environmentalization: origins, processes, and implications for rural social change

Rural Sociology 57(1),1992, pp. 1-27Copyright © 1992 by the Rural Sociological Society

Environmentalization: Origins, Processes, andImplications for Rural Social Change!

Frederick H. ButtelDepartment of Rural Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison,Madison Wisconsin 53706

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to go beyond the sui generis conception ofthe increased role of "green" forces and the concomitant environmentalization of institutional practices in the United States and elsewhereacross the world. It is argued that these forces must be located in thetransition from social-democratic to neo-conservative regimes of socialregulation of economy and society that has occurred during the past 15or so years ofglobal economic stagnation. This transition and its reflectionin greening and environmentalization may be seen to have contradictoryimplications for rural societies. These implications are explored brieflywith respect to sustainable development programs in the developing countries, sustainable agricultural research and outreach in the United States,and the possible growth of environmental symbolization of rural spaces.

Introduction

It is apparent to most sociologists that environmentalization-orgreening, as it is often referred to-is one of the most importantsocial forces of our time. But despite the pervasiveness of greening,there has been little sociological analysis of this phenomenon beyondtrying to locate its social base in mass publics (as, e.g., in Rohrschneider 1990). Social scientists have tended to take greening to be a mostlysui generis phenomenon, deriving more or less from the growing recognition of the severity of local, regional, and especially internationalenvironmental problems and the need to address them. In otherwords, we tend to take greening as being an exogenous force or factorand to give little attention to its broad social antecedents and to thelikely consequences of the modern phase of environmentalization inwhich we currently find ourselves.

While the notions of greening and environmentalization are closelyrelated, leading me at times to use them more or less synonymously,they are not, strictly speaking, identical. By greening, I mean theprocesses by which environmental concerns are nurtured within socialgroups and modern environmentally-related symbols become increasingly prominent in social discourse. Greening can thus be taken tobe a broad social force, equivalent to, for example, the Protestantethic or the formation of an oppositional working class culture in

I Presidential address delivered to the annual meeting of the Rural SociologicalSociety in Columbus, Ohio, in August of 1991. I am grateful to Philip McMichael forhis extensive comments on earlier drafts,

2 Rural Sociology, Vol. 57, No.1, Spring 1992

earlier historical periods. By environmentalization, I mean the concrete processes by which green concerns and environmental considerations are brought to bear in political and economic decisions, ineducational and scientific research institutions, in geopolitics, and soon." Environmentalization is thus the concrete expression of the broadforce of greening in institutional practices.

I will take the phenomena of greening and environmentalizationseriously in their own right and endeavor to set forth some observations on the origins of greening and the implications of some ofthe major forms in which environmentalization of institutions is occurring. I will utilize a number of rural-related examples-mainlyagricultural sustainability in the West, sustainable development in theThird World, and the environmental symbolization of rural spacesbut my analysis will be couched at a fairly general level and will notbe confined to rural phenomena. I will develop two basic argumentshere. The first is that while greening is, in substantial measure, anideological or symbolic phenomenon and a response to environmentaldestruction (or more specifically to the institutionalized rationalitiesand the practices of centralized bureaucracies of state and economythat lead to technological, health, and environmental risks), the riseof greening must be located in the larger currents of social changein the late twentieth century. We must not reduce greening to thesesocial changes, or see greening and environmentalization as beingmere epiphenomena of large-scale social structural change. Instead,we must take into account the reciprocal interactions between thisideological force and the social structures within which it is located.Second, growing out of this social structural assessment of greening,I will attempt to show how and why greening's parallel process-theenvironmentalization of our institutions-has both promise and limitations for achieving this and other goals.

Greening and twentieth century structural change

From social democracy to neo-conservatism

Despite the many differences among the classical sociological theorists, they were in agreement on one fundamental premise: the natureof modern market societies-s-given their extensive divisions of labor

2 Later I will consider greening and environmentalization in the context of theoryon new social movements (NSMs). As will be noted later, one prominent strand ofNSM theorizing stresses their culturalist or expressive (meaning, self-identification)dimension, while other perspectives on NSMs see them in an instrumental way (i.e.,as neo-parties or pressure groups seeking to influence public policy and institutionalpractices). My distinction between greening and environmentalization thus parallels,respectively, the culturalist and instrumental themes of the NSM literature to someextent.

Environmentalization - Buttel 3

and growing technological complexity, along with the anarchic tendencies of full-blown market forces-is such that the notion of a selfregulating market system is a social and practical nonsense. Thus, wefind that Marx's theoretical system stressed the notion of superstructure (i.e., the state, law, ideology, and so on) as essential to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Durkheim's coreconcepts, such as organic solidarity, moral individualism, and the stateas a guarantor of moral individualism and as an agent of collectivereaffirmation, were integral to his critique of utilitarianism and to hisnotion of economic life as a regulated moral order. Weber essentiallytheorized capitalism in terms of its ethos (the spirit of capitalism), thesocial origins of its characteristic forms of rationality (instrumentalrationality, rational capital accounting), and the nature of the modernstate (legal-rational domination). 3

In sum, there is a long tradition within Western sociological thoughtof conceptualizing matters of modern economy and society in termsof their relationship being one of regulation of the former by thelatter. The mid-century sociological tradition that followed was toidentify what were thought to be a number of natural-and thuspresumably irreversible-institutional forms that were said to accompany the transition to mature market economies and democratic polities. These institutions included new forms of social organization(e.g., trade unions, collective bargaining, intermediary or occupational groups), new state structures (the regulatory state, modernpolitical parties, corporatism, the welfare-state), and new culturalforms (the elaboration of a civic culture within which attenuating theeffects of the market was seen to be a proper role of the state). Thisensemble ofan advanced division oflabor, a mature market economy,and institutions of social regulation of economic life was itself takento be a logical, developmentally-immanent trajectory of large-scalesocial change.

In the early 1990s, however, neither social life nor social theorybears much resemblance to those of mid-century. The massive, andlargely unanticipated, changes in the social structures of the advancedcountries since the late 1960s have led many sociologists to recognizethat many of these forms of social regulation of the economy havenot continued their inexorable elaboration. Accordingly, the majorshift in social theory since mid-century has been the growing recognition that the institutions of the post-War West must be under-

3 Polanyi's (1957) work exploded the myth of the self-regulating economy morepersuasively than the classical sociological theorists, however. See also Sayer's (1991)provocative argument that if classical theory is thought of as having a common focuson how the economic is regulated by the social, a number of opportunities for theoretical convergence are opened.


stood more in terms of discontinuity, divergence, and contingencythan of continuity, convergence," and evolution." Trade unions andtheir influence in industrial relations and national politics have declined, the welfare-state and the "social wage" are being selectivelyrolled back, economic inequality is increasing, political parties havedeclined relative to special interest groups and social movements,corporations and market transactions have become increasingly transnational in scope (and thus less amenable to nationally-ordered regulation), and political cultures have shifted from an emphasis on mitigating the impacts of private accumulation to ensuring the sanctityof entrepreneurship. There has, in sum, been a shift toward neoconservative regimes that feed from and bolster the new civic culturein most of the Western world.

