The Midas touch. Theoretical essays in environmental sociology - Filip Alexandrescu

At first glance, environmental sociology may sound like an oxymoron. If the natural environment represents the realm of the non-social, as it does most likely for many sociologists, what could a sociology of the non-social be about? The short answer is that there are many ways in which the non-social plays a part in the social universe. The long answer, the complexity of which is tackled in part in the pages to follow, is that the “social” or, to be more precise, social agents are oftentimes in the unenviable position of King Midas. This legendary king of Phrygia is said to have acquired from Bacchus the power to turn everything he touched “to yellow gold” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 11). Joyful at first, the king with the golden touch soon learned that his potentially unlimited wealth could have soon brought his death by starvation: any piece of tender meat would have instantly turned to gold in his mouth and no sip of wine - turning into liquid gold - could have quenched his thirst. Ovid says that Bacchus felt pity for the man and offered him the chance to wash up his power in a river flowing up in the Lydian heights. The Midas touch is a useful metaphor for understanding our relationships with nature. Nature is for human society a great source of wealth, a source of knowledge and a source of artistic inspiration. Yet, every time we reach to it, we transform it in positive or negative ways and often beyond recognition. Sociology is well positioned to answer the question of who are “we” who stretch our greedy or curious hands to nature only to discover that oftentimes we change her and ourselves in ways which are not always obvious. Environmental sociology is the study of social – environmental interdependencies and of the reciprocal transformations of society and nature under increasing industrialization and urbanization. What is this book about? The book consists of a collection of essays exploring some of the ways in which sociologists have theorized the relationships between society and environment. It covers a definite historical period, from the 1920s to the 1990s, dealing with the theories that preceded the establishment of environmental sociology as well as the approaches that gave it a distinct identity within the discipline. The six main chapters are all conceptual papers. Each of them explores a number of topics connecting social science ideas with ecology and environmental science through a series of interrogations about the nature of their relationships. The interrogations are, to be sure, formulated mostly from a social science perspective as the book is addressed to sociologists. How can the environment be integrated into a sociological framework of analysis? By simply recognizing that the environment should have a place in sociological theorizing, its relevance for social life would still remain obscure if one does not inquire into how various ideas of the environment have been pursued in the history of the discipline. This idea of societal-environmental interactions will be explored from a variety of vantage points with the aim of exposing the rich articulations of the environmental problematique in the history of sociology. Since there is no clear-cut route leading from premises to conclusion, the book can be seen as an exploratory theoretical inquiry from the early twentieth century to its closing decades. Why is this book offered? The intended market for this book is the Romanian academia, especially those scholars who work in or are interested in the intersections of the social and environmental sciences. There is a dearth of environmental sociological writings in Romania. To my knowledge, there is only one book-long study on environmental sociology published by Laura Nistor under the title “Sociology of the environment: a study of attitudes and behaviours in Romania” (2009). Two other introductory pieces to environmental sociology in Romanian are the articles entitled “Environmental sociology as creative marginality: A Review of Its Theories from the ‘Limits to Growth’ to the risk society” (Alexandrescu 2008) and “Sociology and the environment. Integrative perspectives” (Nistor 2008). The book also holds potential value for readers interested in sociological theory-building or theorization. More exactly, it offers an explicit attempt to theorize social – environmental relationships with the aim to improve or deepen our understanding. This means that selected theoretical ideas are systematically explored and linked to each other in order to achieve a more comprehensive or in-depth understanding of the implications or potential application of existing theories. This is perhaps best illustrated in chapter four, where an ecologically inspired perspective on society as an ecosystem – in which a variety of (social) species populations interact – is reinterpreted by means of Max Weber’s ideal type constructs. The final result is a flexible construct of eco-social groups or social specie...