Natural resource sociology and environmental sociology have different historical roots, organizational identities, institutional bases of support, and scholarly orientations, yet both share a common concern with understanding the environmental bases of human societies. Differences as well as similarities between the research foci of the two fields are illustrated by distinguishing between three fundamental functions that ecosystems serve for human societies: supply depot, waste repository, and living space. While natural resource sociologists pay relatively greater attention to the supply depot function (ecosystems as the source of natural resources), their work inevitably touches on the other two functions as well and therefore is not necessarily narrower in focus than that of environmental sociologists. Yet, despite their common concerns, the differing bases of support, orientations, and clienteles for the two fields suggest that there is good reason for both to retain their separate identities.

As with other sciences, ecology's conceptual foundations emerged long after its origin. Clarification of these foundations should enable human ecology to provide understanding of the fact that industrial civilization causes ecosystem breakdowns. Arthur Tansley's reasons for superseding the community concept and coining the term “ecosystem” need to be known. Sociologists have widely misunderstood the term. Their “ecological complex” is not synonymous with it. Tinkering with ensuing lists of variables can be highly misleading. Human ecology should be the study of whatever ecosystems involve humans. Until we put behind us the unnerving impact of inappropriate criticism, rejoin bioecology enough to get over thinking of succession as invader-driven, and recognize seral stages for what they are, sociologists will fail to comprehend the ineluctable difference between industrialism and ecological climax. Available literature can facilitate sociologists' necessary retooling.

Journal Article The World's Most Polymorphic Species Get access William R. Catton, Jr. William R. Catton, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar BioScience, Volume 37, Issue 6, June 1987, Pages 413–419, https://doi.org/10.2307/1310565 Published: 01 June 1987

This volume fills the void created by the lack of a book-length, critical, and systematic treatment of ecological attitudes and behaviors. It emphasizes psychometrics and experimentation within a broad behavioral-cognitive framework focused on the natural world. Gray summarizes and integrates existing research and reviews major alternative approaches to measuring ecological attitudes, while presenting his own ecological attitude domain model. Russell Weigel and Richard Borden provide state-of-the-art reviews of the research on the relationship between ecological attitudes and actions and on the linkage between personality and ecological concern. Gray himself integrates the theoretical perspectives of social psychologists Milton Rokeach and Martin Fishbein in his construction of a paradigm for ecological change. Using this as background, he reviews existing behavioral studies, differentiating between those that rely on information and those that use reinforcement to produce a desired change in behavior. Finally, he suggests that the key to large-scale change is the creation of a true environmental ethic in our society.

Durkheim believed division of labor could promote human fraternity, but today's world raises doubts. Has division of labor become more disintegrative than integrative? With 1,000 times as many occupations as in a preliterate tribe, industrial society has transcended limits of biological division of function by substituting sociocultural differentiation and technology for biological polymorphism and interspecific differences. But industrial-level division of functions entails four serious problems: Abrogation of responsibility, vested interests, predatory relations, and creation of supernumeraries. Two kinds of study are urgently needed. We must map out the unbalancing operations that foster predation and, aided by synthesis of several traditions, investigate social psychological mechanisms that enable people to treat humans as means rather than ends.

Natural systems have limits of tolerance that produce an ensemble of interacting constraints on human action. This ensemble, ecological scarcity, presses people and nations toward zero-sum competition. Over the past nine decades, collective behavior theory has advanced enough to show us the social dilemmas and structurally conducive conditions for targeted hostility we can expect in an era of carrying capacity deficit. After centuries of economic and social development, mankind now faces sharp reversal, making revolutions likely within nations, and wars over access to scarce resources likely between nations. People have been slow to recognize the vulnerability of ecosystems and the seriousness of pressures to overload them, but such awareness may be an essential basis for a critical ability needed to protect us from panic and from resort to catastrophic violence.

Environmental sociology comprises a diverse set of interests, with the built‐environment/natural‐environment cleavage being especially significant. Yet, by virtue of their interest in societal‐environmental relations, all environmental sociologists depart significantly from the disciplinary tradition of ignoring the physical environment. We offer an ecological perspective as a fruitful way of viewing the relations between societal and environmental phenomena, and as a means of integrating work on both built and natural environments.

To confront the probable future without becoming obsolete, sociology needs a new paradigm, for its traditional notion of the nature of its subject-matter precludes asking certain vital questions, makes important hypotheses inconceivable, and stigmatizes essential lines of inquiry. Humans are involved in the web of life, yet sociologists following Durkheim disregard nonsocial facts as explanations of social facts. To understand major social change caused by transition from abundance to scarcity, we have to see how modern technology has enlarged human resource demands and human environmental impact. We have to learn to think in terms of carrying capacity and use a larger time frame. We have to ask some ecological questions, such as how long this planet can tolerate industrialism and what are the prerequisites of a sustainable society.