Sociology, environment, and modernity: Ecological modernization as a theory of social change

Abstract To minimize or at least substantially reduce damage to the natural resource sustenance‐base we urgently need institutional reform within modern society. Environmental sociologists have different views as to which institutional traits can be held primarily responsible for the environmental crisis. Examples include its capitalistic or industrial character as well as the complex, highly administrated technological system of modern society. We discuss these matters in the context of the theory of “ecological modernization”; as developed by the German sociologist Joseph Huber, among others. To analyze the institutional reforms required for bringing human interaction with the sustenance‐base under rational ecological control, however, the theory needs to be substantially modified and complemented in several respects. However, restructuring the processes of production and consumption is only half the story. The change to ecologically sound patterns of production and consumption is limited by the dimension of the environmental crisis that has to do with nature as sustenance‐base and does not provide a solution to problems related to what we call the second dimension of the environmental crisis: the changing role of nature as “intuited nature”; and the way people “deal with”; these aspects of the environmental crisis within everyday life. In this respect we propose that theories of modern society as a risk‐society should be given greater attention within environmental sociology.