New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. 
 

This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of 

its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

 

  

  JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH 
 

 

 

 
Hollow Ecology: Ecological Modernization Theory and the Death of Nature1 
 
 
Jeffrey A. Ewing 

University of Oregon  

jewing2@uoregon.edu 

                                                                                                                                                             
1 I would like to express my gratitude to Erin Beck, Riley Dunlap, John Bellamy Foster, and Richard York for their 

valuable suggestions on earlier drafts. 

Abstract 

The last few decades have seen the rise of ‘ecological modernization theory’ (EMT) as a “green capitalist” tradition extending 

modernization theory into environmental sociology. This article uses a synthesis of political economy, world-systems theory, and 

political, economic, and environmental sociology to demonstrate that the EMT presumption of growth and profit as economic 

priorities (alongside its neglect of core-periphery relations) produces many feedback loops which fatally undermine the viability of 

EMT’s own political, technological, and social prescriptions, alongside creating problems for the fundamental EMT concept of 

‘ecological rationality.’ Furthermore, this article attempts to explain why “green capitalist” approaches to environmental analysis 

have influence within policy and social science circles despite their inadequacies within environmental sociology. Finally, this 

article argues that in order to address the ecological challenges of our era, environmental sociology needs to reject “green 

capitalist” traditions like ‘ecological modernization theory’ which presuppose the desirability and maintenance of profit and growth 

as economic priorities (and predominantly fail to critique power imbalances between core and non-core nations), and instead return 

to the development of traditions willing to critique the fundamental traits of the capitalist world-system. 

Keywords: ecological modernization theory, capitalism, capitalist world-system, environmental sociology, political sociology,  

economic sociology, green capitalism, human ecology, treadmill of production, metabolic rift, world-systems theory, ecosocialism 

 

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Our planet is in ecological peril—and consequently all living species on it, including humanity, 

are equally endangered. To address our ecological crises with sufficient quickness and resolution, 

we need to shelve permanently those attitudes and prescriptions that would put our plans for 

ecological recovery on the wrong track. Dominant approaches to these problems within 

environmental sociology often fall within one of two varieties—either “green capitalist” 

approaches or those of critical environmental sociology. Despite a wide range of established 

critiques against both the capitalist world-system (CWS) and modernization theory (particularly 

in the environmental arena), ecological modernization theory (EMT) has emerged as one 

particularly influential and well-defined variant of “green capitalist” environmental sociologies, 

both among reformist environmental sociologists and within policy circles (Brulle 2010; Foster, 

Clark and York 2010). In this paper, I will both (1) critique EMT for its failure to account for the 

negative ecological impacts of central world-systems factors, and (2) explore why EMT’s ideas 

(as a particular variant of “green capitalist” approaches to environmental sociology) continue to 

have influence in policy and scholarly circles despite the overwhelming evidence against their 

viability as ecological prescriptions.  

 The critique in this article will proceed in three primary steps. First, I will situate EMT within 

the history of environmental sociology more broadly. Second, I will demonstrate that EMT’s 

failure to criticize central CWS features (its profit-and-growth orientation, and the unequal power 

between the core and the rest of the world) necessarily undermines both (a) EMT’s central concept 

of ecological rationality, and (b) its economic and political prescriptions towards ecological 

change. Third, I will explore the sources of EM influence in policy circles and social science 

despite these major flaws. Finally, I conclude that environmental sociology must reject and surpass 

“green capitalist” approaches like EMT if we are to help humanity respond in time to our common 

ecological crises, and I propose some steps for environmental sociology towards that end.  

 

The Critical Origins of Environmental Sociology 

Critical approaches to environment-society research have a wide array of intellectual sources:  

 

from the anti-authoritarianism and anti-commercialism of Kropotkin and Sauer to 

the local rationalism of White and Netting, [political ecological research] has 

consistently interrogated the logic of local production, the value of local 

knowledge, the environmental costs of regional and global change, and the power-

laden impacts of socio-environmental change (Robbins 2011). 

 

Recent research has also now engaged with previously neglected ecological foundations within 

classical sociological thought itself, such as those of Marx and Weber (Foster 1999; Foster and 



 

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Holleman 2012). Critical and explicit sociological study of our ecological relations became 

engrained as the sub-discipline of environmental sociology as a response to the increasingly 

widespread recognition of environmental problems in the early 1970s. As such, one of its central 

questions regards diagnosing the anthropogenic causes of our environmental ills (Jorgenson and 

Clark 2012; York and Dunlap 2012).  

 While there is no universally accepted theory of the forces contributing to environmental 

change, two of the most influential traditions are (1) “green capitalist” approaches such as 

ecological modernization theory (whose analysis maintains the central features of the capitalist 

world-system), and (2) critical environmental sociology (holding capitalism necessarily 

responsible for our ecological ills, and thus pursuing both critical analyses and radical solutions), 

the latter grounded in approaches such as human ecology, political economy, and world-systems 

theory (Brulle 2010; Foster, Clark and York 2010; Pellow and Nyseth Brehm 2013). At the core 

of the development of critical environmental sociology is the human ecology perspective, 

emerging from the works of Catton and Dunlap (see York and Dunlap 2012), which critiqued 

human exemptionalism under the banner of an approach now referred to as the New Ecological 

Paradigm (NEP). Contemporary human ecology studies have recently used cross-national research 

to highlight population and affluence (measured in per capita GDP) as the central driving forces 

behind environmental degradation at the national level (York and Dunlap 2012), and have also 

developed the New Ecological Paradigm Scale, an influential measure of proenvironmental 

orientation (Dunlap 2008).  

Marxian political economy-inspired approaches to environmental sociology have also been 

deeply influential throughout its history. Allan Schnaiberg’s The Environment: From Surplus to 

Scarcity (1980) describes the ‘treadmill of production’ in modern industrial capitalism, where each 

round of investment prioritizes increasingly resource and energy heavy labor-saving technology, 

and thus increases both demand for ecosystem elements and resultant pollution (Gould, Pellow 

and Schnaiberg 2008; Schnaiberg and Gould 1994). James O’Connor’s work on the ‘second 

contradiction of capitalism’ highlights that capitalism tends to undermine its own conditions of 

production as it continually depletes natural resources and shifts to resources that are higher cost, 

lower quality, further from the site of production, etc. (O'Connor 1998). Later, environmental 

sociology was further influenced by a directly Marxian political ecology, centered in a critique of 

capitalism’s varied and severe ecological consequences and focusing on ‘metabolic rifts’ which 

disrupt the society-nature relationship in a number of qualitative ways (Foster 2012; Foster, Clark 

and York 2010).  



 

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 While the earliest world-systems theory had originally been subject to various critiques2 it 

has since been increasingly recognized and utilized as a relevant approach for understanding the 

environmental outcomes of capitalist economic processes (Goldfrank, Goodman and Szasz 1999; 

Jorgenson 2015; Jorgenson and Givens 2014). World-systems environmental analyses join other 

critical traditions in environmental sociology with (1) an acknowledgment of the negative 

ecological effects of the profit-and-growth orientation of capitalist economic activity, alongside 

(2) their sustained, in-depth attention to the differential power between core and non-core nations 

within the CWS (alongside its negative environmental consequences). This focus has recently 

produced significant research on both ecologically unequal exchange and foreign direct investment 

(FDI) dependence as phenomena that contribute to ecological devastation (Jorgenson and Givens 

2014).  

