Blackwell Reference Online

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For sociologists, the consideration of ecology – and thus ecology's role in the economy – is relatively new to the agenda. In a semantic sense, this is necessarily the case. The word “ecology” and its apparatus of meaning only recently entered the vocabulary. But sociology's ecological turn is much more than the result of semantic invention. It embodies a profound shift in the institutionalized model of nature itself ( Frank 1997 ). From roughly the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, what we now call “ecology” barely existed in the social imagination. Nature appeared in the public realm mostly in the narrowly rationalized form of resources – particular material goods, with status external and subordinate to human society. For instance, in the guise of natural resources, trees materialized as timber and cows took form as livestock. The ecology–economy relationship was uncomplicated accordingly. The ecological system served both as store of natural inputs – raw materials to economic production – and sink for outputted wastes ( Berger 1994 ). In utilizing this system, humans exercised their rightful dominion over earth. Especially in the West, this resource model of nature grew deeply institutionalized – i.e., taken for granted in culture and organization. Most importantly, perhaps, the resource model helped fuel the twin expansions of industrialism and capitalism, ... log in or subscribe to read full text