Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Global and Planetary Change
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloplacha
The sociological imagination in a time of climate change
Kari Marie Norgaard
A R T I C L E I N F O
Keywords:
Climate change
Sociological imagination
Ecological imagination
Anthropocene
Sociological approaches
Interdisciplinarity
Social organization of denial
A B S T R A C T
Despite rising calls for social science knowledge in the face of climate change, too few sociologists have been
engaged in the conversations about how we have arrived at such perilous climatic circumstances, or how society
can change course. With its attention to the interactive dimensions of social order between individuals, social
norms, cultural systems and political economy, the discipline of sociology is uniquely positioned to be an important
leader in this conversation. In this paper I suggest that in order to understand and respond to climate
change we need two kinds of imagination: 1) to see the relationships between human actions and their impacts
on earth's biophysical system (ecological imagination) and 2) to see the relationships within society that make up
this environmentally damaging social structure (sociological imagination). The scientific community has made
good progress in developing our ecological imagination but still need to develop a sociological imagination. The
application of a sociological imagination allows for a powerfully reframing of four key problems in the current
interdisciplinary conversation on climate change: why climate change is happening, how we are being impacted, why
we have failed to successfully respond so far, and how we might be able to effectively do so. I visit each of these four
questions describing the current understanding and show the importance of the sociological imagination and
other insights from the field of sociology. I close with reflections on current limitations in sociology's potential to
engage climate change and the Anthropocene.
The changing climate poses an unprecedented challenge to the
human imagination. It seems impossible to imagine the reality of what
is happening to the natural world, impossible to visualize the social,
political and economic consequences of these changes, and impossible
to envision truly changing course. Imagination is power especially in a
time of crisis. Right now in the face of climate change and the
Anthropocene1
more generally there are two forms of imagination that
both the interdisciplinary community and the general public need. We
need the ability to perceive the relationships between human actions
and their effects on earth's biophysical system – call it an ecological
imagination. And we need to be able to see the relationships within
society that make up this environmentally damaging social structure.
This second form of visualization – a central concept in the field of
sociology – was first discussed over 70 years ago by C.W. Mills. Mills
calls it the sociological imagination.
When it comes to our ecological imagination the scientific community
has made great progress. Over four decades atmospheric scientists
have progressively detailed increasingly grim assessments of
how the changing climate is altering the biophysical world around
which human social systems are organized. Natural scientists have
specified reductions in greenhouse gases needed to circumvent
catastrophic climate change. Despite these warnings however, human
social and political response to climate change remains wholly inadequate
(Palsson et al., 2013). We have made little progress in understanding
how to actually change our course. For this, we need the
second form of imagination - the ability to see the relationships within
society that make up our environmentally damaging social structure. In
the words of C. W. Mills:
“The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography
and the relations between the two within society… No social
study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of
history and of their intersections within a society has competed its
intellectual journey… For that imagination is the capacity to shift
from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological;
from examination of a single family to comparative assessment
of the national budgets of the world; from the theological
school to the military establishment; from consideration of an oil
industry to studies of contemporary poetry… It is the capacity to
range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the
most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations
between the two” (1959, 3–7).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.09.018
Received 4 August 2016; Received in revised form 16 May 2017; Accepted 28 September 2017
E-mail address: norgaard@uoregon.edu.
1
Discussions of climate change relate to the concept of the Anthropocene developed by natural scientists Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) to denote a new geological period in which
human activity is a significant force in the shaping of the planet. The term Anthropocene (controversial within geology) draws attention in particular to the fact that human activity is now
fundamentally transforming the natural world, modifying even the planet's basic geochemical and atmospheric cycles. While climate change is the most obvious aspect driving this
change, developments including anthropogenic chemicals and genetic engineering may also be included.
Global and Planetary Change xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
0921-8181/ © 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.
Please cite this article as: Norgaard, K.M., Global and Planetary Change (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.09.018
But our ability to develop this form of imagination has been a
harder nut to crack.
The work of natural scientists raises two kinds of questions for
scholars in the social sciences and humanities. First, whether and how
can we effect the needed change in emissions to avoid catastrophic
climate scenarios? More specifically, what cultural, organizational and
institutional shifts are needed to lower our carbon emissions? Can we
tackle reducing our use of fossil fuels as a technical problem or does it
involve a fundamental reorganization of society? And if so how do we
begin? Secondly, how should we understand and evaluate the impacts
of changes that will come and are already taking place? How is climate
change exacerbating existing gender and racial inequality, and how will
it do so in the near future? To what extent will climate change lead to
economic and political instability? What does sea level rise mean for the
future of cities? How for that matter, can we even begin to really
imagine the reality of our present situation?