Coincident with these structural changes has been a marked shiftin the economic performance of the advanced industrial economies.Their rates of growth are far slower and more unstable than thoseof the heyday of modern industrial civilization in the post-World WarII period. For the bulk of their labor forces-that is, for the majoritythat works in nonsupervisory occupations-hourly earnings have declined in real terms. For example, the real hourly wages of nonsupervisory workers in the United States, who account for two-thirdsof the labor force, have declined since the 1970s to the point thatthey are now roughly equivalent to the levels of the late 1950s (Reich1991). Large cities, which were integral to post-war growth as combined sites of worker residence and industrial production, have become increasingly crisis-ridden and ghettoized as capital has shiftedto the suburbs and low-wage nonmetropolitan zones in the advancedcountries or the Third World and as municipal fiscal crises haveensued (Gottdiener and Komninos 1989). Whereas post-war accumulation was based on the linkage between rising real wages and thegrowth of mass consumption industries, accumulation since the early1970s now appears to be based on a rather different kind oflinkagebetween growth in middle- and upper-middle class incomes, on onehand, and the growing role of flexible industrial production of goodsto targeted affluent sections of the consuming population on theother. Put somewhat differently, the advanced economies appear tobe moving in a direction such that stagnant or declining incomes ofnonsupervisory workers, and thus increased inequality and structuralunemployment and underemployment, are consistent with capitalaccumulation (Therborn 1986).

4 The tendency to see the major institutions ofthe post-War period as being logical,natural, and universal concomitants of the transition to "modern society" has beenreferred to as the convergence thesis by Goldthorpe (1984).

5 This is strikingly apparent in the nature of the topics represented in a recentcomprehensive anthology on sociological theory (Ritzer 1990), which contains chaptertitles such as "The Decline of the Grand Narrative of Emancipatory Modernity"(Antonio, 1990:88).

EnvironmentaLization - ButteL 5

Further, there has been underway a substantial shift in international patterns of industrial, monetary, and financial hegemony.Whereas the post-World War II period was defined in substantialmeasure by American industrial and geopolitical dominance, theAmerican role in regulating global society through the internationalmonetary order, world trade, and foreign aid has slowly but surelydeclined. The growing multipolarity of the global economy is reflected most ominously in the international monetary sphere, in whichthe United States, which once dominated and regulated internationalpayments systems, is still dominant but can no longer regulate (Bellonand Niosi 1988).

These transitions have led to many attempts to theorize their origins and significance. These include, most prominently, variousstrands of so-called French regulation theory, in which the conceptsof Fordism and post-Fordism were originally elaborated (Aglietta1979; Lipietz 1987), the resurrection of long-wave theory aLa Kondratieff and Wallerstein (Gordon et al. 1982; Wallerstein 1984), international relations and international political economy theories ofthe rise and decline of global hegemonic stability (Gilpin 1987; Keohane 1984), theories of the new international division oflabor (Frobelet al. 1979), and theories of modernity and postmodernity (Turner1990). Instead of evaluating each of these theories, I will draw ontheir overall insights and present a composite view of the transitionsof the past two decades and their relevance to greening and environmentalization. Most of the important features of these transitionsare summarized in Table 1.6

In the necessarily highly schematic treatment that follows, I willrely particularly heavily on Lash and Urry (1987), since their work,on the transition from what they call organized to disorganized capitalism, draws together more elements of the story that need to betold about greening than any other treatment. As much as I find theLash and Urry treatment useful, I nonetheless prefer a differentterminology. I will use the expression social-democratic or social democracy.? in preference to organized capitalism, to pertain to the

6 This table, taken from Roobeek (1987), should be interpreted with caution inseveral respects. Not only are the structural features of post-Fordism or neo-conservativism unclear at this point, but it is very likely that there will be as much-and verylikely more-institutional diversity among the advanced countries in the new regulatory regimes than was the case during the Fordist or social-democratic phase. Thus,it should be recognized that the social-democratic era witnessed considerable variationin several respects-for example, in welfare-state development (Esping-Andersen andKorpi 1984) and in incidence of corporatist vs. pluralist state forms (Goldthorpe 1984).

7 In this analysis I employ the notion of social democracy in a general way to pertainto a cluster of institutions through which subordinate classes tangibly affected andbenefited from changes in industrial relations and politics. Later I will refer to socialdemocratic parties in a related fashion: as parties for which the subordinate classes,particularly the industrial working class, were their major constituents and supportersamong the electorate.


Table 1. Differences between social-democratic society ("Fordism")and neo-conservative society ("post-Fordism")

Employment Full employment, ho-mogenous massworkers

Labor relations Mass trade unions, col-lective bargaining

Government poli- Keynesian socioeco-cies nomic policies; wel

fare state, social-democracy

Characteristics

Core technology

Production concept

Consumption pattern

Market

Social-democratic society("Fordism")

Electronics, chemicals,plastics, petroleum,car industry

International mass production

Mass consumption

World market

Neo-conservative society("post-Fordism")

Microelectronics, biotechnology,new materials

CIM (computer integrated manufacturing), "hollow factory," hyperindustrialization

Highly-differentiated consumerstyles

"Triad" markets (North America,EEC, Pacific Rim)

Job-losing growth; structural unemployment, individual decentralizedworkers

Company and individual agreements, basic income

Deregulation; state intervention intechnology policy, self-servicingsociety, neo-conservatism

Source: After Roobeek (1987:150).

social structures of the industrial nations in the roughly three decadesfollowing World War II, and the expression neo-conservativism, inpreference to disorganized capitalism, to pertain to the transitionssince that time."

I would like to make several points in this regard. First, most postWar (macro)social theories implicitly view institutions such as thewelfare-state and collective bargaining as logical concomitants of thetransition to a mature market economy and an advanced division of

8 I use these terms not only because they are more tangible notions, but also becausethey highlight the particular forms of social regulation of the economy that are ofinterest to me and avoid any implication that the economic movement of these changesas a priori causal priority. In particular, 1 find that insofar as disorganized capitalisminvolves describing this form with reference to or as the mirror image of organizedcapitalism, it prejudges what the essential characteristics of the current, ongoing phasewill be. Further, the notion ofdisorganized capitalism may prove to be only a depictionof the phase between dominant, epoch-defining forms of regulation; as such, neoconservativism may be the more enduring category (assuming I am correct that thiswill be the major political form of the new era of regulation). Lash and Urry use theexpression neo-conservatism themselves, and do so more or less synonymously withdisorganized capitalism. Also note that one of the considerable strengths of the Lashand Urry (1987) treatment, which unfortunately cannot be portrayed here, is theirdocumentation of the common patterns as well as the divergences in the structures oforganized capitalism and transitions from organized to disorganized capitalism in theUnited States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden.

/


labor. Also, these theories essentially took national societies as theirunit of analysis and tended to see social change as immanent withinnational social structures. We must now recognize, however, that toaccount theoretically for twentieth century social change we need toresort to social theories that are more situational or contextual intheir logic, more encompassing or global in the concepts they bringto bear, and more historical in their methods (see, e.g., McMichael1990).

Second, and related to the first, we can now see in retrospect thatthe core institutions of social-democratic society began to undergo adecline due to their internal dynamics and on account of historicallycontingent factors. For example, the very logic of social-democraticindustrial relations-the corporate/trade union bargain of wage increases in tandem with productivity increase, which along with lowunemployment levels and the social wage guarantee in effect put afloor under wages-led to rapid automation and eventually to moreactive corporate efforts to resist unionization. Ultimately, the industrial working class declined in both its share of the labor force andin its political potency. The industrial working class declined fromabout 50 percent in Belgium (Przeworski 1985) and several othercountries in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Singelmann 1978) toless than 20 percent today in most OECD countries. That decline inturn led to erosion of the strength of social-democratic parties, andthus in general to a decline in party politics and its analogs such ascorporatism. As a consequence of the fiscal demands of the welfarewarfare state and of social Keynesianism as economic policy, statefiscal commitments eventually came to be well in excess of the abilityof the American government to satisfy through taxation. There was,in other words, a tendency to endemic and deepening fiscal crisis asO'Connor (1973) predicted well before its onset.

