ABSTRACT
‘A flash in the pan’, said a colleague, ‘a passing fashion but nothing really to do with sociology.’ It is easy to dismiss this assessment of environmental sociology without further thought and there may be good political reasons for taking the importance of our subject for granted. On the other hand, the sceptics may have a point. Could concern about the environment ‘blow over’ as they anticipate? The range of issues and approaches now gathering under the environmental banner is certainly impressive and it is increasingly difficult to believe that such disparate concerns will ever converge to form a respectable domain of social scientific enquiry. So does the area have any real sociological substance? Where is its focus and what is its future? Are we talking of developing theoretical perspectives and associated methodologies or is this, as some suspect, a case of the emperor’s new clothes, with ‘the environment’ serving as a usefully vague wrapping for work already under way? Here, in the privacy of a postscript, we can face such questions directly.