While these questions are addressed in part by the social science
literature on climate change (itself hugely under-represented, see discussion
by Hackmann et al., 2014), even here it is my hope that this
explicit enunciation of this and a few other specific concepts from sociology
will highlight the unique but as yet still omitted contributions of
the discipline of sociology. For as much as knowledge and perspectives
from many of the disciplines within the social sciences and humanities
are imperative (Castree, 2014, 2015; Clayton et al., 2015; Hackmann
et al., 2014; ISSC and UNESCO, 2013; Palsson et al., 2013), my focus
here is upon the particular absence of and conceptual contributions of
the discipline of sociology. Without a sociological imagination, most
people in both the science community and the public at large currently
lack the ability to see the social structure that surrounds us. And
without being able to see social structure we have a very hard time
answering any of the above questions. Without seeing the constraints
coming from social structure we are having a hard time moving for-
ward.
Despite appeals for both interdisciplinarity (Brondizio et al., 2016)
and the need for social science knowledge in the face of climate change
(ISSC and UNESCO, 2013), to date insufficient social scientific expertise
has been brought to bear in the major climate reports. Few sociologists
in particular have been engaged in the discussions about how we arrived
at such dangerous climate scenarios, or how society can change
course. With its attention to how individuals, social norms, cultural
systems and political economy interact to generate social order, the
discipline of sociology is uniquely positioned amongst the social sciences
to bring valuable perspectives (Dunlap and Brulle, 2015). Yet
there is only one sociologist on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, and a recent study by the International Social Science Council
found that only 3% of publications in the field were by sociologists
(ISSC and UNESCO, 2013).2
As Erhardt-Martinez et al. (2015) write,
“neither the IPCC Assessments nor the America's Climate Choices
reports consider the importance of the myriad other aspects of social
organization and culture: governance, power structures, political
activism, labor policies, the countless drivers of consumption, the
force of social routines and expectations, systems of global production,
cultural values and a range of other sociological factors that
shape and constrain mitigation opportunities apart from technologically
focused solutions.”
Progress is being made in important quarters. The International
Social Science Council's 2012 report highlighting the “transformative
cornerstones framework” with its six social frames in relation to global
environmental change is gaining attention. Certainly the tone of the
social science critiques within the pages Nature Climate Change, Global
Environmental Change and other leading interdisciplinary journals is
one of increasing urgency. Without understanding relationships between
the individual, cultural and political economic dimensions of
social order the existing interdisciplinary conversation on social impacts
and responses is best characterized by scientific imperialism, a
fetishism of public opinion, and a psychological reductionism of social
phenomena (Brulle and Dunlap, 2015). By contrast sociology and the
sociological imagination in particular raise questions about the relevance
of institutional and structural changes in economic, political
and cultural systems. Paradigms are not only about theory and
methods, but which theory and methods are congruent within existing
political and economic interests. One symptom of this development of
our ecological imagination relative to our sociological imagination is
the recent finding that more Americans can imagine the “end of the
world” than a switch from using fossil fuels or an economic order other
than capitalism (Klein, 2014). But what do we need instead?
1. Sociological imagination and climate crisis
Modern society as most of us know it rests on the assumption that
humans are separate from nature - even that we have risen above it and
are no longer vulnerable or dependent (Plumwood, 1993). Technological
transformation in the homes keep at least middle class Westerners
warm and dry whether or not they know the source of their energy,
food systems have been restructured so that families and local communities
need not be responsible for cultivation, and people can easily
move from one place to another using cars, trains and airplanes. The
convenience of all these activities comes with a conceptual price. Most
of us in modern “western” contexts are alienated from our ecological
worlds. We now need an ecological imagination to understand the
reality of our circumstances. Making visible these relationships between
humans and nature has been the focus of crucial research activity in the
climate arena. Atmospheric and ecological scientists have provided
important descriptive evidence for the impacts of human actions on the
natural world. Yet while the connection between burning fossil fuels
and alteration of the climate is understood on a general level, it can still
be a challenge to visualize the relationship between driving to work and
increased risk of high intensity forest fires.
