Environments, Natures and Social Theory

Damian White is Head of the Department of History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences at the Rhode Island School of Design, USA.Alan Rudy is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Central Michigan University, USA.Brian Gareau is Associate Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Boston College, USA.

• Introduction: The Socio-Ecological Imagination1. Unnatural Social Theory?: The Problem of Nature in Classic Social Theory2. Hybrid Histories: Historical Socio-Ecologies in the Age of the Anthropocene3. Limits/No Limits?: NeoMalthusian, Prometheans and Beyond4. Social Environmentalism and Political Ecology: The Missing Third, Fourth and Fifth Dimensions of the Environmental Debate5. Structures and Institutions: The Treadmill of Production, the Metabolic Rift and the Sociology of Ecological Modernization6. Hybridities and Agencies: Latour, Haraway, Beck and the Vital Materialists7. Culture, Spaces, Power: From Environmental Justice to Critical Urban Political Ecologies8. Global Environmental Governance and NeoLiberalization9. Anthropocene Politics I: Market Natures™10. Anthropocene Politics II: Democratic Natures, Public EcologiesConclusion: Hybrid Arguments, Hybrid Flourishing, Hybrid Futures.

For those of us who want to better theorize and situate struggles, Environments, Natures, and Social Theory is a potentially welcome and timely intervention that can help us contextualize them both theoretically and practically ... White, Rudy and Gareau should be commended for their accomplishment. All of us who study and write about socionatural hybridity have an obligation to figure out how to develop and deploy it in ways that help other people make the world a better place ... This is more the case than ever given current circumstances, and I think Environments, Natures, and Social Theory is just the sort of book that can help us do so.