Now we are in a new epoch, in the new century, the world looks different, and issues of resource depletion, contestation and collapse will haunt it—and, more parochially, sociology—in some potentially catastrophic decades to come. [John Urry, 2011]
Policymakers and the public do not look to sociologists for expertise on climate change. As is the case with many other pressing societal and global challenges, where social scientists are consulted in the production of climate science and policy, they are most often economists [Yearley 2009; Szerszynski and Urry 2010]. Many sociologists have observed and bemoaned this relative marginalization of sociological perspectives, despite the fact that we “have a lot to offer” [Bhatasara 2015: 217]. Sociologists do indeed produce empirical and theoretical work on climate change, and on the relations between society and environment more generally. More fundamentally, climate change is a problem of how we live, produce, and consume, and the science of society ought to be at the forefront of efforts to understand and address such a problem. Thus, much energy has gone into demonstrating the need for sociology, collating the available insights from this literature to make a persuasive case for sociology’s (along with other social sciences’) integration with climate science more generally [Dunlap and Brulle 2015; Zehr 2015; Castree, et al. 2014; Weaver, et al. 2014; Norgaard 2018]. Sociological analyses, it has been argued in review articles, task force publications, and books, ought to be incorporated into wider research programs.
I do not disagree with this mission. However, my agenda in this piece is somewhat different. The motivating question here is not “what can sociology contribute to climate change,” but rather: “what can climate change contribute to sociology?” The former question is essential, but it has been competently and comprehensively addressed elsewhere. The latter question requires greater attention. Elizabeth Shove [2010: 280] has also advocated “turn[ing] the question around” in this way. For her, doing so prompted an exploration into how climate change has affected theoretical development across the social sciences. Climate change, she observes, has renewed and recast longstanding social theory debates around the nature-culture divide, capitalism, and the social construction of knowledge. Though this has been highly generative, “[s]ince there is only so much intellectual energy to go around, these points...