 These foundational critical traditions within environmental sociology, alongside additional 

perspectives such as environmental justice literature (Anguelovski 2014) and newer contributions, 

such as Jason W. Moore’s development of the ‘capitalism as world-ecology’ approach (Moore 

2015) or many distinct degrowth (D'Alisa, Demaria and Kallis 2014) and critical political ecology 

(Peet, Robbins and Watts 2011b; Robbins 2011) perspectives, are significantly complementary 

(Foster 2012; York and Mancus 2009). Additionally, they have together highlighted many of the 

quantitative and qualitative ways in which capitalism, as a growth-and-profit oriented mode of 

production characterized by unequal economic and ecological relations, is responsible for our 

ecological crises (Pellow and Nyseth Brehm 2013; York and Dunlap 2012). Nonetheless, it is 

exactly this thesis that is rejected by ecological modernization theorists and other advocates of 

”green capitalism”, which presume the profit-and-growth imperatives of capitalism, while EMT 

in particular fails to adequately account for the negative ecological implications of the differential 

power between the core and non-core regions. Indeed, it is EMT’s presumption of the CWS that 

impedes the viability of their prescriptions while rendering their approach to ecological rationality 

deeply incoherent and implausible-effectively undermining the whole of EMT’s prescriptive 

analysis. 

 

                                                                                                                                                             
2 World-systems theory has faced early critique for (1) reifying the concept of the “world-system” and consequently 

(2) neglecting concrete attention to the historically-specific development of particular nations (see Zeitlin, Maurice. 

1984. The Civil Wars in Chile: (or the Bourgeois Revolutions that Never Were). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University 

Press.). Simultaneously, even early world-systems research has analytically treated the ’world-system’ as a concept 

rather than as a concrete reified ‘thing,’ encouraging the unit-of-analysis to be determined in the course of research. 

Moreover, I would argue that the plethora of more recent world-systems theory (particularly regarding the effects of 

international power relations on the environment) has escaped these critiques through attention to concrete relations 

between core and non-core regions, rather than taking the “world-system” to be a reified concept. (For an influential 

exposition of, and rebuttal to these critiques, see (So, Alvin Y. 1990. Social Change and Development: Modernization, 

Dependency and World-System Theories. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publications.). 



 

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“Green Capitalist” Modernization Theory as Environmental Sociology 

Ecological modernization theory is a fundamentally representative “green capitalist” approach to 

environmental sociology (Mol 2002), presuming the central features of the CWS and adopting 

many core elements of traditional ‘modernization theory’ (Foster 2012; McLaughlin 2012; Seippel 

2000). Simultaneously, contemporary EMT has been subject to multiple empirical tests, prompting 

significant critiques of its methodological and epistemological premises (Brulle 2010; York and 

Dunlap 2012; York, Rosa and Dietz 2010). First, its reliance on the “case study” method has been 

found to be unable to isolate general large-scale patterns (such as the impact of EM processes on 

actual ecological outcomes). Second, EMT has a strong preference for qualitative over quantitative 

methodology, even though the ecological consequences of modernity are predominantly material 

and can only be fully and reliably understood with large-scale and quantitative analyses. Third, 

EMT proponents defend typically defend their approach using individual counterexamples to 

reject a hypothesis, even though the most developed critiques of EMT have hinged, rather, on 

considerable evidence of widespread negative environmental consequences of modernization 

(Dunlap and Marshall 2007; York, Rosa and Dietz 2010). In all these elements, EMT neglects the 

bigger-picture quantitative research that underlies most critical environmental scholarship in favor 

of individual-case qualitative research that neglects the overall consequences of capitalist 

development.  

 While these critiques highlight major fundamental weaknesses in EM analysis, its central 

weaknesses stem from its adherence to the “human-exemptionalist paradigm” in its approach to 

human-ecological relations (Foster 2012), and its modernization theory influenced presupposition 

of the basic features of the CWS (McLaughlin 2012; Seippel 2000). EMT ignores the number of 

ways that the (1) profit-and-growth orientation and (2) core-periphery relations of the CWS 

undermine the ability of “green capitalist” prescriptions (e.g. technological changes, “green” 

consumption, NGO or market-led strategies, etc) to solve our ecological crises. Existing critiques 

of EMT have not developed a systematic account of how the presumption of these central features 

of the CWS undermine EMT’s prescriptions as well as their development of the concept of 

ecological rationality, a thesis I will proceed to demonstrate using a synthesis of a variety of 

distinct literatures.  

 

The Development of Ecological Modernization Theory 

The central premise of EMT is that environmental interests have been increasingly incorporated 

into social relations, institutions, and everyday practices (Mol 2010). EM analysis presumes 

capitalist dynamics and relations of production and does not see challenging them as necessary for 

overcoming ecological problems (Mol 2002). In this context, environmental changes are said to 

occur through (1) political modernization, involving transformations in the respective roles of 'the 



 

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state' and 'the market' which include an “increasing importance and involvement of economic and 

market dynamics, institutions and agents in environmental reforms” (Mol 2010), (2) 

transformations in technology and technological development, and (3) broader social 

transformations within “greening” consumption practices and in global civil society (Mol 2002; 

Mol 2010). It would be by means of the successful integration of ecological rationality into these 

arenas and processes that EMT argues for the ultimate potential compatibility of the capitalist 

world-system/economic growth and ecological sustainability. 

 EMT shares with modernization theory a Parsonian conceptual edifice, including (1) its core 

structural-functionalist elements such as functional differentiation, rationalization, and 

individualization, alongside (2) its human exemptionalist approach to nature, and (3) its theoretical 

grounding in an elite-driven, essentialist, and developmental account of progress towards various 

social ends (Foster 2012; Gilman 2003; McLaughlin 2012; Seippel 2000). The latter forms the 

core of the EMT notion that the ordinary operations of the contemporary CWS are organically 

tending now towards the incorporation of ecological rationality. These starting assumptions are 

further consistent with the pro-capitalist, elite-driven, anti-populist, and ethnocentric approaches 

of classical liberalism (Wallerstein 2004; Wallerstein 2011) and modernization theory (Gilman 

2003). The EM eco-optimistic defense of capitalism persists despite widespread recognition that 

our ecological crisis is increasingly dire (Klein 2014; Steffen et al. 2015) and the influence of 

environmental movements have been decreasing in influence (Brulle 2010) as anti-ecological 

movements and environmental skepticism and denialism  increase in influence (McCright and 

Dunlap 2010). Before we address the consequences of the presumption of the CWS on EMT’s 

other prescriptions, however, we must first look at the consequences of its a priori rejection of 

other approaches to human-ecological relations.  

 

The Failings of "Green Capitalism” and EMT 

To solve our ecological crises, we must first acknowledge the importance of considering 

alternative sets of values and beliefs concerning human-ecological relations, as one of the biggest 

challenges we face in attempting to address our ecological crises is: 

 

the narrow cultural scope and shallow historical depth that circumscribe 

contemporary environmental discourse, constraining our potential to visualize 

alternatives to currently dominant human-environment relations (Paulson 2014). 

