ABSTRACT
When Schnaiberg presented the initial treadmill theory, it had no formal empirical evaluation. Indeed, the theory itself had been grounded by analytic induction (Glaser and Strauss 1967). In formal terms, this means that the theory “fit” the data from which it was actually abstracted. So the 1980 volume represented a grounded but untested theory. What has happened in the 1980–2008 period? Most directly, we have individually and collectively tested how well the treadmill theory explains the social production trends in the intervening decades. This includes work on Great Lakes water pollution (Gould 1991, 1992, 1994), on local mobilization for toxic waste control (Weinberg 1997), on local wetland protection efforts (Gould et al. 1996), on global environmental treaties (Gould et al. 1995; Gould et al. 1996), on the rise of postconsumer recycling in the United States (Weinberg et al. 2000), on ecotourism (Gould 1999), on local alternative technology initiatives in the global south (Schnaiberg and Gould 2000), and on environmental injustice in the waste treatment and electronics industries (Pellow 2002; Pellow and Park 2002).
