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Review Essays and Book Reviews

The Climate Moment: Environmental Sociology, Climate Change, and the Left

On September 21, 2014, the largest climate march in U.S. history took place in New York City, as more than 300,000 protestors signaled to UN delegates arriving for climate talks that more desperate measures were needed to protect humanity and other species. The massive demonstration, though representing a wide array of social and political viewpoints, […]

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Nature, Technology and the Sacred

The classical sociologists, including Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, all argued that society was experiencing a rapid secularization, arising from the Enlightenment, industrialization, and capitalism. While Marx famously argued that under capitalism “all that is holy is profaned,” Weber just as famously referred to the “disenchantment of nature” associated with formal rationalization. Although by no means […]

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Marx’s Ecological Value Analysis

Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 312 pp., $45, hardcover. If there is a single charge that has served to unify all criticism of Marx in recent decades, it is the charge of “Prometheanism.” Although Marx’s admiration for Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and his attraction to […]

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The Canonization of Environmental Sociology

Environmental sociology first arose, as a distinct subfield of sociology, in the 1970s. The Environment and Technology section of the American Sociological Association was formally launched almost one quarter of a century ago, in 1976. The rise of the subfield was a direct response to the rapid growth of environmentalism in society at large in […]

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Is Overcompetition the Problem?

It is tempting perhaps to attribute all the problems of capitalism to excessive competition. After all, capitalism is generally presented within contemporary ideology as a system which is nothing more than a set of competitive relations governed by the market. Is it not possible then that the economic contradictions of capitalism, and indeed the present […]

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