We are not only alienated from our ecological conditions – unaware
for example of the relationship between personal automobile use and
the changing precipitation in our local communities. We have also
become alienated from our social conditions – seeing our dependence
on automobiles as a function of poor choices rather than corporate
lobbying by the auto industry, or how our ability to reduce our carbon
footprint may be constrained by our nation's foreign policy. Essentially
we lack the ability to imagine social structure. As a result, most people
can only imagine their impacts on the planet in the form of individualized
consumer actions (Shove, 2010; Webb, 2012).
The need to make this second set of relationships visible has received
much less focus in the interdisciplinary conversation on climate
change and the Anthropocene. While the insights from many disciplines
in the social science and humanities are critically important in light of
climate change, making visible the relationships the relationship between
“micro,” “meso,” and “macro” dimensions of social order is the
central project of the discipline of sociology. The application of a sociological
imagination and a few other sociological concepts allows us
to powerfully reframe four central questions in the current interdisciplinary
conversation on climate change and the Anthropocene: why
climate change is happening, how we are being impacted, why we have failed
to successfully respond so far, and how we might be able to effectively do so.
I visit each of these four questions describing the current understanding
and show the importance of the sociological imagination and other
insights from the field of sociology in providing fuller explanations. I
close with some reflections on limitations in sociology's current potential
to engage climate change and how sociologists might become
2
Note that as we move towards a truly interdisciplinary conversation on climate
change, it would not need to be sociologists per se espousing sociological concepts. Until
we are in such a truly interdisciplinary scenario, the near total absence of sociologists in
these key interdisciplinary spaces and the importance of the sociological concepts I emphasize
here would seem to be important and worth underscoring.
K.M. Norgaard Global and Planetary Change xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
2
more involved.
2. Four key sociological insights: #1 why is climate change
happening?
Climate change is a result of high emissions of carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases, but why are these emissions occurring? Despite
the fact that this is a highly relevant question for social scientists generally
and sociology in particular, the vast majority of theorizing and
discussion on this question to date has come from natural scientists
themselves. Furthermore, the vast majority of the few social scientists
who are involved in this conversation come primarily from only two
disciplines: economics and psychology (ISSC and UNESCO, 2013). This
dominance of natural sciences is visible in the boards of prominent
University programs on “climate change and society” that are led and
staffed by people with PhD's in climatology or ecology (and maybe one
economist), editorial boards of interdisciplinary journals3
with similar
make ups, and the above mentioned composition of the IPCC and other
large scale efforts. The result has been very technical answers to the
question of why climate change is happening (e.g. where emissions
come from by sector), but les assessment of political factors behind
emissions trajectories (such as how the fossil fuel lobby shapes the
carbon intensity of our energy grid, or how cultural imaginaries constrain
decision making). Although there are a variety of theoretical
orientations within psychology and economics, almost all research in
both disciplines takes the individual as the unit of analysis and tend to
assume biological (or otherwise pre-determined) explanations for perception,
cognition, and emotions. Analyses from these presumptions
tend to characterize human consumptive and political behaviors as
universal and inevitable phenomena, making it even more difficult to
imagine that we can change.
By theorizing macro level research questions and situating individual
behavior and cognition in social contexts, sociologists emphasize
the role of culture and social structure in cognition, perception
and emotion with respect to climate change. For example, Ulrich Beck's
(1992) concept of the risk society describes how we can no longer
understand the risks of the world through direct experience, but they
must instead be mediated by science and technologies. Schnaiberg's
(1980) concept of the treadmill of production emphasizes the need
for both continued growth under capitalism, and the fact that other
sectors of society especially the state and labor are also structured to
continue economic growth. With macro level concepts such as the notion
of the risk society and treadmill of production we can see context
for both why individuals would fail to understand risks or chose high
carbon emissions behaviors, as well as why the state may be unwilling
to put in place economic or political incentives to reduce them.
