David N. Pellow

Interrogating the treadmill of production: Everything you wanted to know about the treadmill but were afraid to ask

This article is structured to answer a number of questions that have been raised over the years about the origin, structure, and application of the treadmill of production theory. The following questions are addressed: What was the theoretical structure of the treadmill of production? Why does the theory focus on production rather than consumption? Was the treadmill a dialectical or a linear change theory? How has the treadmill theory changed under the growing globalization of production since 1980? Has the treadmill been evaluated empirically? What forces have limited the diffusion of the treadmill in environmental sociology? Is the treadmill more/still useful today for ecological analyses? For social analyses?

From "Just Us" to Justice: Connecting the Environment, Community, and Academy

In a recent article, Freudenburg et al. (1995) call for sociologists studying environmental phenomena to move beyond the society-nature divide. This is a divide that has always haunted environmental sociology in particular and the social sciences in general. For example, as Dunlap and Catton (1979) argued two decades ago, sociologists have long held the implicit view that social (read human) systems are separate and largely independent of natural or ecosystems. The society-nature divide allows us to maintain the social construction of human control over a world that is