William R. Freudenburg

Ecological Modernization and Its Critics: Assessing the Past and Looking Toward the Future

The theory of ecological modernization has received growing attention over the past decade, but in the process, it has been interpreted in conflicting and sometimes contradictory ways. In this article, we attempt to bring greater clarity to the discussion. Reviewing the works both by the theorys best-known proponents and by its most outspoken critics, we note that difficulties are created not just by the combining of theoretical predictions and policy prescriptions - a point that has already been noted in the literature - but also by the stark and highly significant differences in expectations between ecological modernization and most prevailing theories of society-environment relationships. Perhaps in part because of these differences, disagreements have often been expressed in stark, black-and-white terms. If the problems are to be resolved, there will be a need for greater theoretical precision, developed in conjunction with empirical research that is more focused, more finely differentiated, and more rigorous.The theory of ecological modernization has received growing attention over the past decade, but in the process, it has been interpreted in conflicting and sometimes contradictory ways. In this article, we attempt to bring greater clarity to the discussion. Reviewing the works both by the theorys best-known proponents and by its most outspoken critics, we note that difficulties are created not just by the combining of theoretical predictions and policy prescriptions - a point that has already been noted in the literature - but also by the stark and highly significant differences in expectations between ecological modernization and most prevailing theories of society-environment relationships. Perhaps in part because of these differences, disagreements have often been expressed in stark, black-and-white terms. If the problems are to be resolved, there will be a need for greater theoretical precision, developed in conjunction with empirical research that is more focused, more finely differentiated, and more...

Forty Years of Spotted Owls? A Longitudinal Analysis of Logging Industry Job Losses:

The protection of habitat for an officially designated “threatened” species, the Northern Spotted Owl, is widely seen as having endangered the survival of a very different “species,” namely the rural American logger. In spite of the widespread agreement on this point, however, it is not clear just how many jobs have been endangered, over just how long a period, due to the protection of spotted-owl habitat and of the environment more broadly. In the present paper, we analyze longer term employment trends in logging and milling, both nationally and in the two states of the Pacific Northwest where the spotted-owl debate has been most intense, to determine the length of time over which such environmental protection efforts have been creating the loss of logging and milling jobs. There are three potential key “turning points” since the start of high-quality employment data in 1947—the 1989 controversy over the federal “listing” of the Northern Spotted Owl under the Endangered Species Act, the earlier increase in environmental regulations accompanying the first Earth Day in 1970, and the still-earlier “locking up” of timber after the passage of the Wilderness Protection Act in 1964. We also examine the effects of two other variables that have received considerable attention in the ongoing debates—levels of U.S. Forest Service timber harvests and the exporting of raw logs. We find that the 1989 listing of the spotted owl has no significant effect on employment—not even in the two states where the debate has been most intense. Instead, the only statistically significant turning point came with the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964. The direction of the change, however, was precisely the opposite of what is generally expected. Both nationally and in the Pacific Northwest, the greatest decline in timber employment occurred from 1947 until 1964—a time of great economic growth, a general absence of “unreasonable environmental regulations,” and growing timber harvests. The period since the passage of the Wilderness Act has been one of increased complaints about environmental constraints, but much less decline in U.S. logging employment. If logging jobs have indeed been endangered by efforts to protect the environment in general and spotted-owl habitat in particular, what is needed is a plausible explanation of how the influence of the owls could have begun more than forty years before the species came under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.

Natural resources and rural poverty: A closer look

Abstract The review by Humphrey et al. (1993) is arguably the most important effort to date to advance our understanding of poverty in resource‐dependent communities—one that is likely to be remembered as pivotal, not just because it brings together four highly diverse theoretical perspectives, but because its clarity will facilitate the recognition of important gaps and of the need for empirical testing. All four of the perspectives appear to have important weaknesses, although the weaknesses appear not to be due so much to the efforts of Humphrey et al. as to the fact that social scientists have often overlooked biophysical variables in the past. For the future, there is a need for more systematic empirical analysis, including a more explicit focus on the characteristics of natural resource activities. In particular, attention needs to be devoted to (1) long‐term declines in both extractive and “linked”; employment; (2) the high levels of volatility that characterize world commodity markets; and (3) the...

Socioenvironmental factors and development policy: Understanding opposition and support for offshore oil

One of the difficulties of integrating environmental variables into sociological analyses is that societies have a dualistic relationship with the biophysical environment. Humans are like other species in depending on the environment, yet humans are also unique among all species in the potential for altering and sometimes evading environmental constraints. A second and related difficulty results from the degree to which humans incorporate the environment into their everyday views of reality; the process often seems so automatic that the biophysical realities can be forgotten, taken for granted, or ignored, both by residents and by those who study them. This problem is particularly significant for studies that fail to be sufficiently comparative to be able to observe significant variations in environmental and technological factors. The problem is illustrated with a study that deals with a relatively traditional social-psychological dependent variable—attitudes toward a proposed development. The focus is on the apparent paradox of a form of industrial development that has been welcomed with open arms in one area of the country while virtually opening armed warfare in another, namely drilling for offshore oil. To explain the marked differences across regions, it is necessary to understand the influence of biophysical and technological variables, as well as the social and historical differences across the regions. Implications for further research are discussed.

Linked to what? Economic linkages in an extractive economy

There are two main ways in which resource extraction can lead to prosperity for extractive regions. The first involves temporally delimited benefits—those that can only exist so long as extraction is taking place—while the second involves the potential for benefits that will endure beyond the period of extractive operations. As the scale of extraction has increased over time there has been a dramatic reduction in the potential duration of temporally delimited benefits for resource deposits of any given magnitude. While there remains a possibility that extraction could still be associated with benefits that are not temporally delimited, primarily through the development of “linked” industries, many studies have documented cases where linked industries have failed to emerge. Still, a full test of the possibility requires that we also look for cases in which a significant degree of linkage capture didoccur. The clearest 20th century example we have been able to identify involves the offshore oil industry in ...