Situational factors played a parallel role. For example, the severebalance of payments problems experienced by the United States asa result of the Vietnam War and the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargoled the U.S. state? to undertake controlled currency devaluations andpromote foreign direct investment in order to solve these problems(Block 1977). Gilpin (1975: 198) noted early on that state promotionof direct foreign investment involves"... exporting or trading awayits comparative advantages (technology, technical know-how, and

9 While the United States was by no means the epitome ofsocial-democratic societylacking, as it did, a labor party tout court, a full-blown welfare-state, and many of thesocial-democratic features of Northern Europe-the United States is emphasized herebecause of its being the dominant industrial power in the post-war order. Many of thetheoretical traditions from which I draw here (e.g., Gilpin 1987; Keohane 1984) arguethat stable world-economic epochs are characterized by the dominance of a singlehegemonic power.


management) and potential productivity gains in exchange for futureforeign exchange earnings.... The United States ... is convertingitself into the type of rentier economy, that is, one which lives offinvestment income, that Great Britain became in the latter part ofthe nineteenth century." As Foster (1989:105) would note nearly adecade and a half later: "In short, the U.S. economy was followinga path of hegemonic decline analogous to the one that Britain hadproceeded down in the final decades of the 19th and the openingdecades of the 20th centuries.i"? Owing in part to declining fiscalcapacity, to the transnational expansion of industrial capital duringthe social-democratic period, and to the liberalization of world tradeachieved through American influence in the 1960s and especially the1970s, states have decreased ability to regulate capital. In particular,states have far less leverage in extracting tax revenues from privatefirms, given slow growth, profit squeezes, and the declining barriersto the mobility of industrial and especially financial capital. Privateprofit squeezes, the decline of working class power, and the growingopportunities of (and imperative for) capital mobility have combinedto undermine the welfare-state, the social wage, and ultimately thereal wages of nonsupervisory workers. And, yes, social-democraticindustrialization contributed to severe environmental problems andto movements against many of the industries and production processes (chemicals, autos, and so on) that lay at the heart of the postwar economy.

Most observers of the demise ofwhat I call social-democratic societyremain tentative, and some even bewildered, about the ultimate paththat post-industrialism or post-modernity will take. Will the powerand autonomy of national-states, and thus the essentially nationallyordered post-war type of economy and society, persist or decline? Isneo-conservatism a mere transitional phase between social-democratic society and some kinder, gentler post-industrial or post-modernsociety? Have we witnessed a demise of the conditions through whichworld-economic incorporation of peoples and territories yields improvement in living standards?

While these questions cannot be answered at this point, I believethere are historical precedents for guessing that neo-conservatismwill be a cornerstone of the types of social structures that will emergein the future. The economic slowdown of the 1920s and the GreatDepression of the 1930s ushered in most of the components of whatI have referred to earlier as social-democratic society. The same pro-

10 This is explained by many scholars from the international political economy tradition, such as Keohane (1984:37), as follows: " ... there is an inherent logic to thedecline of hegemonic powers in a capitalist system, since their technological and organizational advantages are inherently subject to diffusion to the periphery, driven bythe incentives of profit and power."


cess with respect to neo-conservatism may very well be occurringduring the long slump, which began at about the time of the 19731974 Arab oil embargo and continues today.

Assuming I am correct, we might imagine the predominant featuresof neo-conservative society as follows. I believe that neo-conservativesociety may prove to have several defining features. Structurally, neoconservative society will have a highly differentiated or pluralisticclass structure, consisting of the remnants of the post-war class structure-the industrial working class and the white-collar managerialstrata-plus the new service class, informal sector workers, and theurban and rural underclasses in which racial and ethnic minoritiesare overrepresented. The differentiation of these subordinate classgroupings will militate against their being a singular force, as was thecase with the trade union/social-democratic party linkage after WorldWar II. Also, as Haeusler and Hirsch (1989) and Bellon and Niosi(1988) have stressed, one of the major factors that has contributedto and shaped neo-conservatism is global industrial multipolarity,which is the result of the United States's world-economic decline andthe rise of several rival industrial powers, especially Japan and Germany. Neo-conservatism provides a pervasivejustification for nationalmarket-augmenting policies (typically deregulation, especially of labor conditions, plus state promotion of high technology and exports)necessary for engaging in successful international technological competition. Thus, ideologically, neo-conservatism can best be seen as acombined explanation of stagnation (excessive state intervention) anda prescription for transcending it-namely, that the proper role ofthe state is not to mitigate market forces, but rather to augment themin order to contribute to national competitiveness goals. II

The rise of new social movements

Dating from the late 1960s, American sociologists increasingly beganto understand modern social movements from a resource mobilizationperspective, the first important statement of which was by McCarthyand Zald (1973). Shortly thereafter the European literature on socialmovements would depart substantially from that of North Americaas European scholars came to stress the notion of new social movements (NSMs).I2 Since that time, American scholarship has begun toshift to the European position, having found that resource mobilization theory, while true as far as it goes, borders on being a tautology

11 As Gilpin (1987) stresses, however, multipolarity, rather than propeBing furtherinternationalization and liberalization, could lead to protectionism.

12 Some of the most noteworthy European contributions were by scholars such asAlain Touraine (1971), Manuel Castells (1978), and Claus Offe (1985a, 1985b). Cotgrove (1982) was the first attempt to bring these considerations to bear in the analysisof environmentalism.


and fails to account adequately for the "expressive" side of socialmovement mobilization. Resource mobilization theory, which essentially asks the question of how social movements emerge, has less tosay about the more interesting question of why they emerge.

While there are a good many rival definitions of and perspectiveson NSMs (see Scott [1990] for an excellent overview and Kriese [1989]for a noteworthy empirical study), most scholars have defined thesemovements in terms of a rejection of the institutional practices of themodern state and economy. Most agree that their main bases of sup-

. port are professionals, social and cultural service workers, and publicservice and administrative employees, and more generally amongyoung, well-educated persons who are employed outside of corporatemilieus (what some have referred to as the new class).

Most observers take the environmental, anti-nuclear, peace, andfeminist movements to be the core of the NSM ensemble. Each ofthese movements has some distinctive characteristics germane to thestory I want to tell here. On one hand, each movement has an expressive dimension, involving motivations such as the quest for identity, meaning, autonomy from statist technocracy, and the like. Thesedimensions are difficult to account for by way of the methodologicallyindividualistic"... hard-nosed ... realism ..." (Scott 1990: 116) ofresource mobilization theory and its explicit or implicit embracementof a rational choice perspective. On the other, NSMs emerged and/or blossomed during the period when the transition from socialdemocratic to neo-conservative society was underway. Some treatments of NSMs draw a clear connection between the rise of thesemovements and the decline of social-democratic society. Scott (1990:25), for example, has noted that

. . . the politically integrative function of the new socialmovements suggests that their development can be seen, inpart at least, in more conventionally political terms, namely,as a consequence of the failure of social democratic partiesto undergo a process of political renewal. Particularly withinthe European ecology movements the criticism is often madethat social democratic parties have either stuck too closelyto the major historical interest they represent, or they haveadopted "statist" strategies through which they hope to winwider appeal as effective managers of the Welfare State andmixed economy (for example, in West Germany).

