Ryan Gunderson

Environmental sociology and the Frankfurt School 2: ideology, techno-science, reconciliation

In a two-article project, I demonstrate that the first-generation Frankfurt School’s critical theory can conceptually inform sociological examinations of societal–environmental relations. This second article clarifies and systematizes the theories of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse in the context of current debates and issues in environmental sociology: (1) the constructionism/realism debate and its relation to the critique of ideology; (2) the role of science and technology in human–nature relations; and (3) how society might bring itself into a sustainable and ethical relationship with the environment. I argue the Frankfurt School’s metatheory can help environmental sociologists denaturalize human–nature relations that appear fixed; explain how their theories of science and technology transcend the debate of whether science and technology are harmful to or helpful for the environment; and show that the underpinning normative goal of early critical theory was to reconcile human–nature relations. In addition to explicating these broader contributions, I provide a concrete example of how their views can inform sociological studies of environmental disasters.

Environmental sociology and the Frankfurt School 1: reason and capital

In a two-article project, I demonstrate that the first-generation Frankfurt School’s critical theory can conceptually inform sociological examinations of societal–environmental relations and address contemporary debates and issues in environmental sociology. This first companion article explains why Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse persistently tied the domination of nature to the domination of human beings in the context of two interrelated processes: (1) the instrumentalization of reason and (2) the development of capitalism. The Frankfurt School argued that capitalism was unsustainable due to growth dependence and provided an early analysis of environmentalism’s co-optation. While early critical theory argued that structural forces are primarily responsible for environmental degradation, they did not neglect the role of social psychological and cultural forces in maintaining these structures. In addition to clarifying and systematizing these broader contributions, I provide concrete examples of how their views can inform neo-Marxist models of growth dependency and offer an explanation as to why the mass response to environmental health hazards is through shopping.

Ideological obstacles to effective climate policy: The greening of markets, technology, and growth:

In light of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this project synthesizes and advances critiques of the possibility of a sustainable capitalism by adopting an explicit ‘negative’ theory of ideology, understood as ideas that conceal contradictions through the reification and/or legitimation of the existing social order. Prominent climate change policy frameworks – the ‘greening’ of markets (market-corrective measures), technology (alternative energy, energy efficiency, and geoengineering), and growth (the green growth strategy) – are shown to conceal one or both of the two systemic socio-ecological contradictions inherent in the current social formation: (1) a contradiction between capital’s growth-dependence and the latter’s degrading impact on the climate (the ‘capital-climate contradiction’) and (2) a contradiction between the potential of using technological infrastructure that aids in emissions reductions and the institutionalized social relations that obstruct this technical potential (the ‘technical potential-productive relations contradiction’). Attempts to reform the very techniques and institutions that brought about the climate crisis will remain ineffective and reproduce the social order that results in climate change. After proposing a way in which societies might move out of the ideological trappings of green markets, technology, and growth, two alternatives are proposed: economic degrowth coupled with Marcuse’s conception of a ‘new technology’.

Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?

ABSTRACT In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the commodification of nature. In addition, they increase risks to society and the domination of economic elites. While carbon markets further subject social and ecological relations to market mechanisms, we examine degrowth as a possible response to climate change that prioritises social and environmental goals over economic growth. While degrowth continues to be dismissed as impractical or impossible, a growing number of scholars, scientists and activists argue it is the only way to address global climate change. In contrast to carbon markets, we argue degrowth could represent a genuine Polanyian counter-movement in response to climate change. In addition, degrowth could help all those disenfranchised by market fundamentalism by addressing the triple crises related to the commodification of land, labour and money.

Public receptiveness to policies promoting plant-based diets: framing effects and social psychological and structural influences

ABSTRACT Governmental and non-governmental organizations, social movements, and academics have called for reductions in meat consumption due to the environmental, animal welfare, and public health consequences of industrial animal agribusiness. An impactful move toward plant-based diets would require changes in public policy. First, we assess if there are different social and structural factors that influence support for policies that promote plant-based diets. We look at four categories of policies (action frames) that will likely reduce meat consumption: environmental, animal welfare, public health, and direct meat reduction. Second, we use a manipulation rhetorical frame to see if support can be altered by providing individuals with information about meat reduction, framing the issue in terms of environmental protection, animal welfare, or public health. Different social and structural factors predict support for different policy groupings, meaning that it matters how policies are enclosed in action frames. However, providing information to individuals about a particular impact (rhetorical frame) has limited influence on policy support.

