ABSTRACT
When Earth Day inaugurated the ‘Environmental Decade’ of the 1970s, sociologists found themselves without any prior body of theory or research to guide them towards a distinctive understanding of the relationship between society and the environment. While each of the three major classical sociological pioneers – Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber – arguably had an implicit environmental dimension to their work, this had never been brought to the fore, largely because their American translators and interpreters favoured social structural explanations over physical or environmental ones (Buttel 1986: 338). From time to time, isolated works pertaining to natural resources and the environment had appeared, mostly within the area of rural sociology, but these had never coalesced into a cumulative body of work. In a similar fashion, social movement theorists gave short shrift to conservation groups, leaving historians to explore their roots and significance.