Many NSM theorists stress that the distinctiveness or significance,or the newness, of these movements lies in their being expressive,identity-oriented, anti-technocratic, autonomy-seeking, post-materialist, and decentralist in their thrust. Others argue their significanceor newness lies in their being a potent force of political oppositionto neo-conservative regimes, apart from and often in overt oppositionto existing left or working-class parties. My own view, similar to that

/


expressed by Scott in the preceding quote, is that both componentsare essential in understanding what is new and social about NSMs.What is new about NSMs in general, and the environmental movement in particular, is not that qualitatively new issues are the subjectof movement mobilization. Rather these movements are manifestlyor latently alternative modes of expression and political mobilizationto trade unions and labor and working class parties of social-democratic society.

NSMs have, in other words, emerged as a response to several interrelated realities about social-democratic parties. First, their principal clientele, the industrial working class, is a declining minority ofthe electorate. Thus, social-democratic parties face an absolute imperative to expand their support base beyond that of the industrialworking class. As Przeworski (1985:27) has noted:

Social democrats must offer credits to the petite bourgeoisie,pensions to salaried employees, minimal wages to workers,protection to consumers, education to the young, family allowances to families. This convergence cannot be found inmeasures that strengthen the cohesion and combativenessof workers against other classes. When social democrats extend their appeal, they must promise to struggle not forobjectives specific to workers as a collectivity ... but onlythose which workers share with members of other classes.

Yet, second, social-democratic parties are constrained in fully embracing new class interests or NSM positions, since these may alienatethe working class electorate. Third, social-democratic parties remaintied to unions and/or the industrial working class. They cannot turntheir back on trade unions and the working class electorate, and thusare committed to rear-guard struggles, sometimes only half-hearted,to salvage the welfare-state and the social wage in a milieu of fiscalcrisis, the more conservative political culture, and the increasinglydifferentiated electorate. Social-democratic parties are neither herenor there-neither working-class parties nor NSM-type parties. Thus,finally, these parties are tending to lose support or have weak allegiance among both of the constituencies-the industrial workingclass, and the white-collar or new class part of the electorate-thatthey must unite in order to restore the potency they had in the 1950sand 1960s. 13 The outcome is now quite familiar: Reaganism andThatcherism, and parallel conservative shifts among the regimes,such as those of France and some of the Nordic countries, in whichthere was nominal social-democratic rule during the 1980s.

But the rise of neo-conservativism is not without its limits. In particular, there has been an upwelling of NSMs to fill the void of social-

IS More generally, the crisis of social-democratic society"... is accompanied by acrisis of the dominant party type: the Volkspartei (catch-all-party)" (Haeusler and Hirsch1989:315).


democratic party decline. These movements take many forms, including the local, expressive groups given considerable attention bysome NSM theorists, and, more importantly in my view, groups,typified by the modern environmental movement, for which achieving particular policy goals are their raison d'etre. Their influence isbeing felt not only in the advanced countries but increasingly ingeopolitics and the Third World as well. There has emerged anincreasingly dense network of non-governmental organizations(NGOs) that now contests almost all issues of international relations(such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, world intellectual property conventions, the World Bank, international development policy, international environmental treaties, and even interstate relations). Some have even pointed to a trend to "NGOization"within nations and internationally. According to this point of view,NGOs are assuming a level ofpower and influence that was previouslythought to be possible only on the part of states and large multinational firms. NGOs are able to do so not only because of their mobilizing capacity, but also because of the vacuum created by nationalstates and the international regimes they have fostered having lostlegitimacy.

Some general implications of new social movementsand greening

Given the apparent significance of NSMs, one of the major issues thathas arisen about them has been whether these movements are destined to be the historical bearer of transformative social forces equivalent to that of the working class during the first two-thirds or so ofthe twentieth century (see the discussion in Scott 1990:Chapter 3).Such a claim involves several major arguments. First, industrial workers' organizations and traditional social-democratic parties are structurally and ideologically incapable of being a significant transformative force, creating a political vacuum. Second, the size of the newclass is destined to increase even further as the modern post-industrialdivision of labor proceeds. Third, neo-conservative policies will inevitably generate intense opposition among the growing new class.Fourth, the support base of NSMs is articulate, politically-skilled, andable to exercise influence disproportionate to its numbers. And fifth,NSMs are structurally flexible, and can take a variety of forms depending upon the context. In some places, particularly Germany andpossibly several of the Nordic countries, NSM and ecology mobilization have been focused around Green Parties. Elsewhere, particularly the United States and other countries with plurality votingsystems in which viable third parties are essentially precluded, NSMsand ecology take the form of multiple, overlapping local grassrootsorganizations, lobbying groups, think tanks, and NGOs.


While resolving the larger issue lies beyond the scope of this paper,I feel there are both strengths and weaknesses in the emerging NSMmode of political mobilization. On one hand, I suspect that NSMswill become a predominant and perhaps the most broad-based modeof opposition to neo-conservatism. Further, NSM claims will have theadvantage of being based on public-interest arguments, rather thanon only material self-interest, potentially enhancing their legitimacy.On the other hand, I suspect there are likely to be major limits tothe political potency of the new class and NSMs. Insofar as this classis based heavily in public and other noncorporate employment, fiscalcrisis will limit public payrolls and the size of the new class. Also,insofar as neo-conservatism is likely to engender even more incomeinequality, NSM issues will likely not attract much interest from thegrowing ranks of the urban underclass, the rural poor, and the working poor.!" NSM concerns, when expressed in the political arena,essentially involve either pursuing public goods (e.g., environmentalintegrity) or consumptionist goals (reducing health risks by limitingnuclear power or nuclear weaponry). In other words, these concernsare not buttressed by the encompassing material interests of the typethat were integral to, and successfully transposed into entitlementsof citizenship (Turner 1986) through, labor movement mobilizationduring the social-democratic epoch. The expansion of NSM concernswill likely impel further fragmentation ofpolitical parties, which havehistorically been the most efficacious form of interest aggregation inparliamentary dernocracies.!" Finally, each of the NSM issues can, atleast in principle, be resolved in a way that is moderately reformistat best, 16 and quite consistent with neo-conservatism at worst. In otherwords, NSM issues have potential for cooptation-that is, for stateand corporate elites to take a particular NSM issue as their own andto embrace it in a superficial way. Some NSM positions will even beembraced by parties of the right, a good example of which is that all

14 Though I suspect NSM issues will not generate keen interest among U.S. industrialworkers in national politics, this will not necessarily be the case at the local level or inother countries. Kriese (1989), for example, found that when education was controlled,industrial workers were no less likely than other occupational groupings to supportNSMs in the Netherlands.

15 Haeusler and Hirsch (1989:325), in their analysis of the decline of the Volksparteienin Germany, note:

Political decisions and state activities thereby become seemingly less relevant forindividual perspectives. This might help explain decreasing party ties and increasing abstentions which in turn force parties to assume their discursive strategieswith an orientation towards target groups: structurally privatised interests aremobilized in an ad hoc fashion, in tactical terms and in a quasi-populist mannerand without establishing stable coalitions and interest complexes.16 Good examples are the American environmental movement's having acceded to

marketable permits to pollute and their support for related instruments domesticallyand internationally (e.g., carbon taxes to reduce CO2 emissions).


seven neo-conservative G7 governments, save for the United States,endorsed the creation of an international treaty to address globalwarming at their July 1991 meeting. No less than one-quarter of thefinal communique of the G7 meeting was devoted to environmentalprotection.

