tropical forests and their diverse inhabitants. We will discuss this issue in what follows.

Environmental Movements Respond to Tropical Deforestation

Environmental activists around the globe are taking action to slow the rate of deforestation. Actions take place at local, national, and international levels. This section focuses on the actions that United States-based groups take to halt deforestation, particularly in the tropics. One should keep in mind, however, that there are numerous environmental groups around the globe and especially within the tropics that are working on these issues. While none of the groups that we discuss would refer to themselves as Durkheimian, Weberian, or Marxian environmental activists, the strategies that they use and the solutions that they propose to end deforestation contain an implicit analysis of what they see as the causes of deforestation - a lack of environmental consciousness, policies that don’t take the environment into account, and corporate capitalism, respectively.

Durkheimian Strategies

Durkheimian strategies to protect forests attempt to change people’s values and raise their consciousness regarding deforestation so that they will change their behaviors that affect the forests. Durkheimian strategies do not attempt to change the social structure; instead, they use the mechanisms of the existing capitalist structure to improve the environment.

One strategy is to educate citizens who, in turn, are encouraged to boycott corporations responsible for deforestation. Environmental organizations using this strategy attempt to raise consumer’s awareness, change their consumption patterns, and eventually, force corporations to alter their destructive practices. Rainforest Action Network, an environmental organization based in San Francisco, focuses their work on protecting rainforests. The Network’s primary tactics –education in comination with boycotts – uses the logic of the capitalist system to work. The tactic has been successful for th group. They state in their literature:

In our first direct-action campaign, we led a nationwide boycott of Burger King. Burger King was Importing cheap beef from tropical countries where rainforests are denuded to provide pasture for cattle. This campaign succeeded in several ways. After sales dropped 12% during the boycott in 1987, Burger King cancelled $35 million worth of beef contracts in Central America and announced that they had stopped importing rainforest beef. The rainforest issue also began to gain ground in the public’s awareness and consumers began to appreciate the power they have to change things through their purchasing choices.24

The Rainforest Action Network continues to use this strategy. One of the Network’s current campaigns is against U.S.-based Boise Cascade who they have targeted because of their practice of logging in old growth forests.

The Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Virginia, is another organization that is attempting to protect existing tropical forests. The Conservancy’s dominant strategy is to purchase lands that contain important forests. Once the lands are purchased, the Conservancy either donates the land to non-profit groups who manage the lands privately or to governments that establish national parks on these lands. For example, in Bolivia, the Conservancy worked with the government, a Bolivian non-governmental organization, and private investors to expand Noel Kempff Mercado National Park by 2.2 million acres and to eliminate logging within the park. This strategy, used around the globe by the Nature Conservancy and other organizations modeled after the Conservancy, relies upon a critical aspect of a capitalist, free market system; namely, private property.

Weberian Strategies

Environmental organizations with an implicitly Weberian perspective focus their efforts to halt deforestation on states’ and multinational lending agencies’ policies. The goal of environmental groups like the Washington, D.C.-based World Resources Institute is to convince governments and lenders, such as the World Bank, that the protection of forests is in their best interests and that they should “green” their policies and practices. In addition to nation-state, these organizations work at the international level, through organizations like the United Nations and events like the Earth Summit+10 held in South Africa in 2002 to forge international agreements to protect forests, especially in the tropics. Since states in cooperation with international lenders are often the triggers for large scale development projects that lead to deforestation, as discussed earlier in this chapter, these two groups are the targets of Weberian strategies to save the forest.

Many analysts consider the debt load that is carried by governments in the Global South to be a contributor to deforestation. The debt forces countries to intensify economic practices, often through increasing exports, often in the form of cash crops. Land is cleared – deforested – so that cash crops can be planted.25 When nations are indebted, governments must also reduce spending. Often budget cuts come from environmental programs, like national parks, which further limits states’ abilities to halt deforestation.

In response to this problem, environmental organizations such as the Washington, D.C.-based World Wildlife Fund, began a strategy called “debt-for-nature swaps.” In a swap, an organization buys a portion of a country’s debt in exchange for a commitment to protecting the environment through establishing a Conservation Trust Fund into which a country pays a fraction of its former debt. Through this mechanism, the country’s debt load is reduced and funding is established to conserve protected areas. A number of countries have benefited from swaps. Madagascar, for example, has participated in a number of swaps, which have generated funds for the nation to protect and manage parks and to acquire additional land for protection.

Marxist Strategies

Environmentalists who favor Marxist explanations to environmental problems seek to reorganize social/economic communities so that they can overcome the two contradictions of capitalism: alienation of labor and disregard for the quality of the environment that the economy relies upon. A strategy that addresses these contradictions in relation to deforestation is community-based conservation (CBC). This model assumes that people living nearest the forests have the best understanding of the forests’ processes, such as regeneration. Community based conservation strategies place the decisions about how to use forest resources in the hands of the local forest community. The people decide how much non-timber resources should be extracted. Because the community’s economic well-being relies on the health of the forest, it is in the community’s interest to renew resources through productive management techniques, thus protecting the quality of the environment. In this type of model, the economic development is community-centered rather than centered on multinational timber corporations. The community is not alienated, rather it is connected and empowered.

