Nature, Society and Environmental Crisis

The threat to the global environment has become a major political concern over the past decade. This concern has been sharpened by an awareness of the critical role played by human activity in this crisis – from rising levels of carbon emission and widespread disregard for ecological sustainability to GM crops and human cloning. The social dimensions of the current environmental crisis present a challenge to the discipline of Sociology: what role can it play in analysing the concerns of the contemporary world?

This volume brings together an unusually broad range of contributors who take up this challenge, exploring debates within social theory about the relationship between the natural and the social worlds. They consider the political and public policy engagement of sociologists in a profoundly unequal social world that faces the prospect of severe ecological degradation. Focusing specifically on climate change and the challenges this poses to human societies, the contributors both reveal and outline the significant part that Sociology has to play in understanding and shaping how human societies respond to the threat of ecological catastrophe.