Environmentalism as a collective action problem

There is a growing sense that the political center of gravity of NSMswill likely lie, if it has not already, in its green or ecology component.Olofsson (1988: 15), for example, has argued: "The most likely centrefor a possible coalescence of a multitude of NSMs into a major socialmovement, if not in the class formative sense, is the societally-basicrelationship, nature-society." I am inclined to agree, and for the~emainder of this paper I will take ecology to be the master NSMIssue.

It is useful to begin an analysis of modern greening by recognizingthat environmentalism, broadly speaking, involves a more complexcollective action puzzle than is often realized. And, as Frankel (1987)stresses, many NSM theorists have erred in ignoring the constraintsthese movements face in effective political mobilization. While mostenvironmental issues may be directly or indirectly construed in wayssuch that immediate material interests are involved and in whichparticular social categories are obvious proponents of a particularenvironmental initiative, environmental issues in general are of aquite different character. Environmentalism is intrinsically indeterminate as an ideological form because, unlike most old or even newsocial movements, such as the women's movement, the civil rightsmovement, ethnic separatist movements, and labor movements, it hasno natural constituency or bearers. Opposition to environmentalism,on grounds of threatened material interests or aversion to state intervention, is actually easier to explain than environmental advocacy.For many environmental issues, those who act to protect the environment can expect to receive no personal material benefits. 17 A highquality environment tends to be a public good, which when achievedcannot be denied to others, even to those who resist environmentalreforms (Williams 1982). Because of the situational and transitorynature of environmental mobilization, environmentalism can and does

17 However, the definition of particular conflicts or issues as being environmentalones is, in part, a social construction. A good example in this regard is (typicallysuburban) no-growth or growth control policies, which are rooted as much or morein defense of property values than in environmental concerns per se (Logan andMolotch 1986), and which thus involve an environmental dimension having beensuperimposed on an issue that involves more fundamental material concerns.


take many forms: what elsewhere I have called "environmentalisms"of left, right.!" and center.!?

Like all other ideologies, environmentalism is socially-constructed,but it is an especially indeterminate, malleable ideological form. Inother words, environmentalism is what its current bearers say it is.What environmentalists ultimately come to say it is involves a complexprocess of political trial-and-error in which its proponents balanceresource mobilization factors (e.g., efficacy in attracting numerousand articulate movement supporters and in garnering resources) andpolitical persuasiveness factors (e.g., whether the claims that can bederived from the ideology can be effective in the political process orcan confer legitimacy on the movement).

There have been several predominant tendencies in environmentalideology formation since the decline of social-democratic society began. 20 The first is the tendency to package the need for implementinga lengthy agenda of environmental goals within a comprehensive,compelling framework. The second is to accede to the well-institutionalized instrumental-scientific rationality of the modern world (see,for example, Aronowitz 1988; Offe 1985a) by transforming scientificconcepts into value or ethical claims-or, in other words, into ideology-which are in turn legitimated by the authority of science. Thethird is to invoke alarmism in order to dramatize the fact of theenvironment as an imperative public good. These tendencies arerevealed in three of the major recent phases of twentieth centuryenvironmentalism: the "population bombism" of Paul Ehrlich andGarrett Hardin during the late 1960s, the "limits to growthism" ofMeadows et al. (1972) during the mid 1970s, and the global environmental and climate change framework that has been promulgatedover the past half dozen or so years (Buttel et al. 1990).21 I will place

18 Those who doubt the fact that environmentalism is potentially consistent withconservative forces must read Bramwell's (1989) fascinating account of the origins oforganic farming and of the cultivation of images of rural environmental wholesomenessby the Nazis during the 1930s.

19 Environmentalisms of left, right, and center will tend to be constituted, respectively, as a critique of industrial capitalism, as a squeeze on consumption levels tofacilitate accumulation, and as a managerialist or lifestyle politics (But tel and Larson1980). NSM environmentalism, in my view, has a general tendency to be a center-lefthybrid, albeit with considerable variation by country (e.g., the relatively left versionas represented by the European Green Parties and the more centrist version in theUnited States).

20 However, these predominant tendencies within environmental movement ideology coexist with the persistence of a strikingly diverse array of ideologies expressedby contemporary ecological movements (Scott 1990).

21 In making this point I am mindful of the fact that, to quote Philip Parker (1991:44), an ex-Greenpeace official, "In the US ... there are 8000 community-based groups


particular stress later on the significance of this most recent ideological reorientation of the movement.

Though I will not elaborate on this point here, remember thatcontemporary American and international environmental movements must deal with the sensitive matter of the relationship of environmental policy to economic growth and accumulation. Probablythe major reason the limits to growth notion was an utter failure asenvironmental ideology was that it threatened so many groups, including but not limited to capital, on account of its imperative toachieve a steady-state economy (that is, to reduce the rate of accumulation toward zero). The global change formulation is closely related to that of sustainable development and sidesteps, but does notreally resolve this issue through its explicit or implicit assumptionthat growth and accumulation can be consistent with environmentalconservation.P We must also bear in mind that the environmentaljeconomic growth confrontation could be postponed in the late 1970sup to now because chronic global economic stagnation accomplishedan attenuation of resource consumption quite similar to that advocated by limits-to-growth spokespersons in the mid-1970s.

Rural social change in an era of greening

Thus far I have made very few connections between my analysis ofgreening and environmentalization, on one hand, and rural societiesand social structures on the other. Nonetheless, I believe that greening and environmentalization have had and will have many crucialrelationships to rural social structures. I will stress three such relationships here, each of which represents a dilemma or tradeoff ofNSMs and greening becoming the most persuasive and broad-basedunderpinning of social transformation. First, greening, in the contextof the decline of social-democratic society and the rise of neo-conservative society, has been crucial in leading to the substitution ofenvironmental for social justice discourse. Yet I suspect that the pathtaken and consequences of greening will depend on how these concerns are articulated with social justice ones. Greening and environmentalization will probably need to be tied to social justice in orderto be enduring. Second, greening is contributing to "scientization"of social conflicts and policy formation. The scientization of social

tackling a range of toxic pollution issues [that] have grown up, in part, due to thefailure of the environmentalmovement to come to terms with certain central socialand political truths: there is unlikely to be environmental quality until there is humanequality." Thus, while the Washington-based environmental establishment is the majorexpression of environmentalization, it is by no means the only such expression.

22 See Daly and Cobb (1989) for a strong plea that sustainable development will notachieve its promise if it is not integrally linked to reduction of growth and resourceusage in the West; see Simonis (1989) for a related argument.


movements, in which movement officials have Ph.D.s and quasi-academic resumes, and in which movement claims are buttressed mainlyby the authority ofexperimental science, confers legitimacy, but oftenserves to limit issues to those that can be handled in a technocraticframework. Third, greening involves breadth of appeal, but this verybreadth can lend itself to superficiality and trivialization. I will exploreeach of these dilemmas by commenting briefly on three issues involving rural society and the environment: sustainable developmentin the Third World, sustainable agriculture in the West, and thegrowing ecological symbolization of rural spaces across the globe.