 

Such circumscription limits ecological prescriptions by allowing non-or-anti-ecological criteria 

(e.g. growth, profit, maintenance of geopolitical power, etc.) to restrict the consideration or 

implementation of ecological standards, necessarily sabotaging our efforts. Additionally, 



 

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exclusion of various communities and their perspectives from our policy and social science 

discussions is an issue of environmental justice, as the dominant nature-society ideas and relations 

are often “detrimental to certain human communities, primarily the poor and people of color” 

(DiChiro 1998). In short, excluding alternative ecological perspectives from our policy and social 

science discussions is profoundly unjust, and it threatens the viability of any strategy towards a 

“greening” of human-ecological relations.  

 Nonetheless, like liberal and modernization theorists before them, EM theorists have shown 

explicit disdain for theoretical paradigms and traditions associated with “traditional,” 

“premodern,” or “antimodern” values and perspectives. For example, Mol and Spaargaren critique 

Catton and Dunlap as contributing to environmental sociology's “coquetting with ecology” 

(Spaargaren and Mol 1992), and reject all “human ecology” schools and theorists (from Catton 

and Dunlap to deep ecology) for their supposed “tendency to try and restore the interrelationship 

between the social and the natural world in such a way that they seem to underscore the fact that 

all facts, events, goals, outcomes, patterns etc. as we know them, are socially mediated” (Mol and 

Spaargaren 2000). This ground for rejection of the human ecology perspective shows a neglect of 

particular environmental paradigms more than it shows weaknesses in them,3 and predominantly 

rests on a denial that ecological ‘forced choices’ exist. Thus, EM theorist’s grounds for rejection 

of whole families of alternative ecological traditions centers on EMT’s committed “failure to 

incorporate the biophysical environment as an independent causal force” (McLaughlin 2012), and 

their consequent view of humanity as “ultimately exempt from natural conditions” (Foster 2012).  

 EMT shares the rigid anthropocentric separation between humanity and non-human nature 

characteristic of historical Western scientific and economic analysis (Merchant 1989; Plumwood 

2002), and rejects any traditions that hold non-human nature to have anything more than pure 

instrumental value. Like liberal and MT theorists before them, these commitments ultimately limit 

EMT to “a highly restrictive theory of social change that promotes a panglossian socio-technical 

optimism, while marginalizing people and projects who depart from that vision by conceptualizing 

them as deviant, backward, or irrational” (McLaughlin 2012). This contrasts with many 

foundational critical perspectives in environmental sociology, from environmental justice activists 

(DiChiro 1998) to the myriad advocates of degrowth and the expansion of the commons against 

growing commodification (D'Alisa, Demaria and Kallis 2014) to deep ecologists, spiritual 

ecologists, and social ecologists looking for a total transformation in political economy (Merchant 

                                                                                                                                                             
3 I highly doubt that Catton and Dunlap do not believe humanity has a choice whether to either accept the reality of 

environmental degradation or ignore it, yet still there is more truth to even this extreme claim than EMT would like 

to admit—as beings who require a metabolism with nature to survive, there are limits to the extent that we can both 

ignore the environment and survive, let alone survive as healthy individuals. In this regard, arguing dismissively that 

human ecology perspectives are guilty of “coquetting with ecology” is somewhat akin to critiquing medical doctors 

for “coquetting with biology.” 



 

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2005). This similarly rejects by fiat a number of non-Western and/or indigenous perspectives 

which posit a more relational approach to human-ecological relations, such as indigenous cultures 

(LaDuke 2005), Buddhist perspectives (Kaza and Kraft 2000), and pagan faiths (Starhawk 2014).  

 While denying the independent causal impact of non-human nature is a curious stance for an 

“ecological” scholarly tradition, EMT attempts to escape critique through (a) redefinition of the 

object and terms of study, alongside (b) a selective use of case studies (enabling their rejection of 

empirical anomalies) (McLaughlin 2012). In contrast to Marxian political ecology (for example), 

EMT studies traditionally focus on “relative (but significant) changes into more environmentally 

sound directions, in contrast to the “absolute” sustainability sought by neo-Marxist scholars” (Mol 

2002). Simultaneously, EMT tends to focus on “conventional” environmental problems such as 

waste and pollution rather than on the kinds of ecological issues central to Marxian political 

ecology, such as “climate change, bio-diversity, ozone layer depletion and the like” (Mol 2002:96).  

 In addition to the limits these biases impose on the actual credibility of EMT within 

environmental sociology, EMT's prioritization of the maintenance of the CWS as an unquestioned 

premise creates deep inconsistencies in a central (if not the central) EMT concept—ecological 

rationality due to both (1) the dynamics of the profit-and-growth imperatives of the CWS, and (2) 

the unequal power between core and non-core regions. EMT posits a “growing independence” of 

ecological rationality (Mol 2002) while arguing that it should not be given priority above “other 

rationalities” (Spaargaren, Mol and Buttel 2000), and that it can be incorporated only when 

“environmental criteria, instruments and concepts are reformulated to mesh with the logics of 

modern markets” (Mol, Sonnenfeld and Spaargaren 2009). EMT thus holds that ecological 

rationality should be subordinated to economic rationalities despite elsewhere recognizing that 

“economic mechanisms, institutions and dynamics will always first follow economic logics and 

rationalities” (Mol 2002). Ecological rationality as defined by EM theorists is thus theoretically 

incoherent and inherently contradictory, as it is supposed to be simultaneously somehow (1) 

increasingly independent from economic rationality, yet (2) ultimately subordinate to it, despite 

the latter’s divergence from and potential hostility towards the former. 

 Simultaneously, inattention to the full implications of global power imbalances within the 

CWS generates further problems in the conceptualization and hypothetical integration of 

ecological rationality. At face value, EMT recognizes that (1) nations, global economic 

institutions, and transnational corporations with more power in the global economy have 

disproportionate decision-making power (Mol 2002) and (2) tend to neglect 

underdeveloped/poorer nations and peoples (Mol 2002:106). Simultaneously, EM further (3) 

prioritizes analysis of local “conventional” environmental problems such as pollution (Mol 2002) 

rather than the broader global issues common to rich and poor nations and peoples alike, such as 

climate change. Without fundamentally challenging the disproportionate power between the core 



 

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and the periphery and semi-periphery, how plausible is EM optimism when more powerful nations, 

firms, etc., tend to ignore the issues of poorer nations and peoples, and EM analysis ignores their 

common-cause global-scale environmental crises? In ignoring these deeper questions, EMT 

provides little guidance as to how ecological rationality can reliably be incorporated, further 

undermining the practical viability of their approach to ecological rationality. Beyond these 

problems, EMT’s presumption of the CWS also undermines their other prescriptions for economic, 

political, or social change. 

 

Endogenous “Ecological Rationality:” Ecological Production in the CWS?  