By contrast, from a sociological standpoint, high emissions result
from the reinforcing growth logics of current economic, social, political
and cultural systems (Rosa et al., 2015). Individuals participate in these
systems, but individual understandings, values, risk assessments, actions,
choices and so forth are critically constrained by their cultural,
economic and political contexts. Here Durkheim's foundational term
“social fact” is also helpful. For as Durkheim writes social facts are
“external to the individual, but they are endued with a compelling and
coercive power by virtue of which … they impose themselves … Even
when in fact I can struggle free from these rules and successfully break
them, it is never without being forced to fight against them. Even if in
the end they are overcome, they make their constraining power sufficiently
felt in the resistance that they afford. There is no innovator,
even a fortunate one, whose ventures do not encounter opposition of
this kind” (1982 [1938], 50–59). As Erhardt-Martinez et al. (2015) note
“Social organization and culture produce variation in values among
stakeholders and decision makers, variation in the perception of risks
and uncertainties, differences in costs and benefits, and variation in the
capacity of decision makers to implement mitigation policies” (see also
Beck, 1992; Fisher, 2006; Roberts and Parks, 2006). Thus, in order to
understand why climate change is happening we must employ a sociological
imagination and address economic systems (see e.g. Clark
and York, 2005; Foster and Clark, 2012; Foster et al., 2011; Jorgenson
et al., 2016), the military (Nagel, 2011), institutional level interests
(Bonds, 2016; Perrow, 2010), political structures (Ciplet et al., 2015;
Roberts and Parks, 2006; Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011), and cultural
systems (Shove, 2010; Norgaard, 2011). When it comes to why climate
change is happening, sociological attention to the macro level of organization
matters. Sociologists highlight complex patterns in the relationships
between carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth
(Jorgenson and Clark, 2012; York and McGee, 2017), and important
variations in the carbon intensity of nations' economic trajectories
(Jorgenson, 2014).
3. Sociological insight #2 how is society impacted?
The impacts of climate change on human societies are diverse and
highly varied (Dunlap and Brulle, 2015). On the one hand, societies are
not monolithic. The impacts of changing ecological conditions including
unstable weather patterns, sea level rise, intensification of
wildfires and increased storm intensity are experienced very differently
by communities around the globe (Nagel, 2016). As a result, the ecological
changes that undermine social activities and infrastructure simultaneously
reproduce gender, racial and class inequalities in complex
ways depending on social context. Much sociological attention has
addressed the ways that class, gender, race, sexuality, region, and much
more each influence the type and degree of exposure to direct or indirect
impacts of climate change in complex ways across various scales
(see e.g. Nagel, 2016; Pellow et al., 2015).
Climate impacts are varied not only along dimensions of inequality
and vulnerability, but are also a function of interaction between material
impacts and their cultural interpretations. On the material level
alterations in snowpack, fire seasons and sea levels have numerous and
widespread effects on human security from the expansion of diseases
like malaria and increases in the intensity of natural disasters, to the
creation of climate refugees. Social impacts obviously include such
material threats to municipal infrastructure such as when heat waves
lead to higher than expected electrical use and power grids fail. Here
sociology points to the importance of factors including community
cohesion or cultural attachment in shaping impacts (Bates, 2016;
Klinenberg, 2015). At another level, sociology points us to consider the
ways that climate change (and our various responses to it) may indirectly
threaten democratic structures when corporate oil interests
who benefit from continued high emission scenarios shape policy debates
and public opinion (Brulle et al., 2012; Dunlap, 2013). Sociology
also points to symbolic threats from climate change to collective
identity and meaning systems (Norgaard, 2011). Ultimately, climate
change threatens the legitimacy of our present economic and political
systems (Klein, 2014).
4. Sociological insight #3 why we are not responding more
effectively?
Amongst the most important questions related to climate change,
the Anthropocene and the new human condition concern whether and
how we can change our current course, and the related question of why
we have thus far failed to do so. Climate change has already begun to
jeopardize state economic resources, exacerbate social inequality, alter
community structures and generate new patterns of economic and social
conflict (Bates, 2016). Despite the extreme seriousness of this
3
For example the boards of recently launched interdisciplinary journals such as
Anthropocene and Earth's Future are composed almost entirely of natural scientists. Nature
Climate Change by contrast, has a “Social Science and Policy Advisory Committee” that
includes several sociologists, and has made a concerted effort to outreach to sociologists
at ASA meetings.
K.M. Norgaard Global and Planetary Change xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
3
global environmental problem, the pattern of meager public response –
in terms of social movement activity, behavioral changes or public
pressure on governments – exists worldwide. As scientific evidence for
climate change pours in, public urgency and even interest in the issue
fails to correspond (Norgaard, 2011).
For nearly twenty years the majority of research on climate change
presumed information was the limiting factor in public non-response.