Sustainable development

Western environmentalism has long had a problematic relationshipto groups that wish to advance the social and economic developmentof the Third World. Ehrlich-style neo-Malthusianism was severelycriticized by Third World delegates at the 1974 United Nations WorldPopulation Conference at Bucharest. The limits to growth perspective of 1970s environmentalism was seen as ill-founded by the development establishment and as inimical to improved living standardsby Third World states, many NGOs, and many others in the development community. Now, sustainable development, which is commonly taken to mean a development strategy that combines environmental conservation with social and economic growth, is the mostrecent buzzword in international development circles. Sustainabledevelopment is distinctive in several respects as an international development strategy. First, and most obviously, sustainable development represents the greening of the institutions of development finance and assistance. Second, sustainable development is an outgrowthof the internationalization of the environmental movement, whichitself was a reflection of the fact that the movement embraced globalenvironmental change, global warming, and so on as its principalideological form.P Third, sustainable development is much like manyprevious development buzzwords in that it had its origins in a scathingcritique of prevailing development practice by groups external toofficial development circles (mainly by environmental groups furiousabout World Bank dam, road, mining, and rainforest developmentprojects). But sustainable development is essentially the first to bepremised on grounds other than those of social justice.v' Fourth,

23 Elsewhere I (Butte! et al. 1990) have discussed some of the historical and politicalmobilization factors that led the environmental movement to become more internationalized and to embrace global environmental and climate change as its predominantideology.

24 Appropriate technology is a partial exception, insofar as its possibilities of successwere at.lea~t in part .matte.rs of engineering and physical science. However, the originalcrystallization of this notion, by E. F. Schumacher, was squarely premised on socialjustice considerations.


unlike previous social justice critiques ofprevailing development practice that derived from or were given credence by social science reasoning and evidence, sustainable development is rooted primarily inthe natural sciences and in conservation biology and ecology in particular.

The sustainable development movement has a number of very positive and promising aspects, particularly by comparison with the notions of structural adjustment and "getting prices right" that wouldotherwise have been the uncontested dominant doctrines in officialdevelopment circles. There have, in fact, been few areas of policymore affected by the transition to neo-conservatism than that of official development practice. The world's most influential and tastemaking development institutions-the World Bank, the U.S. Agencyfor International Development, and the regional development banksreflect the neo-conservative consensus to such a degree that the socialjustice claims (e.g., basic needs, women's participation in development) that were modestly influential in the 1970s and early 1980snow have essentially no standing at all. In this context, sustainabledevelopment is not only a potentially persuasive means to achieveresource conservation and ecological integrity, but in addition it oftenserves as a disguised means of preventing social justice concerns frombeing entirely written off the agenda. Many resource conservationissues, for example, cannot be resolved without addressing the grinding poverty and social marginality that drive rainforest destruction,land degradation, and so on. Many environmentally-oriented NGOs,in fact, were previously social-justice oriented ones or are staffed bypersons whose commitments are as much or more to social justice asto environmental conservation. Many small environmental and sustainable development-oriented NGOs, particularly those of ThirdWorld origins, self-consciously employ environmental claims as a calculated means of agitating for social justice goals.

While there can be and often are happy marriages between sustainable development and social justice in the Third World, this isnot necessarily or even often the case. With admittedly some exaggeration, we can begin to assess the prospects of sustainable development by noting that neither of its two main proponents-majorofficial international development assistance and finance institutions,and the Washington-centered environmental establishment-hasmuch more than a coincidence of interest in promoting sustainabledevelopment as such. Major official development institutions aremainly interested in development in the form of global capital accumulation, promotion of liberal trade arrangements, and maintenance of Third World debt repayment schedules, with sustainabilityand sustainable development being the price to be paid to ensure theautonomy of these institutions in the midst of the increasingly greenmood of the industrial world. The new North Atlantic ecological


bureaucracy (Martinez-Alier 1990:x)25 is mainly concerned with preserving rainforest habitats and biological diversity, while going alongwith a social development approach and tolerating people as the priceto be paid for building viable coalitions to achieve preservation.

Most major environmental groups promoting sustainable development are also engaged in promoting concern about global climatechange, which is thought to be caused by greenhouse gas emissions(mainly of CO2), perhaps 15 to 20 percent of which globally are dueto rainforest destruction. Accordingly, sustainable development nowhas a very strong strain of rainforest fundamentalism. There is agrowing mental shorthand that sustainable development pertainsmainly to rainforest zones. Relatively little attention within the sustainable development community is being paid to the ecosystems(agroecosystems, the semiarid tropics) and social structures in whichthe majority of Third World people live. Also, much of what passesfor sustainable development has been realized within what Redclift(1987) has called environmental managerialism and Martinez-Alier(1990) has called international managerial ecologism (a good exampleof which is Schramm and Warford 1989). By environmental managerialism, Redclift and Martinez-Alier mean introducing environmental and resource management considerations, generally in acost-benefit formulation, into the national and subnational planningmethodologies originally formulated to help Third World states increase their ability to rationalize and control their economies. Whiletechnocratic planning methodologies are not, in and of themselves,desirable or undesirable, these planning practices are those that haveled programs of dam construction, expansion of tropical exports,granting of rainforest logging and mineral extraction concessions infragile environments, and the like that have contributed significantlyto Third World environmental destruction.

It is widely acknowledged that debt stress is one of the major factorsthat drives Third World production and export promotion practicesthat degrade the environment. It could, in fact, be said that onesimple, nonenvironmental policy-that of substantial Third Worlddebt forgiveness-would be the single most effective measure for

25 Juan Martinez-Alier (1990:xi), who is no opponent of environmentalism, nonetheless has also caustically referred to the Washington, DC, ecological establishmentas "the IMF of Ecology" because of its coziness with the World Bank and U.S.A.J.D.This portrait nonetheless must be qualified in several respects. As much as someorganizations (e.g., Friends of the Earth) are given to " ... intractable power brokingwith the likes of the World Bank" (Parker, 1991:44), others are less comfortable withsuch an approach. It should also be recognized that working relations between theinternational development finance and international environmental establishments coexist with often harsh public criticism by these same environmental groups of the majorindustrial-country governments and the development institutions they dominate (Lewis1991).


achieving simultaneously resource conservation and bolstering ThirdWorld development. Yet ironically, much contemporary sustainabledevelopment practice is premised in one way or another on the current global debt regime itself. Only desperately-indebted countrieshave their debt sufficiently discounted on the world's secondary debtmarket so that it can be purchased in debt-for-nature swaps. Debtstress, and the implicit threat of terminating the flow of loans andbridging funds, is typically in the background as environmental organizations and development agencies have worked to prompt developing countries to strengthen their environmental conservationpolicies.

Some (e.g., Martinez-Alier 1990:xiii), in fact, have devoted considerable attention to the fact that the "North Atlantic ecological establishment" coexists so comfortably within the structural adjustmentWeltanschauung of the official development community, which existsas much to ensure Third World debt repayment and to patch up theanarchic international monetary order as it does to achieve ThirdWorld development (Wood 1986). This coexistence is now beginningto generate vehement opposition in some Third World quarters.Third World groups are now criticizing what they call the ecologicalimperialism of the North, complaining that environmental groupoverestimates of the Third World contribution to global climatechange are politically motivated and have justified official sustainabledevelopment practices that are superficial (Centre for Science andEnvironment 1991).