Despite EMT’s assumptions to the contrary, many natural and social scientists deny that indefinite 

economic growth is possible or desirable on a finite planet (D'Alisa, Demaria and Kallis 2014; 

Foster, Clark and York 2010; Gould, Pellow and Schnaiberg 2008). The centrality of growth and 

profit imperatives in the CWS nonetheless means that firms ultimately have to prioritize growth 

and profit, regardless of environmental costs (Löwy 2015; Magdoff and Foster 2011) which are 

not reflected in market prices (Schor 2011). The divergence between profit and ecological 

rationality impedes firms’ abilities to incorporate the latter, as it is impossible for firms to 

maximize divergent or competing priorities, and telling managers to try leads to “confusion and a 

lack of purpose that will handicap the firm in its competition for survival” (Jensen 2001). Profit 

maximization thus tends to generate externalities, where the social and ecological costs of 

production are pushed onto the public rather than internalized (Fieldman 2014; Magdoff and Foster 

2011; Schor 2011). Studies have shown that financialization has increased the dominance of 

ecologically harmful profit maximization criteria in recent decades (Peet, Robbins and Watts 

2011a; Schor 2011), such as impeding the capacities of firms to implement EM innovations 

(Fieldman 2014), surging food prices in 2008 following agro-food transnationals’ increasing 

internalization of the logic of finance capital (Moore 2010), and increasing threats to biodiversity, 

forest ecosystem functions, and conservation efforts in North American industrial timberland 

ownership (Gunnoe and Gellert 2011).  

 Numerous limitations exist to the central EMT and “green capitalist” eco-efficiency argument 

that ecologically efficient technologies and management strategies may be reliably adopted due to 

cost savings or related improvements in profitability. Eco-efficiency arguments tend to neglect the 

“Jevons paradox,” in which cost advantages (gained from the cheapening of resources due to 

increased efficiency in production) often generate increased resource usage (Foster, Clark and 

York 2010), such as how overall energy demand has recently risen fastest in sectors with the largest 

efficiency gains (Schor 2011). EMT eco-efficiency arguments further neglect the “paperless office 

paradox,” where the presence of a substitute of a resource does not necessarily lead to diminished 

usage of that resource (York 2006). Finally, attention to world-system factors highlights that 



 

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“green” technology adoption in the core may come at the cost of ecological devastation in the 

periphery, as when “green” automotive technologies utilize materials from the global South whose 

extraction causes tremendous ecological devastation (Bonds and Downey 2012). In short, 

technological development within the constraints of the CWS will likely be insufficient to 

overcome the “treadmill” of increasing resource and energy usage (Schnaiberg 1980; Schnaiberg 

and Gould 1994).  

 Acknowledgement of core-periphery relations further impacts the anticipated environmental 

consequences of economic development. Within the CWS, the core both extracts resources (Clark 

and Foster 2009) and labor (Chase-Dunn 1998) at low-or-no cost (relative to the periphery), and 

commonly externalizes the environmental impacts of their production onto peripheral regions 

(Jorgenson and Givens 2014). For example, ecologically unequal exchange literature has used 

cross-national research to show that the vertical flow of exports from poorer to wealthier nations 

contributes to environmental destruction in the former, such as increased deforestation, 

biodiversity loss, and carbon dioxide emissions, while foreign direct investment dependence also 

contributes to a variety of environmental harms (see Jorgenson 2016; Jorgenson and Givens 2014). 

Accounting for the consequences of the profit-and-growth orientation of the CWS and the unequal 

power between core and non-core nations highlights that nothing in the logic of profitability or 

growth suggests ecologically sound production processes as an endogenous tendency of capitalist 

firms.  

 

Endogenous “Ecological Rationality:” Ecological Consumption in the CWS? 

Various other tendencies within the CWS weaken the “green capitalist” and EMT argument that 

economic and ecological rationalities may be unified as consumers choose “green” consumption. 

These arguments typically only consider the consumption of individual consumers (Foster, Clark 

and York 2010), though two definitions are relevant to our ecological crises: (1) consumption as 

the use of natural and physical resources, and (2) (in economics) consumption as that part of 

aggregate economic demand that is attributable to consumer spending. The conflation of the 

“environmental” and “economic” meanings of consumption is referred to as the enigma of 

consumption (Foster, Clark and York 2010). Prescriptions limited to individual-level consumption 

consequently often (1) neglect investment and its impact on environmental throughput, (2) lead to 

analyses which highlight saving as part of our environmental solutions, ignoring that savings 

become directed into investment oriented towards economic growth in the CWS, and (3) conflate 

“total environmental waste in society with waste related to direct household consumption” (Foster, 

Clark and York 2010). A full critique of consumption practices within the CWS thus necessitates 

a critique of individual consumption practices and a deeper critique of its orientation towards profit 

and growth, the very aspects EMT maintains at all costs.  



 

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 Regarding individual consumer spending, economic growth in the CWS typically requires 

continual overall growth in consumption (Jones 2011; Schnaiberg 1980). At least three (not 

mutually exclusive) consumption tendencies contribute to ecologically harmful overconsumption. 

First, the concept of acquisitive consumption relates to acquisition of goods that exceeds one’s 

needs, amplified by the dependence effect, whereby the generation of new products expands 

consumer possibilities and, with them (and persistent advertising), creates new and expanded 

perceived needs (Dutt 2008; Galbraith 1958). Second is repetitive consumption, the “cycle of 

buying, discarding, and buying again” due to both disposable products and “planned obsolescence” 

(Sheth, Sethia and Srinivas 2011), including the psychological planned obsolescence resulting 

from increasing emphasis on the “symbolic value” of goods due to the “fashion cycle” (Schor 

2011). Finally, the concept of aspirational consumption (Sheth, Sethia and Srinivas 2011) reflects 

how considerations of class and status modify consumption patterns (Bourdieu 1984; Schor 2007; 

Veblen 1973), easily translating into ecologically harmful consumption practices. These factors 

together greatly contribute to individual overconsumption and threaten sustainability (Sheth, 

Sethia and Srinivas 2011). 

 The factors that contribute to ecologically harmful overconsumption practices are amplified 

by those keeping consumers in the CWS under-informed of the ecological quality of the goods 

they consume. Individual consumers in the CWS tend to be blind to the process of production, and 

therefore the social (Marx 1990) and ecological (Jones 2011) relations and processes that created 

the commodity, a phenomena Marx discussed in terms of commodity fetishism (Marx 1990). This 

commodity fetishism is amplified by the increasing distance between production and consumption 

in the CWS, the proliferation of marketing (as it drowns out neutral information and thus increases 

the cost of acquiring it) (Hudson and Hudson 2003), and copyrights, patents, and trademarks 

(Schor 2011). These phenomena collectively reduce the likelihood that consumers understand the 

true ecological cost of individual consumption. As information asymmetries between producers 

and consumers tend to cause the average value of a commodity to decrease (Akerlof 1970), this 

can easily extend to the diminishment of the ecological quality of goods over time (Kuhn 1999).  

 Consumer blindness to the true ecological costs of their consumption cannot adequately be 

solved within the CWS by the common “green capitalist” advocated eco-labeling proposal due to 

profit-oriented corporate “greenwashing.” Greenwashing emerges from the reality of ‘ecological 

rationality’ being at best a secondary concern for firms (if at all) against their aforementioned 

biases towards profit maximization. This effectively guarantees that “in the absence of a 

compulsory system, corporations will continue to hold a strong incentive to appear socially 

responsible while avoiding the costs of actually doing so” (Alves 2009), producing a rampant 

tendency towards greenwashing at either the firm-level or the product-level (Delmas and Burbano 

2011). The TerraChoice Group has categorized product-level greenwashing into the “seven sins” 



 

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of greenwashing, including (among others) the ‘Sin of No Proof’, where environmental claims 

cannot be substantiated, and the ‘Sin of Worshipping False Labels’, where a product gives the 

impression of a third-party endorsement but no such endorsement exists (TerraChoice Group 

2010). For example, of the 5,296 home and family consumer products examined in the 2010 ‘Sins 

of Greenwashing’ report, over 95% of ‘greener’ products commit at least one of the seven Sins of 

Greenwashing. “Greenwashing” amplifies consumer eco-blindness while eroding confidence in 

green firms and products (Delmas and Burbano 2011), and cannot form a primary solution to our 

ecological woes within the context of the CWS. In short, there are no organic tendencies towards 

reliable prioritization of ecological rationality in either production or consumption within the 

CWS. 

