ABSTRACT
What exactly is ‘environmental sociology’? Its definition requires us to distinguish the intellectual roots of the ‘subdiscipline’, examine some of the interdisciplinary issues and spaces that have fostered its development and explore its geographical parameters. There are several contiguous intellectual terrains – including rural sociology, urban sociology, political ecology, development studies, ecological economics and environmental history – some of which have blossomed at the same time as environmental sociology. However, there are also key differences between environmental sociology and some of the other fields discussed in this volume (gender, stratification, medical sociology, ‘national’ sociologies) in that most of these have developed within the discipline, rather than at its margins, and have gone on to become staples of mainstream sociology.