Sustainable agriculture

Sustainable development and sustainable agriculture are close cousins. They emerged in tandem in the early 1980s and accordingly havea number of similarities. Like sustainable development, agriculturalsustainability is a post-social justice formulation, having been the successor to the "family farmism" that was the main preoccupation ofagrarian activists in the 1970s. In other words, both represent asubstitution of environmental for social justice discourse in a milieuin which social justice claims have increasingly lost their standing.Both are based in the natural sciences. Sustainable agriculture, inparticular, is at root a scientific notion and involves claims in whichscientific data and the authority of experimental natural science areemployed to confront the data and scientific knowledge claims ofadvocates of agricultural chemicals, monocultural practices, and soon. Thus, both sustainable development and sustainable agricultureare also subject to a narrowing of debate to mainly technocraticconsiderations (e.g., whether productivity increase can be sustainedmost effectively by developing new chemical inputs or by curbing theuse of these inputs).


Sustainable development and sustainable agriculture, however, aredistinct in several respects. While the driving force of Third Worldsustainable development programs is the North Atlantic ecologicalestablishment, the agricultural sustainability movement lacks thefunctional equivalent of centralized international environmental bureaucracies. It is more free-wheeling in its structure and more grassroots in its impetus. While the dominant language of agriculturalsustainability is scientific-deriving from the work of agroecologistsand environmentally-concerned agricultural scientists-sustainableagriculture arguably has a stronger tone of client service, social science input, and so on. Further, agricultural sustainability is morerooted in immediate, tangible economic, consumption, and healthconcerns of specific constituencies than is sustainable development.

The base of sustainable agriculture is wide, but it faces severalproblems in becoming a major force for change in rural America.First and foremost is the threat that it will fail on technical-agronomicgrounds-that is, it will not deliver the goods in farmers' fields. Onepossible ground for failure is that it is difficult to fine-tune integratedsystems of crops, livestock, and other biota quickly so that thesesystems can compete effectively with the engineering-type models oftraditional agronomy. The major prototype of sustainable systems,that of traditional agriculture in the Third World, is based on longexperience (indigenous knowledge) and human-directed coevolutionof cultivars and other biota that are difficult to mimick in experimentstation time frames. Another problem is that many of the barriers toproduction systems that use fewer chemicals are to be found in federalpolicies.f" particularly our still permissive policies toward nonpointpollution by farmers, and not merely in the lack of appropriate research. Scientific and activist groups that are the strongest supportersof sustainable agriculture tend to be ones that want research resultsand practical information tomorrow, if not sooner. There is, in otherwords, not much of a constituency within contemporary sustainableagriculture doctrine for basic, long-term agroecological research, uponwhich a more environmentally-benign agriculture 20 years hence willneed to be built.

26 A number of other federal policies, particularly the structure of commodity programs, provide disincentives to adopting nonchemical production systems (see theuseful summary in National Research Council 1989). Prior to the 1980s Americanenvironmental groups' interest in agriculture was mainly confined to pesticides and,to a lesser degree, to soil erosion. Over the past decade they have begun to substantiallyincrease their emphasis on the agricultural environment and to focus considerablelobbying efforts on the farm bill and other federal agriculturally-related legislation.They have achieved some federal legislative successes (e.g., the conservation reserveand cross-compliance provisions of the 1985 farm bill), but these were made possibleprimarily by the fact that these ostensible environmental measures were also disguisedsupply control measures at a time of a major overproduction-induced farm crisis.


A second problem facing sustainable agriculture is that it mustdepend primarily on public funding because its goal is at least partlyto reduce the use of external chemical inputs. With federal agricultural research funding being tilted increasingly toward basic researchin biotechnology and state funding declining precipitously, sustainable agriculture research has been heavily dependent on special appropriations (the federal LISA program and related state programs)that must be fought for in each farm bill and state budget period. Athird dilemma concerns sustainable agriculture's very breadth, or its"motherhood" character. The symbol itself is diffuse, and the metaphor ambiguous. Even chemical companies, for example, have littledifficulty making claims that chemical agriculture is sustainable (sincethese chemicals are profitable and integral to sustaining farms financially). Finally, sustainable agriculture may prove more variegatedin social justice terms than many imagine. It is an article of faithamong most sustainable agriculture proponents that the developmentand diffusion of sustainable practices will bolster the role of familyfarms and impede the spread of corporate-industrial agriculture. Iam suspicious about this assumption, and in fact there are some groundsfor suggesting it could prove to be wrong. To the degree that diversification, involving many crop and livestock enterprises, crop rotations, and tighter nutrient recycling, is a cornerstone of sustainablepractices, those who farm large acreages will be in the best positionto utilize efficiently the multiple lines of machinery and the capitalinvestments that will be required for enterprise diversification. If wesee that 3,000-acre midwestern farms shift to low-input practices, willthis strengthen or weaken the activist and scientific impulse to redouble efforts aimed at agricultural sustainability?

Environmental symbolism of rural spaces

For decades there has been a debate within rural sociology aboutwhether "rural" or "rurality" is to be understood mainly in structural or ideational terms. From the Sorokin years to the 1960s, rurality was thought to be mainly a cultural or ideational phenomenon.Over the past 20 years rural sociology has shifted, seeing ruralitymore as a structural phenomenon, mainly in spatial division of laborterms. Most recently, a number of scholars, particularly from theFrench tradition of cultural sociology, have resurrected culturalistnotions of rural society. Mormont (1990:36) has claimed that " ...rurality is not a thing or a territorial unit, but derives from the socialproduction of a set of meanings." While I am inclined to think thatnonmetro spaces are implicated in both a concrete division of laborand cultural meaning, I believe this new French tradition has a strongelement of truth. In particular, I cannot help but wonder whethergreening and environmentalization might over time lead to a fun-


damental shift in how rural spaces are symbolized, and accordinglyhow we define and deal with rural problems.

While the rural tradition in the United States clearly has long hadenvironmental-symbolic elements (Burch 1971), the strongest andmore enduring cultural connotation is one that has seen rural communities and households tending to be underprivileged and worthyofassistance. The establishment and institutionalization ofland-grantuniversities and the priority given to rural places and people in the1960s war on poverty are excellent cases in point. Many ofthe positivethings we have been able to accomplish in rural America have beenpremised on this symbolism, though its limits are obvious. An interesting harbinger of the growing force of the environmental symbolization of rural spaces may be gleaned from a front-page headlinestory in The Economist (1991:22):

Some academics ... argue that the federal government shouldwelcome rural depopulation in what, after all, used to becalled the Great American Desert. "The wisest thing thefederal government can do," writes one advocate of whathas come to be called the Buffalo Commons plan, "is startbuying back great chunks of the Plains, replant the [prairie]grass, reintroduce the bison-and turn out the lights."

While the Buffalo Commons plan is unlikely to be implemented, thefact that the plan has been taken seriously raises provocative questionsabout the future of a region that contains a disproportionate shareof the most agriculturally-dependent counties in the nation and ofdecaying or declining rural communities. What, then, will be thefuture of rural America if it becomes defined in strong symbolic termsas forest sites or prospective forest acreage needed to curb the greenhouse effect, as pristine ecosystems to ensure clean water for urbanuse, and as more desirable to the degree that fewer people are thereto pollute, disrupt natural habitats, and the like? Will we, in otherwords, witness a further erosion of commitment to improving thelivelihoods of the rural poor and to rural development? Can we thinkmeaningfully of "sustainable development" in nonmetropolitan contexts of the advanced countries?