Survey researchers repeatedly demonstrate minimal to modest levels of
public interest in climate change (Shwom et al., 2015). Psychologists
conduct experiments outlining conceptually flawed mental models and
apply theories of cognitive dissonance and motivation to climate
change. The thinking has been that, “if people only knew the facts,”
they would act differently (Bulkeley and Stripple, 2013). Many studies
also emphasized the complexity of climate science or political economic
corruption as reasons people do not adequately understand what is at
stake. Each of these efforts point to important answers. However, few of
their findings support either the theory that people fail to respond because
they are uninformed (the ‘information deficit model’), or the
notion that people have stopped caring about the environment, future
generations or people living in poor nations. Yet if our collective passivity
comes from neither ignorance nor greed, it would seem even
more irrational.
Here again, sociology's emphasis on the relationships between individuals,
culture, and economic systems leads to uniquely important
insights into why we have as yet been unable to respond. Social context
itself can be a significant part of what makes it difficult to respond to
climate change. Sociologists note how relationships between oil company
executives and federal governments shape climate policy and
public understanding, analyze climate skeptic misinformation campaigns
and describe how even the notion of “balanced” media framing
itself skews public understanding (Boykoff, 2008). My own work on the
social organization of denial (2011) describes how in particular political
economic contexts, people actually work to avoid acknowledging
disturbing information in order to avoid emotions of fear, guilt and
helplessness, follow cultural norms, and maintain positive conceptions
of individual and national identity. Other scholarship on cultural inertia,
culturally patterned receptivity (Fox, 2014; Fox and Rau, 2017)
and the symbolic violence of consent in the Alberta Tarsands ‘petrostate’
(Haluza-Delay, 2014) sheds much light on the profound potential
for normalization of the climate threat across society. Taken together
these approaches contribute important perspectives on our individual
and collective ability to respond to climate change to date.
5. Sociological insight #4 how might we respond?
The ultimate question for human survival concerns whether we can
reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and if so how. Again, by far the
majority of research on this question has focused on individual consumption
and decision-making in the absence of social context. As
Erhardt-Martinez et al., 2015 note, “Scholars in economics, psychology
and science communication have placed the human response to climate
change more centrally in their research agendas than have sociologists,
with the overall result that within the larger interdisciplinary conversation
about mitigation: 1) micro-level approaches have dominated
the general policy and scientific discourse; 2) within this micro focus
the potential role for individuals in mitigation has largely been construed
in terms of their ability to reduce individual and household
consumption, and 3) explanations for consumer behavior have undertheorized
the role of social context in shaping consumption behavior.”
As a result, the potential role of individuals and especially individual
consumption in social change is drastically overemphasized (see also
Maniates, 2002, Szasz, 2007, Szasz, 2011, Webb, 2012). Approaches
emphasized within the IPCC, America's Climate Choices and other high
profile interdisciplinary climate reports emphasize individual consumption
and decision-making, often in the absence of social context.
Yet when individuals are detached from their social context, we cannot
account for where values or beliefs come from, and thus how they
might actually change. Instead, the potential role of individuals and
especially individual consumption in social change is drastically overemphasized,
and there is little to no discussion of whether or how institutional,
political or economic transformation might be achieved.
The focus on individuals is more than a theoretical choice, it has the
political function of leaving government and corporations unaccountable.
An individual can take shorter hot showers but the US
military remains the biggest consumer of oil in the world. Social science
disciplines such as economics and psychology are more able to fit into
the scientific models not only because they use individuals as the unit of
analysis, but more importantly because they are compatible with existing
political and economic paradigms (Brulle and Dunlap, 2015).
In contrast, sociology points to the need for larger structural change
in economic, political and cultural systems. Sociology tells us we need
to be asking questions such as whether and under what circumstances
social movements can mobilize citizen engagement and political pressure?
Now in the face of the 2015 Paris agreement, how can communities
mobilize to put pressure on city governments, local employers,
and Federal entities? With sociological analyses the question becomes
not how do we better educate and inform the public, but under what
circumstances are people able to move beyond a sense of helplessness,
guilt or fear of the future and take actions that are in their collective,
long term survival interest? Climate change requires large-scale reduction
of emissions, but our current political economic structure is
intimately embedded in our petroleum- based economy. We need democratic
engagement and response, yet individuals retreat out of a
sense of helplessness. Part of what presently makes people feel helpless
is an assessment of this very serious problem in a context where only
individual action and not social structures are understood as shaping
outcomes. We therefore need to develop a sociological imagination and
focus more attention on the strategic opportunities that individuals may
be able to employ to effect larger scale social change from their various
social locations.