 

Exogenous “Ecological Rationality:” Non-State Mechanisms of Political Change in the CWS 

While the increasingly decentralized, private-oriented forms of governance that underlie EM 

prescriptions for political modernization are an evident trend in environmental policy, they have 

serious limitations as environmental solutions. In addition to greater inclusion of firms, EMT’s 

advocacy of political modernization involves the greater inclusion of non-state actors such as 

NGOs (Mol 2002), as does the influential “world polity” tradition in its analysis of environmental 

governance. This section will focus on the negative impacts of the CWS on the viability of these 

prescriptions through a focus on this “world polity” literature, who argue akin to EMT that 

“significant environmental restructuring is possible within the global economy” (Schofer and 

Hironaka 2005) through increasing global environmental concern, and through the impact of 

science on political and economic policy. Along with EMT, they contend that environmental 

concerns become embedded in institutions, particularly environmental international non-

governmental organizations (EINGOs) which pressure the state to take on environmental 

responsibility. While cross national research has found some limited support for these propositions 

(Schofer and Hironaka 2005), there are clear limitations to NGO-led strategies of environmental 

reform within the constraints of the CWS. 

 “World polity” literature (among others that prioritize NGO-led strategies for environmental 

change) is often criticized for ignoring power and inequality (Hall and Taylor 1996), and 

significant scholarship on global environmental governance contests much of the power and 

autonomy that are attributed to the EINGOs (on which the world polity literature focuses) (Gareau 

2012; Goldman 2006). Specifically, “world polity” literature has been critiqued for ignoring the 

role of both corporate and political power (Smith 2000) and specifically the disproportionate power 

of states in the core (Beckfield 2003, 419) in shaping global values. Moreover, while NGOs may 

contribute towards the adoption of regulatory standards, they often have weak monitoring 

capabilities (King and Pearce 2010), while dependence on external funding and support often 



 

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makes them more likely to take relatively conservative positions deemed acceptable to their 

funders or home governments (Brulle 2000; Fisher 1997), a process which has often impacted 

EINGOS (Gareau 2012). In light of all these factors working against the efficacy of NGO-led 

strategies within the constraints of the CWS, it is unlikely that EINGOS will be able to make 

significant progress regarding our ecological crises without fundamentally critiquing the global 

economic system. The endogenous production and consumption tendencies of the CWS cannot be 

sources of sufficient ecological change, and neither can reliance on NGOs in the absence of a full, 

critical challenge to the CWS itself. As our ecological crisis is truly dire and the central tendencies 

of the CWS undermine our ability to meet it fully or in anything resembling an acceptable timeline, 

the more pressing question becomes why “green capitalist” approaches like EMT have had 

influence in public policy circles, mainstream environmentalisms, and in contemporary 

environmental sociology. 

 

Hollow Ecology in State Policy and Social Science 

Within the confines of the CWS, states face many factors that bias their priorities towards the 

facilitation of profit and growth, and these biases have only grown in the neoliberal era. 

Simultaneously, this general political context has produced certain analytical paths of least 

resistance for mainstream environmental organizations and social scientists. As addressing our 

environmental crises involves both identifying their causes and the factors impeding the adoption 

of solutions, the following section will explore why states and social scientists sometimes constrain 

their analyses and prescriptions within the ecologically destructive tendencies of the CWS. Despite 

the wide diversity of perspectives on the nature of the contemporary state, approaches as diverse 

as neo-Weberian (Evans 1995), neo-Marxian (Jessop 2002), and world-systems approaches to the 

state (Chase-Dunn 1998; Wallerstein 2004) acknowledge contemporary states’ prioritization of 

economic growth as a primary economic objective. The general structural separation between 

political and economic institutions and agents under capitalism renders states generally dependent 

on capital accumulation (and the profitability that it hinges on) for the production of the goods 

used in state power, maintenance of the tax base that underlies state funding, financing (where 

taxation is insufficient), and employment. Prioritization of profit and growth in state policy is 

further amplified by interstate geopolitical and economic competition (Chase-Dunn 1998; 

Miliband 1969) and the increasing dominance of financialization and global financial and trade 

institutions (Chang 2012; Jorgenson and Givens 2014; Peet, Robbins and Watts 2011a). Outside 

the core these latter institutions have often imposed strong austerity measures and structural 

adjustment policies (Dunlap and Jorgenson 2012) which have been shown to increase 

environmental harms (Shandra 2007). These features of states, the state-system, and political-



 

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economic relations within the CWS often bias state policy towards facilitating profit and growth 

above competing priorities. 

 Many further phenomena may contribute towards state actors’ active support of the profit-

and-growth priorities of the CWS. The ideological tenets of “bourgeois cultural hegemony” may 

be believed by both state actors and the population in general (Block 1977; Gramsci 1971), whose 

power stems from the ability to re-interpret the relations of production (Ewing 2015) and their 

ecological nature and consequences (Robbins 2011). The acceptance of this hegemonic consensus 

may be amplified as the highest positions within state institutions (Miliband 1969) and policy-

planning groups (Domhoff 2010) tend to be filled with individuals who share upper-class 

backgrounds. Simultaneously, the interdependence of states and capital within the CWS also 

creates in firms a general dependence on states to support the preconditions and apparent 

legitimacy of profitability and growth (Foster 2014; O'Connor 1998; Parenti 2016; Purcell and 

Nevins 2005) in addition to many specific ways states impact profitability (Wallerstein 2004).  

 Firms thus have a strong interest in working to facilitate active state support, and to thwart 

the imposition of any standards that would impede profitability, such as environmental or labor 

standards (Schnaiberg and Gould 1994). Industry groups or firms may attempt to use tactics such 

as lobbying and advertising (Miliband 1969; Schnaiberg and Gould 1994), campaign finance (De 

Figueiredo and Edwards 2007), or the persuasion of individual politicians (Schnaiberg and Gould 

1994) to prevent regulation and secure political support. If regulation does become enacted, 

“treadmill actors” can attempt to disempower their governmental implementation via means such 

as lawsuits, appeals to international trade bodies, or various forms of regulatory capture (where 

special interests such as firms or industries manipulate the agencies tasked with their regulation) 

(Schnaiberg and Gould 1994). In short, without challenging the political power of capital within 

the CWS (and the factors predisposing states and state actors in favor of profit and growth), state 

policy will predominantly tend to undermine “ecological rationality.”  

Simultaneously, EM theorists often justify their prescriptions via the argument that EM-style 

“green capitalist” policies are already being enacted by states and within the international 

community. Given state prioritization of profit and growth (and the ecological inadequacy of 

“green capitalist” approaches altogether), why would states adopt any environmental policies at 

all? Despite the factors biasing states within the CWS towards the facilitation of profit and growth, 

states are simultaneously now held responsible by their citizens to some degree for the alleviation 

of environmental degradation (Hay 1994; Parenti 2016). These competing priorities mean states 

often restrict their responses to the minimum necessary to restore face-value legitimacy (Hay 

1994), often limited to a combination of strategies such as token gesturism, symptom amelioration, 

or the “greening” of political ideology (Hay 1994) rather than fundamentally addressing our 



 

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ecological crises. Nowhere is this truer than the embrace in many states of “green capitalist” 

approaches to environmental crisis. 