Discussion

I have sought to move beyond the sui generis conception of greeningand environmentalization that has tended to prevail in most quartersof the social sciences. I believe the rise of green must be located inthe discontinuity from post-War social-democratic/industrial societyto neo-conservative post-industrialism. Greening will be an increasingly important, constructive force for change. But the long-termsocial and environmental significance of greening, new social move-


ments, and the new class will lie in the alignment of these forces withthe two others. These forces are the neo-conservative state and corporate elites and the increasingly differentiated, fragmented groupings of low-wage service sector employees, informal sector workers,the urban and rural underclasses, and the working poor. This coalition will in all likelihood define the future epoch of neo-conservativism. Green forces will be crucial in determining whether the newforms of social regulation of the economy that emerge will eitherreinforce the growing inequality of the past decade or lead to newchannels for the mobilization of subordinate class demands.

Rural sociology has long had something ofan identity crisis becauseits subject matters seemed increasingly residual to the major socialchanges of twentieth century social change. We should recognize,however, that environmentalization portends a decisive reversal ofthe inconsequentiality of matters rural and nonmetropolitan. Muchof the green agenda brings rural societies and their environmentscenter stage. Insofar as the green agenda is malleable, there will bemuch research and outreach work for members of the Rural Sociological Society and their colleagues elsewhere in the world to do. Wewill bear some considerable responsibility in ensuring that environmentalization is as meaningful as it can be ecologically, and that itadds to rather than detracts from the quest of the majority of theworld's population to earn an adequate livelihood, have economicsecurity, and live in dignity.

References

Aglietta, M.1979 A Theory of Capitalist Regulation. London: New Left Books.

Antonio, R. J.1990 "The decline of the grand narrative of emancipatory modernity: crisis or

renewal in neo-Marxian theory?" Pp. 88-116 in G. Ritzer (ed.), Frontiers ofSocial Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Aronowitz, S.1988 Science as Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bellon, B., and J. Niosi1988 The Decline of the American Economy. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

Block, F.1977 The Origins of International Economic Disorder. Berkeley: University of

California Press.Bramwell, A.

1989 Ecology in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press.Burch, W. R., Jr.

1971 Daydreams and Nightmares. New York: Harper & Row.Buttel, F. H., A. Hawkins, and A. G. Power

1990 "From limits to growth to global change: contrasts and contradictions in theevolution of environmental science and ideology." Global EnvironmentalChange 1:57-66.

Buttel, F. H., and O. W. Larson III1980 "Whither environmentalism? The future political path of the environmental

movement." Natural Resources Journal 20:323-44.


Castells, M.1978 City, Class and Power. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Centre for Science and Environment1991 "Global warming in an unequal world: a case of environmental colonialism."

New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment.Cotgrove, S.

1982 Catastrophe or Cornucopia. New York: Wiley.Daly, H. E., and J. B. Cobb, Jr.

1989 For the Common Good. Boston: Beacon.Esping-Andersen, G., and W. Korpi

1984 "Social policy as class politics in post-war capitalism: Scandinavia, Austria,and Germany." Pp. 179-208 in j. H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflictin Contemporary Capitalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Foster, J. B.1989 "The uncoupling of the world order: a survey of global crisis theories." Pp.

99-122 in M. Gottdiener and N. Komninos (eds.), Capitalist Developmentand Crisis Theory. London: Macmillan.

Frankel, B.1987 The Post-Industrial Utopians. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Frobel, F., G. Heinrichs, and O. Kreye1979 The New International Division of Labor. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.Gilpin, R.

1975 U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation. New York: Basic Books.1987 The Political Economy of International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University PressGoldthorpe, j. E.

1984 "The end of convergence: corporatist and dualist tendencies in modern western societies." Pp. 315-43 inJ. H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflict inContemporary Capitalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gordon, D. M., R. Edwards, and M. Reich1982 Segmented Work, Divided Workers. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gottdiener, M., and N. Komninos (eds.)1989 Capitalist Development and Crisis Theory. London: Macmillan.

Haeusler, j., and j. Hirsch1989 "Political regulation: the crisis of Fordism and the transformation of the

party system in West Germany." Pp. 300-27 in M. Gottdiener and N. Komninos (eds.), Capitalist Development and Crisis Theory. London: Macmillan.

Koehane, R. O.1984 "The world political economy and the crisis of embedded liberalism." Pp.

15-38 inj. H. Goldthorpe (ed.), Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kriese, H.1989 "New social movements and the new class in the Netherlands." American

Journal of Sociology 94:1078-116.Lash, S., andj. Urry

1987 The End of Organized Capitalism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Lewis, D.

1991 "G7 gets a roasting on environmental record." New Scientist (20 July):14.Lipietz, A.

1987 Mirages and Miracles. London: Verso.Logan, j. R., and H. Molotch

1986 Urban Fortunes. Berkeley: University of California Press.Martinez-Alier, J. . .

1990 Ecological Economics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.


McCarthy,j., and M. N. Zald1973 The Trend of Social Movements in America. Morriston, NJ: General Learn

ing Press.McMichael, P.

1990 "Incorporating comparison within a world-historical perspective: an alternative comparative method." American Sociological Review 55:385-97.

Meadows, D. H., D. L. Meadows,j. Randers, and W. Behrens III1972 The Limits to Growth. New York: Universe.

Mormont, M.1990 "Who is rural? Or, how to be rural: towards a sociology of the rural." Pp.

21-44 in T. Marsden, P. Lowe, and S. Whatmore (eds.), Rural Restructuring.London: David Fulton.

National Research Council1989 Alternative Agriculture. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

O'Connor,J.1973 The Fiscal Crisis of the State. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Offe, C.1985a Disorganized Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.1985b "New social movements: challenging the boundaries of institutional politics."

Social Research 52:817-68.Oloffson, G.

1988 "After the working-class movement? An essay on what's 'new' and what's'social' in new social movements." Acta Sociologica 31: 15-34.

Parker, P.1991 "The advance of the green guards." New Scientist (3 August):44.

Polanyi, K.1957 The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon.

Przeworski, A.1985 Capitalism and Social Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Redclift, M.1987 Sustainable Development. London: Methuen.

Reich, R. B.1991 The Work of Nations. New York: Knopf.

Ritzer, G. (ed.)1990 Frontiers of Social Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rohrschneider, R.1990 "The roots of public opinion toward new social movements: an empirical test

of competing explanations." American Journal of Political Science 34: 1-30.Roobeek, A. j. M.

1987 "The crisis in Fordism and the rise ofa new technological paradigm." Futures19:129-54.

Sayer, D.1991 Capitalism and Modernity. London: Routledge.

Schramm, G., and j. j. Warford (eds.)1989 Environmental Management and Economic Development. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press.Scott, A.

1990 Ideology and the New Social Movements. London: Unwin Hyman.Simonis, U. E.

1989 "Ecological modernization of industrial society: three strategic elements."International Social Science Journal 121:347-61.

Singelmann, J.1978 From Agriculture to Services. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

The Economist1991 "Rural America: where breakdown and bankruptcy play." The Economist (2

November):21-23.


Therborn, G.1986 Why Some Peoples are More Unemployed Than Others. London: Verso.

Touraine, A.1971 The Post-Industrial Society. New York: Random House.

Turner, B. S.1986 Citizenship and Capitalism. London: Allen & Unwin.

Turner, B. S. (ed.)1990 Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity. London: Sage.

Wallerstein, I.1984 The Politics of the World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams. R. M., Jr.1982 "Individual welfare and collective dilemmas: problems without solutions?"

Pp. 351-382 in R. M. Hauser, D. Mechanic, A. O. Haller, and T. S. Hauser(eds.), Social Structures and Behavior. New York: Academic Press.

Wood, R. E.1986 From Marshall Plan to Debt Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

environmentalization: origins, processes, and implications for rural social change

Documents