Jean-Guy Vaillancourt

Collective Movements and Globalization

In this chapter we examine the question of the development of social movements in the context of the globalization of the economy and of culture. First we will tackle this question at the theoretical level, in order to characterize these movements and to delineate the oppositions and the alternatives observed at the level of domination and reciprocity in social relationships. We will also analyse this question empirically, in order to explain the evolution of these initiatives by examining the collective action of environmentalists in the various sectors of social life of the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the planet.

Environment and Society

These two readers have little in common, yet both teach us a lot about what has been written in recent years concerning the relationship between the environment and human society. Smith’s reader is basically an anthology of contributions dealing with the politics and ethics of contemporary nature-society relations, written mostly by US and British authors. Fifty-five selections, culled mostly from books and divided into seven sections, treat the links between ecology, social and political thought, and environmental ethics. Frey’s reader, on the other hand, is a collection of twenty-one social science articles, many of which were written by leading environmental sociologists, such as Dunlap, Dietz, Rosa and Frey himself. The book is organized in three sections and eleven chapters. Part I (chapters 1-4) examines the scope, character, and driving forces (or human causes) of local, national and global environmental problems. Part II (chapters 5-8) gives us an overview of the different human responses to environmental problems, at the level of beliefs, social action, eco-management, and scientific research. Finally, Part III focuses on solutions to these problems. It discusses the emerging sustainable development approach’s usefulness for dealing with environmental problems in a fruitful theoretical and practical manner.

Sustainable Development Again

It seems like a new book on sustainable development has been coming out nearly every week for the past ten years. Each one comes from a particular discipline or combines a few different perspectives. Daly focuses on ecological economics and ethics, Harrison gives a lot of attention to politics and is more interdisciplinary in his approach, but both contain interesting ideas that deserve a hearing. Daly, a defrocked World Bank economist does not have a very high opinion of contemporary economics as taught in universities or as practiced at institutions like the World Bank, when it comes to taking the environment into account. For him, sustainable development is a dynamic, dialectical concept, which requires the economy to be viewed as a part of the ecosystem. It is a qualitative improvement, a development which does not entail growth beyond the environments carrying capacity and which insists on an equitable redistribution of wealth and income, some population control, and technological improvements in resource productivity. It means moving to a steadystate economy in the North and eventually in the South, and respecting the biophysical limits of planet Earth, because we are now consuming natural resources beyond their sustainable capacity of renewal.

Remarks on a World Congress of Sociology

4. We should provide for international and national media of cornrnunication--journals, bulletins, etc. -which will exchange information and views frorn politically minded radical sociologists and encourage non-conventional uLudie s on political use s of radical re sear ch, such studies are routinely left unpublished in standard sociological journals, which seem to be controlled by groups non representative of poor people, racial-ethnic minorities, and the third world in general. 5. We should include and emphasize, in the next world meetings, the topics so dubiously absent in this meetings the sociology of sociology,