The Will to Consume: Schopenhauer and Consumer Society

Consumer society has negated Freuds thesis presented in Civilization and its Discontents. The hindrance of desire affirmation is no longer the foundation of discontent. The inverse is now true. A seemingly limitless number of desires have been manufactured and administered with a solitary route to their affirmation via consumption. Because of this, consumer societys members find themselves in a lifeworld of aimless striving, dissatisfaction, disappointment and boredom. I demonstrate that the attempt to flee the sufferings of estranged labour through consumption has pushed consumer society into a new web of suffering brought on by a continual development of manufactured desires, creating a minor yet perpetual pain that is best understood in the light of a sociologized and historicized Schopenhauerian philosophy.

Nonhuman Animals as Fictitious Commodities: Exploitation and Consequences in Industrial Agriculture

This paper examines how nonhuman animals, along with land and labor, represent fictitious commodities as described by Karl Polanyi. Animals in agriculture are examined as an extreme example of animal commodification whose use resembles the exploitation of land and labor. Conceptual frameworks developed from Marxist theory, including the subsumption of nature, the second contradiction of capitalism, and alienation, are applied to illustrate how the negative impacts to animals, the environment, and public health associated with animal agriculture are caused by attempts to overcome the incomplete commodification of animals. This paper illustrates how social theory can be extended to apply to animals, especially animals who are deeply embedded in human society. The inclusion of animals in social analyses also serves to strengthen our overall understanding of exploitation and oppression under capitalism.

The Political Economy of Geoengineering as Plan B: Technological Rationality, Moral Hazard, and New Technology

ABSTRACT Geoengineering would mask and reproduce capital’s contradictory needs to self-expand, on the one hand, and maintain a stable climate system, on the other. The Plan B frame, which presents geoengineering as a back-up plan to address climate change in case there is a failure to sufficiently reduce emissions (Plan A), is one means to depict this condition to the public and is a product of, and appeals to, a prevalent ‘technological rationality’. Despite its misleading simplicity, logical flaws, and irrational rationality, the Plan B frame is a relatively valid representation of geoengineering in current political-economic conditions. Although the Plan B frame will gain traction because Plan A is too expensive in the short term and does not serve powerful interests, there are alternative social futures in which technology could be used to address climate change in ways that preserve the environment and reduce social risks.

Global environmental governance should be participatory: Five problems of scale

The goals of this project are twofold: (1) to show how research on, and normative-theoretical justifications for, public participation in environmental decision-making can inform discussions about how to improve global environmental governance (GEG) and (2) to present a series of questions that follow any attempt to scale up results from research on local, regional, and national public participation to meet global environmental challenges. It seeks to clarify what the ‘problem of scale’ means for democratizing GEG by classifying, and proposing partial answers to, multiple problems of scale: (1) The social barriers question: What political-economic barriers stand in the way? (2) The institutional formation question: What institutions need (re)forming? (3) The ‘who’ question: Who should participate and how should they be selected? (4) The procedural question: How and when should the global public participate? (5) The evaluative question: What are the criteria for process and outcome evaluation?

Anomie’s Eastern origins The Buddha’s indirect influence on Durkheim’s understanding of desire and suffering

Durkheim’s claim in Suicide that humanity’s ‘inextinguishable thirst’ (soif inextinguible) causes suffering was adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument that the will-to-live’s ‘unquenchable thirst’ (unlöschbaren Durst) causes suffering, which was previously adopted from the Buddha’s argument that ‘ceaselessly recurring thirst’ (tṛṣṇā) causes suffering. This article retraces this demonstrable though seemingly unlikely history of ideas and reveals that the philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s theory of anomie are rooted, through Schopenhauer, whose thought influenced many thinkers during the Neo-Romantic fin de siècle period, including Durkheim, in the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth – a doctrine made available to Schopenhauer in European translations of Buddhist texts during the previous turn of the century’s ‘Oriental Renaissance’. By achieving a more thorough understanding of the ambiguous concept of anomie through its Eastern intellectual origins, this project shows that the common conceptualization of anomie as ‘normlessness’ is inconsequential without presupposing that humans thirst and unconstrained thirst causes pain.