 Following increasing public awareness of environmental ills emerging from the 1960s 

onward, environmental governance institutions and firms alike recognized the necessity of 

acknowledging and responding to environmental crises (Bernstein 2012; Peet, Robbins and Watts 

2011a; Sklair 2001). Rather than reject the CWS or accept an increasingly anti-capitalist 

environmental consensus, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) organized the “big 

business response” (Sklair 2001) to the crisis, and in the 1970s founded a Commission on 

Environment, and later a World Conference of Environmental Management in 1984, attracting 500 

representatives from government, environmental groups, and industry. The ICC was then chosen 

to advise the Bergen Ministerial Conference, which ultimately produced the Brundtland Report of 

the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), Our Common Future in 

1987.  

 The concept of “sustainable development,” still the dominant approach of both the UN and 

the increasingly transnational capitalist class (Salleh 2015), emerged from the Brundtland Report 

(Bernstein 2002; Eckersley 2004; Sklair 2001) as: 

 

a political discourse which sought to address both the growing North-South 

conflicts (the relations between poverty and global sustainability) and the growing 

counter-revolution by firms and states to the idea of regulation, that is to say to 

attempt to install an environmental governance “compatible” with no limits to 

growth (the pre-condition of neoliberal capitalism) (Peet, Robbins and Watts 

2011a) 

 

Free market “corporate environmentalism” that circumscribes environmental analyses and 

solutions within market logics became “the main weapon of those working for the global capitalist 

system to establish ownership of [the concept of] sustainable development” (Sklair 2001), ensuring 

that environmental politics were carefully contained within pro-growth “green capitalist” 

prescriptions. This business-oriented “green capitalist” consensus continued to mobilize in order 

to shift global environmentalism towards growth-and-profit oriented directions (Sklair 2001) via 

the construction of a “sustainable development historical bloc” that solidified in the 1992 Earth 

Summit in Rio.  

 In Rio, the ICC’s environmental arm (the Business Council for Sustainable Development) 

guaranteed that emerging environmental discourse continued to reflect the needs of major firms 

and industries. It was ultimately successful in keeping criticisms of increasingly transnational 

corporations “off the official agenda” (Sklair 2001) in discussions of our environmental crises, 



 

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instead promoting the view that trade and finance liberalization are consistent or even necessary 

for environmental protection (Bernstein 2002). This approach continues to dominate the 

mainstream approach to our ecological crises, as exemplified in the 2012 Rio+20 summit, where 

both the “the business sector and UN promote[d] a future ‘green economy’ based on finance, 

technology, market mechanisms, and ‘voluntary commitments’” (Salleh 2015). The result of these 

corporate efforts is a circumscription of environmental solutions within the boundaries of profit-

and-growth priorities, and these approaches bled into environmental sociology in a “modernist 

sociological” form via EMT (Blühdorn 2012; Eckersley 2004; Sklair 2001).  

 In effect, while “green capitalist” approaches to the environment have myriad evident 

weaknesses impeding their ability to address environmental crisis, they perfectly package 

environmental concern in terms friendly to the environmentally destructive profit-and-growth 

priorities of firms and states within the CWS. In this context, even apparent “green” prescriptions 

are often wedded to economic proposals that undermine any potential of ecological gains, as was 

the case with the Rio+20 summit: 

Rather than concede the fundamental irrationality of industrialized provisioning, the 

transnational ruling class asks the World Bank, Organization for Economic Cooperation and 

Development, and UNEP to insert green growth and sustainable development into structural 

reform policies on a country by country basis [. . . b]ut at the same time, “innovative 

instruments” for high tech financing are to be consistent with the Doha Development Round 

of multilateral trade negotiations. The Future We Want builds on Agenda 21, the 

Johannesburg Declaration, Monterrey Consensus, Istanbul Programme for Least Developed 

Countries, and the Bali Strategic Plan for Technology Support and Capacity Building. (Salleh 

2015) 

Just as “green capitalist” approaches to environmental governance were initially developed and 

promoted by capitalists and their representatives to circumscribe “green” prescriptions within the 

constraints of the profit-and-growth priorities of capitalists and capitalist states (Bernstein 2012; 

Sklair 2001), so has their influence continued in current policy discussions towards the same 

purposes. “Green capitalist” solutions were never intended to solve our ecological crises as much 

as they were intended to contain increasing public awareness of environmental crises within a 

direction that preserved or hopefully amplified profit and growth (and without substantially 

addressing the existing relations between the core and periphery), all at the expense of our 

ecological future. While this seems to be the primary EMT goal as well, it remains to be explained 

why this approach has retained influence within environmental sociology to the extent that it has.  

 Despite the critical core of environmental sociology, it has been argued that “today the main 

thrust of environmental social science has shifted to ecological modernization” (Foster, Clark and 



 

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York 2010). If acknowledging the inherent unsustainability of capitalism is historically influential 

within environmental sociology, why have “green capitalist” approaches retained any credence 

therein? One answer involves the embeddedness of social science within power relations, as the 

object of the social sciences is the social, and thus “both its analysis and what is deemed 

acceptable/unacceptable tends to be filtered through the dominant institutions and structures of the 

prevailing hierarchical social order” (Foster, Clark and York 2010). Social science “often enters a 

relatively dormant state once a new system of power is established” and consequently “in normal-

non-revolutionary-periods is unable to develop in a rational direction that would allow knowledge 

to interact in meaningful ways with social practice, particularly of a democratic kind.” (Foster, 

Clark and York 2010). In short, taking truly critical, sometimes controversial stances (let alone 

translating them into practice) becomes rare except in the context of periods of widespread, radical 

change.  

 In this context, academic success often requires accordance with the dominant ideologies and 

logics of power, where getting ahead in the academy, media, government, and other occupations 

for social scientists often involves “self-censorship, a narrow focus on the relatively 

inconsequential, and leaving the big stuff—in terms of social change—off the table” (Foster, Clark 

and York 2010). Consequently, scholars search “for models that might be more amenable to the 

political and economic zeitgeist” (Gould, Pellow and Schnaiberg 2008). Many facets of social 

science become increasingly safe to the dominant logics of power in these periods via the 

progressive erosion of deeply critical research in favor of topics and prescriptions that are less 

substantial and more hollow.  In the case of some sectors of environmental sociology, this means 

analyses that are safely subordinate to the political-economic relations that have been and are 

creating our ecological ills. 