A well-known example of community-based conservation is the Chico Mendez Extractive Reserve established in the Brazilian rainforest through the cooperation of international conservation organizations, including the Washington, DC-based Environmental Defense Fund, and the Rural Workers Union in Brazil. In the Reserve, rubber tappers are able to extract rubber from the rainforest in a sustainable manner that allows them to survive economically, while at the same time preserving the rainforest for future generations. The rubber tappers are organized into cooperatives that work together to process and sell the rubber. The rubber tappers control the economic process (and are not alienated from their labor) while they preserve the rainforest (the material base necessary for their future).26

A final example comes from Ecuador, the Tagua Initiative. This initiative, led by United States-based Conservation International, is intended to limit deforestation in the coastal rainforest region of Ecuador, a region of high biodiversity. Through the initiative, people living in the region extract the ivory-like nut of tagua palm trees. Artisans in the community create buttons and jewelry from the nut. Conservation International has organized a number of clothing manufacturers to purchase these items, including L.L. Bean and Esprit. The program employs over 1,800 people and protects the land and forests in the Cotacachi-Cayapas Ecological Reserve.27 Other tagua programs like this exist in Central America.

Summing Up

As the case of deforestation highlights, environmental groups and environmental sociologists have diverse understandings of the causes of environmental change; the solutions that are proposed by academics and activists reflect this diversity. A key feature of these strategies is their focus on human behavior. Environmental organizations, like environmental sociologists, are clear that productive solutions to environmental problems must examine human behavior and human organization.

One of the main tasks of environmental sociology is to expand traditional sociological analyses to include the biophysical environmental as a key variable in understanding the processes of social maintenance and social change. In the last twenty-five years, environmental consciousness in the United States and around the globe has remained high. Within this context, environmental sociology has reinterpreted classical social theories to include the “materiality” of social life. Durkheimian, Weberian, and Marxist theories, the basis of traditional sociology, have been “greened.” While the reinterpretation of these theories has helped sociologists better understand the causes and consequences of environmental change, the ultimate promise of environmental sociology is arguably that of helping to chart a course for the future that is more socially and environmentally sustainable.

Online Chapter Questions

1. This online chapter states that sociologist William Catton's social theory Durkheimian functionalism) about environmental degradation reverses the causal reasoning of Marxian environmental sociologists' account of environmental degradation. Explain the differences between the two. Which aspects of Weberian accounts are like/unlike these arguments?

2. Environmental sociologist Tom Rudel presents two accounts of tropical deforestation: the immiserization model and the growth coalition-lead institution model. How do these models compare with biologist Norman Myers' theory of tropical deforestation? Based on each of these models, what are the different practical approaches to halt deforestation that might be taken?

3. In this online chapter, we use Brazil's Chico Mendez Extractive Reserve as an example of a Marxian environmental response to stop tropical deforestation. Why is Brazil's response to tropical deforestation considered Marxian?

Special thanks to Craig R. Humphrey and Tammy L. Lewis, authors of:
Environment, Energy, and Society: A New Synthesis, 1st Edition
Craig R. Humphrey
Tammy L. Lewis
Frederick H. Buttel
Wadsworth Publishing
©2002
ISBN: 0534579558

References

1  Buttel, 1996, p. 57.

2 For a comprehensive review of environmental sociology, see Humphrey, Lewis, and Buttel (2002); Humphrey, Lewis, and Buttel (2003).

3  Olson, Lodwick, and Dunlap, 1992, p. 13.

4  Catton and Dunlap, 1978, p. 41.

5  Catton and Dunlap, 1980, p. 34.

6  Catton and Dunlap, 1980, p. 34.

7  Catton and Dunlap, 1980, p. 17.

8  Catton, 1980.

9  Catton, 1976, p. 287.

10  Murphy, 1994.

11  Murphy, 1994, p. 180.

12  O’Connor, 1988, 1994, 1998.

13  O’Connor, 1994, p. 158.

14  O’Connor, 1994, p. 160.

15  O’Connor, 1994, p. 169.

16  Myers, 1992.

17  Myers, 1992.

18  Population Reference Bureau, 2001.

19  Myers, 1992, p. 157.

20  Rudel and Horowitz, 1993.

21  Rudel and Horowitz, 1993, p. 30.

22  Redclift, 1987, p. 12.

23  Redclift, 1987, p. 126.

24  www.ran.org. Accessed on 3/27/02.

25  Buttel and Taylor, 1994.

26  See Humphrey, Lewis, and Buttel, 2002, Chapter 1 for an account of how and why the extractive reserves were established.

27  Conservation International (n.d.)