Risky Thinking: Irrational Fears about Risk and Society

Scientists have made remarkable progress in dealing with technical challenges but not in dealing with society. Given that public concerns have grown, in the face of declining “real” risks, the common if simplistic tendency has been to blame public ignorance or irrationality and to argue that policy decisions should be based on quantitative risk estimates, effectively ignoring public concerns. Such assertions are superficially plausible, but they reflect fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of technological societies, as well as of the reasons behind declining scientific credibility and of actual strengths and weaknesses of risk assessment. Scientific credibility has been undermined not so much by shadowy enemies as by actions of self-proclaimed friends, and there are inherent limitations to the practical usefulness of risk assessment in policy disputes. If proposals for risk-based decision making were actually implemented, they could well lead not to increased credibility for specific technologies but to self-reinforcing losses of credibility for science and technology as a whole.

A `Good Business Climate' as Bad Economic News?

Abstract One common concern about strong environmental regulations is that they will detract from one areas “business climate,” limiting or driving away economic growth. Ironically, although the usual assumption is that businesses focus more narrowly on economic factors than do persons holding environmental concerns, it appears that little if any systematic attention has been devoted to the logic or the facts behind such “business climate” claims. The connections have generally been assumed, not demonstrated. Systematic, national‐level ratings of state “business climates” have now been available for more than a decade. Using the upper midwest state of Wisconsin as a reference point, this paper examines the predictive validity of three of the best‐known ratings. On average, “good” business climate ratings actually predicted worse economic outcomes; the states named as having “bad” business climates actually had better economic performance (growth in jobs and incomes) over subsequent 5‐ and 10‐year periods...

Mining the Past: Historical Context and the Changing Implications of Natural Resource Extraction

Residents and leaders of rural or less-developed regions often believe that the exploitation of natural resources will provide an antidote to regional poverty, but the research literature on the topic is decidedly mixed. While many development economists have predicted regional benefits from resource extraction, other analysts have differed; in particular, many dependency scholars have predicted increasing “underdevelopment,” and a number of natural resource sociologists have predicted a more specific problem of “overadaptation.” Obviously, it is not likely that all of these competing expectations are equally accurate. To clarify the conditions under which extraction leads to prosperity or poverty, it is necessary to devote greater attention to the ways in which the developmental dynamics of resource extraction have changed over time — and if possible, to do so in a way that identifies relatively specific causal factors. As an initial step in that direction, this paper calls attention to four such factors, all of which have changed substantially over the past several centuries — historically contingent levels of resource-extraction capacities, pre-existing competition, linkage specialization, and transportation. For all of these factors, the overall pattern of change has been toward decreasing the likelihood that natural resource extraction will lead to local or regional “development.” The net effect is that expectations for local prosperity appear to have been reasonably accurate in earlier years, up through roughly the first half of the 19th century, but increasingly inaccurate thereafter. This preliminary argument is illustrated with three case studies of some of the most “successful” extraction-based development experiences we have been able to identify from the past four centuries, involving British coal mines of the 17th-18th centuries, upper Midwest lead mines of the 19th century, and offshore oil extraction along the U.S. Gulf Coast in the 20th. We conclude by noting the relevance of the experiences from earlier centuries for resource-related decisions of the 21”.

Environmental sociology: Toward a paradigm for the 21st century

This paper briefly outlines the origins and contributions of environmental sociology to date, going on to propose ways in which the existing research can be used as a foundation for a new generation of research into the 21st century. It argues that environmental sociologists need to avoid the omphaloskepsis that sometimes afflicts other fields of sociology, but that there is a real opportunity to do so. Three options appear particularly promising: (a) broadening the now‐established base of sociological research that deals systematically with environmental variables; (b) devoting greater attention to the ways in which socially constructed “definitions of the situation” may contribute to (and not simply permit the evading of) the environmental problems that societies face; and (c) beginning more fine‐grained analyses of the connections between specific human activities (particularly economic activities) and specific components of the physical environment. Contributions to date have clearly established the f...

How crude: Advocacy coalitions, offshore oil, and the self-negating belief

Although the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) offers a promising approach for the study of policy change, other social science perspectives – specifically including human ecology – point to competing expectations. The ACF proposes that external perturbations are a necessary precondition for policy change; by contrast, work in human ecology draws attention to the potential for autogenic succession– cases where people or organizations act in ways that bring about their own demise. This difference in perspectives is tested with respect to a policy subsystem that has been found to offer a valuable context for examining ACF expectations, namely the U.S. federal program for offshore oil leasing. Many developments within this program have been quite consistent with ACF expectations; the rise to power of a new governing coalition in 1981, for example, did lead to a decided shift in policies, and the National Academy of Sciences did play roughly the role predicted by ACF. In addition, however, key sources of policy change were set in motion by members of the governing coalition itself – based on actions that were quite consistent with the policy core beliefs of the governing coalition, but not consistent with the assessments by independent scientists. The experience suggests that what is needed is not so much a rejection of the ACF as its refinement. Even without ‘external perturbations,’ members of the governing coalition have the potential to undercut their own interests, if only because of the potential power of the self-negating belief. Ironically, this potential may be the highest in precisely those cases where the governing coalition has the greatest apparent ability to impose its own beliefs, and the lowest level of apparent need to respond to alternative or competing views.