 In this context, the political sea change that came with the rise of neoliberalism has 

constrained the potential for wider adoption of more radical analyses, including within 

environmental sociology. For example, after Reagan the U.S. political context became dominated 

by an antienvironmental agenda, increasing corporate power, rolling back environmentalist gains, 

and directly attacking challenges to capitalism (Gould, Pellow and Schnaiberg 2008; Sklair 2001) 

just as critical environmental sociology started to come into its own. Over time, many 

environmental groups and movements became more conservative and cooperative with business 

and the state (Gould, Pellow and Schnaiberg 2008). As environmental sociologists sought careers 

that are amenable to power holders, they turn to increased abstraction, safer and smaller topics, 

and the restriction of environmental study and prescriptions within the limits set by those very 

logics of power that are corrupting and destroying our human-ecological relations (Foster, Clark 

and York 2010; Gould, Pellow and Schnaiberg 2008). In short, “green capitalist” perspectives find 

prominence in policy and the social sciences precisely because they fail to challenge the factors 



 

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causing our ecological ills. At the same time, failing to challenge them prevents environmental 

sociology from accomplishing its potential in contributing towards effective ecological solutions. 

 

Conclusion: EMT or a Future for Planet Earth? 

EMT is one of the most systematic “green capitalist” perspectives, as its utilization of a variety of 

“green capitalist” prescriptions makes it a fair representation of much of “green capitalist” thought. 

The thorough and wide-ranging nature of EMT’s prescriptions is largely responsible for its ability 

to persist and evade critique—a critique of any singular part can be countered with reference to 

other EM prescriptions. Consequently, a similarly wide-ranging critique of EMT goes a long way 

towards identifying issues in the “green capitalist” approach in general. EMT’s maintenance of the 

profit-and-growth imperatives and unequal international relations of the CWS produces myriad 

feedback loops for many “green capitalist” prescriptions, and these feedback loops render “green 

capitalist” EM prescriptions untenable even in combination. Consequently, attempts to construct 

successful “green capitalist” solutions for our ecological crises (like those of EMT) are effectively 

doomed to fail. 

 Critical approaches to environmental sociology, by contrast, refuse to presume the major 

ecologically destructive features of the CWS. For example, human ecology rejects human 

exemptionalist theoretical blinders, while Marxian political ecology highlights the impacts of 

profit-and-growth oriented production on ecological devastation and world-systems theory 

critiques the ecological impacts of the differential power between core and non-core nations. All 

of these critical perspectives (along with other environmental justice, degrowth, and critical 

political ecology scholars (D'Alisa, Demaria and Kallis 2014; Peet, Robbins and Watts 2011b; 

Robbins 2011)) are predominantly complimentary, which allows them to form the groundwork for 

a wide-ranging critical environmental sociology (Foster 2012; York and Dunlap 2012; York and 

Mancus 2009). One central commonality between these different perspectives is an 

acknowledgment that the central elements of capitalism amplify ecological destruction by 

necessity (including its profit-and-growth orientation and its unequal international relations). 

Consequently, any “green capitalist” perspectives which maintain these features (like EMT) are 

consequently irrelevant at best or obstruct real solutions at worst. 

 In presuming the central features of the CWS, EMT silences critical traditions within 

environmental sociology alongside many communities’ and cultures’ different visions for 

political, economic, and ecological values, objectives, and institutions, introducing ethnocentric 

biases into EMT analysis. This also restricts ecological rationality to one which is (1) 

fundamentally human-exemptionalist and anthropocentric, (2) subordinated to profit-and-growth 

imperatives, and (3) neglectful of the true impact of international inequality within the CWS on 

EM prescriptions, rendering the central EMT concept of ecological rationality both practically and 



 

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logically incoherent within these boundaries. To maintain EM optimism despite these definitive 

weaknesses, EMT shifts the terrain of its analyses to comparably shallow ecological issues, 

ignoring large crises like climate change in favor of smaller-scale problems like pollution (Mol 

2002), while maintaining implausible general optimism about the widespread integration of 

ecological rationality of some limited, ill-defined, and internally contradictory variety.  

 EMT’s presumption of the CWS also proves fatal to the rest of EM’s central economic and 

political prescriptions. On the one hand, the CWS has no endogenous tendencies towards sufficient 

greening in either production or consumption, and reliance on “global civil society” or NGO-led 

solutions are similarly insufficient to compensate for the endogenous tendencies in the CWS 

towards ecological devastation. Despite these limits, many factors bias the policies of capitalist 

states towards the facilitation of profit and quantitative economic growth despite states being 

increasingly held responsible by citizens to address environmental crises. “Green capitalist” policy 

prescriptions allow states to give the appearance of dealing with our environmental ills while 

maintaining those very factors that destroy the environment, their influence stemming not from 

their efficacy but because they safely contain environmentalist analyses within the limits of the 

major features of the CWS. In the social sciences, “green capitalist” approaches are adopted for 

many reasons, many of which having to do with the unavoidable fact that failing to question 

capitalism is the analytical path of least resistance. Though “green capitalist” approaches within 

environmental sociology may provide an easy path to grants and promotions, nothing less than the 

fate of our planet depends on environmental sociology abandoning “green capitalist” hollow 

ecologies, and meeting its promise as a critical and effective discipline.  

 As the central tendencies of the CWS are both the cause and continuous amplifier of our 

ecological crises, “environmental sociology” needs to commit to a new critical environmental 

synthesis. In this regard, environmental sociology must (1) commit to the principled rejection of 

necessarily inadequate “green capitalist” ecological prescriptions in favor of adopting critical 

sociological perspectives, and seek both (2) alternative political-economic systems and 

organization(s) which reject the central features of the CWS, and (3) an interdisciplinary 

engagement with fields such as political science and political economy to produce concrete, 

practically-oriented plans to facilitate a transition from the CWS to a more ecologically sound and 

anti-imperialist ecosocialism. While aiding the pursuit of (1) is the central project of this article, 

and (2) and (3) are beyond its scope, the following will be a (necessarily brief) discussion of the 

latter. 

 History has room for a number of committed ecosocialist varieties and ecologically sound 

alternatives to capitalism, and different analysts and activists have identified many potential 

ecosocialist principles, goals, and strategies. Broad principles, for example, could be organized 

around a synthesis of the elementary triangle of socialism (social ownership, worker-organized 



 

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social production, and the satisfaction of communal needs) and the elementary triangle of ecology: 

“(1) social use, not ownership, of nature; (2) rational regulation by the associated producers of the 

metabolism between human beings and nature; and (3) the satisfaction of communal needs—of 

present and future generations” (Magdoff and Foster 2011). Environmental sociology, jettisoning 

counterproductive “green capitalist” fictions, can work towards the refinement of broad 

ecosocialist principles, unified around the rejection of (1) profit-and-growth imperatives and (2) 

power imbalances within core/periphery relations, while (3) theorizing critical solutions to the 

myriad anti-ecological consequences of these features, as noted throughout this article. Finally, (4) 

environmental sociology can encourage active experimentation with and analysis of many of these 

variants of ecosocialism, as “what we need—along with the movements to bring this about—are 

new conceptions of what constitutes viable post-capitalist societies—aimed at maintaining a 

rational metabolism between humans and the environment, while promoting economic and social 

justice” (Magdoff and Foster 2011).  

 In this process, environmental sociology should support the voices and values of many non-

Western and critical perspectives in both analysis and prescription. International political and 

academic communities need to engage with the thought of diverse thinkers and traditions outside 

those of the global North (and beyond even the confines of formal academia). Examples of these 

alternative perspectives include Buddhist economists’ emphasis on reorganizing the economy to 

prioritize maximizing well-being with minimal consumption (Sivaraksa 2011), or the struggles of 

neo-pagan practitioners (Starhawk 2014), indigenous peoples (LaDuke 2005; Löwy 2015) and 

many throughout the global South to pursue less anthropocentric and ecologically destructive 

relations with non-human nature (see D'Alisa, Demaria and Kallis 2014 for a wide range of 

alternatives along these lines). Central to this project is the engagement with various political, 

economic, and environmental prescriptions from various conferences and forums such as the 

Belém Declaration of the 2009 World Social Forum (see Löwy 2015), the People’s Agreement of 

the 2010 World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (see 

Magdoff and Foster 2011), or the Leap Manifesto (2015).  