Individual people can get involved in local political efforts. Even
talking about climate change with family and friends is an important
way to break cultural norms of silence. Although they are insufficient in
isolation, local efforts to make climate change visible in one's community
such as developing climate ordinances, creating statewide
carbon plans and other efforts to reduce emissions at the county and
regional levels are important. Each of these actions strengthens existing
community ties, identity and sense of place. As such they may provide a
key for breaking through climate denial from the ground up. There is
already a global movement building for communities to uncover how
climate change is manifesting in their local contexts. Local political
renewal cannot be enough to combat climate change on its own, but
especially now in the context of large-scale international efforts, local
mobilization is an important next step for individuals in renewing the
democratic process on the ground. As people participate in thinking
about what is happening in their own locale and how they will respond,
they will begin to see why the facts of climate change matter to them
and to develop a sociological imagination at the same time as they
reconnect the rifts in time and space that have constructed climate
change as only a distant issue. Working together, people can over time
create the supportive community that is a necessary (though hardly
sufficient) condition for facing large fears about the future and engaging
in large-scale social change.
There may be some who read my reflections on the importance of
sociology as an appeal for a return to disciplinarity. This is not my intention.
Rather, in order for us to develop an effective response to climate
change, there are key insights from the discipline of sociology that
have not as yet been engaged, namely 1) the reality and operation of
social structure at multiple dimensions of social order from the individual
to the cultural and large scale, and 2) the ability to see the
relationship between these so-called micro, meso and macro dimensions
of social order. Such conversations about the nature and operation
K.M. Norgaard Global and Planetary Change xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx
4
of power in the shaping of culture, economics, values, beliefs or
knowledge production have been less palatable for natural scientists
especially. Yet without them, we cannot move forward.
6. A call for sociologists
Just as the interdisciplinary social science conversation has been
slow to engage sociological approaches to climate inaction, the discipline
of sociology has unfortunately been surprisingly silent on the
implications of climate change for sociological theory and practice. As
of this writing in 2017, climate change has only once been the subject of
a plenary session at the American Sociological Association meetings (in
2014), was not mentioned in a Presidential address until 2016, and only
a few sociologists outside of the subfield of environmental sociology
have applied their expertise to the issue. We sit on the brink of the most
profound social dislocation since the founding of our discipline, yet all
but a few are doing “sociology as usual.” There is work to be done here
as well.
There are historical reasons for sociology's short-sightedness. The
discipline emerged at the height of the modernist myth that humans
had overcome natural “limits.” It was presumed that the natural world
was no longer a relevant influence on social outcomes (Brulle, 2015).
The central concern of this new discipline was to understand the novel
forms of social order that were emerging with modern capitalism –
especially those in the rapidly growing urban areas. Founding father
Emile Durkheim specifically called for a focus on “social facts.” But as
the social dimensions of climate change become evident – thanks in
large part to a still modest number of environmental sociologists – the
lack of attention paid to this urgent situation by mainstream sociologists
is appalling. Just as those in the scientific community struggle to
see social structure, it is time now for sociologists to develop an ecological
imagination. Things have recently begun to change. The
American Sociological Association's Task Force on Climate Change released
its important report Climate Change and Society: Sociological
Perspectives (Dunlap and Brulle, 2015) at the 2015 annual meeting, and
a solid collection of sociological work on climate change is emerging.
Given these factors - and assuming academic discourse can indeed
influence public understanding or social policy - it would seem that our
collective interdisciplinary task is twofold. First, the natural scientific
community needs to move beyond scientific imperialism and truly engage
sociologists and other scholars in the social sciences outside economics
– in short to develop a sociological imagination. Our paradigms
and methodologies are different, but they are urgently needed. Now is
the time for natural scientists to read our task force report, consult with
sociologists on policy directives and involve more sociologists and other
social scientists on the IPCC, journal editorial boards and interdisciplinary
academic institutes. Sociologists in turn, need to more
broadly engage the material and symbolic importance of environmental
problems, climate change and the Anthropocene in our research
agendas, learn more about the natural science dimension of what we
are up against, be more vocal in getting our research findings to the
media and even perhaps invite a few more natural scientists to our
meetings.
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