 The project of refining broad ecosocialist goals should prioritize consideration of the causes 

of and solutions to our major ecological problems, including (1) climate change, (2) biodiversity 

loss and extinctions, (3) stratospheric ozone depletion, (4) ocean acidification, (5) nitrogen and 

phosphorus flows into the oceans and biosphere, (6) changes in land use, (7) changes in global 

freshwater use and the hydrological cycle, (8) atmospheric aerosol loading, and (9) chemical 

pollution and the introduction of other “novel entities,” “new substances, new forms of existing 

substances and modified life-forms that have the potential for unwanted geophysical and/or 

biological effects” (Steffen et al. 2015). These constitute the planetary boundaries which are 

essential to the maintenance of a safe-for-humanity earth-system environment (Steffen et al. 2015). 



 

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While environmental sociology can and should also highlight the lower-threat ecological harms 

that EMT studies, its primary and more immediate goal should be to prioritize the analysis of broad 

ecological principles and our most consequential ecological challenges. 

 This interdisciplinary academic work should all be undertaken alongside working with 

activist communities to generate concrete plans to pursue identified solutions, from short-term 

(immediate) goals to mid-range and long-term transition plans. This includes both (1) 

identification of the steps that should be taken to halt and reverse our negative ecological outcomes, 

and (most centrally) a (2) political-economic plan-of-action regarding how these steps can be 

actually implemented, and how humanity can overcome obstacles to their practical 

implementation. In short, environmental sociology should (1) commit to the rejection of the 

necessary failures of “green capitalist” ecological prescriptions in favor of prioritizing critical 

ecological approaches, while seeking to define (2) the broad outlines of an ecosocialist future. This 

should be companioned with the (3) identification of concrete short-to-long-term plans to (a) 

increasingly reduce and eliminate the negative ecological impacts of our political-economic 

organizations, and (b) implement (3a) and overcome the barriers to their implementation. 

Environmental sociology can learn from the failures of EMT and “green capitalist” approaches to 

environmental study, and unify around the critical traditions that have long formed the heart of 

(and greatest contributions to) the sub-discipline.  

 In addition to contributing to major existing debates in contemporary environmental 

sociology, this analysis has implications for both environmental sociology in general, and world-

systems environmental research in particular. In developing a comprehensive account of how 

attention to world-systems factors undermines the viability of a host of “green capitalist” 

prescriptions, this analysis highlights both the connections between world-systems environmental 

research and other critical traditions (via a shared critique of profit-and-growth prioritization), and 

ways in which world-systems environmental research has unique contributions to the critical 

environmental synthesis, via its long critique of unequal international power and its harmful 

ecological impacts. Attention to world-systems factors is thus a necessary component in the 

development of a critical environmental sociology. Given the major ecological consequences of 

power imbalances between core and non-core nations, environmental solutions require the erosion 

of those power imbalances, and world-systems research is ideally suited for the development of 

analytic tools to aid in both the critique of such factors, and in the pursuit of solutions.  

 Recent research has highlighted the need for further study on both (1) ecologically unequal 

exchange, in order to examine in-depth how the structure of international exchanges allows core 

nations to impose environmental harms on less powerful nations (Jorgenson and Givens 2014), 

and (2) the impacts of foreign direct investment dependence on the services sector (Jorgenson and 

Givens 2014)—both important contributions to the advancement of ecological scholarship in the 



 

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WST tradition. Additionally, while a full set of solutions and prescriptions cannot be the focus of 

this article, I would add that the preceding analysis highlights some fruitful future directions for 

world-systems’ environmental research. First, world-systems environmental research is well 

equipped to highlight the myriad factors regarding production and exchange in the CWS that 

amplify “commodity fetishism” (thus obscuring consumer awareness of the impacts of 

consumption), alongside the changes to production necessary to minimize commodity fetishism.  

Secondarily, such research can usefully develop proposals for overcoming the factors that amplify 

state prioritization of profitability and growth over ecologically beneficial social and ecological 

relations. Finally, world-systems environmental research can pave the way for the development of 

the interdisciplinary framework necessary to pursue practical proposals for the implementation of 

ecosocialist changes (and for the overcoming of unequal power relations between core and non-

core nations). The long emphasis in WST on interdisciplinary work renders world-systems 

research especially salient towards this important project. Altogether, environmental sociology 

needs to continue the dialogue between critical traditions while transitioning towards an increased 

focus on implementation, and world-systems environmental research has an important role in this 

endeavor. 

 In their extension of the presuppositions of modernization theory into environmental 

sociology, promoting inadequate partial ecological solutions after defining more rational solutions 

off the table, EMT seems to have as its primary goal not solutions to our ecological crises, but 

rather the defense of the CWS from ecological critique. Their unwillingness to criticize the central 

elements of the CWS creates substantial problems in the heart of both their primary concept, 

ecological rationality, as well as their major prescriptions for the potential integration of 

ecological rationality. The circumscription of one’s critique and vision within dominant discourses 

and power relations for pragmatic purposes is akin to a firefighter putting out only half of a flaming 

house because they believe it is too utopian to imagine putting out the whole home. Our ecological 

peril is at hand whether EMT and other “green capitalist” approaches to ecological analysis would 

like it or not, and the time for valorizing hollow ecology and entertaining pseudo-ecological 

fictions is at an end. In order to maintain its strong analytic relevance as a sociological sub-

discipline, let alone its potential to aid in the transformation of our human-ecological relations 

before we drive full-speed off the ecological cliff, environmental sociology needs to rid itself of 

“green capitalist” approaches like EMT (and their presuppositions), and return to its rightful 

focus—the study of how humanity can truly live in long-term harmony with non-human nature, 

and the means by which we get there. 

 

 

 



 

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About the Author 

Jeffrey A. Ewing is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Oregon. His primary 

academic research interests focus on many of the central factors that reproduce hierarchical social 

relations. His dissertation uses social network analysis to explore how realignments among 

corporate and political elites amid the recent U.S. rightward political shift relate to increasingly 

predatory forms of profit-making in contemporary capitalism. He has also critically engaged with 

topics in the sociology of religion, focusing on the uses of religion to support hierarchical social 

relations. Recently, this project has produced both a critical feminist interrogation of Christian 

demonology in “Women as “The Devil’s Gateway”: A Feminist Critique of Christian 

Demonology” (forthcoming, in Philosophical Perspectives of Demonology, Routledge 2017), and 

a reconstruction and application of the Marxist critique of religion in “Eternal Damnation as 

Exploitation’s Last Defense: Marx, Religion, and the Concept of Hell” (In The Concept of Hell, 

Palgrave Macmillan 2015). 

 

Disclosure Statement 

Any conflicts of interest are reported in the acknowledgments section of the article’s text. 

Otherwise, authors have indicated that they have no conflict of interests upon submission of their 

article to the journal.  

 

  



 

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