Theorizing Environmental Harm: Power, Capital, and the Politics of Inaction

Environmental sociology powerfully accounts for why capitalist societies degrade the conditions of their own reproduction. The treadmill of production (Schnaiberg; Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg), the metabolic rift (Foster), and world-ecology (Moore) each locate environmental harm in accumulation's structural imperatives, while ecological modernization holds out the contested possibility of reform from within. Turbulent times bring renewed scrutiny to these frameworks and what they can and cannot explain. The session asks what theoretical work the present conjuncture demands.

Three unresolved tensions organize the session.First, the field theorizes degradation better than the machinery that defends it: organized denial, anti-reflexivity, and corporate political power that turn structural imperative into deliberate obstruction (McCright and Dunlap).Integrating political economy with a sociology of countermobilization and the state remains unfinished. Second, a theory of harm that cannot theorize its contestation is incomplete. How do structural accounts make room for agency, treating movements and countermovements as interacting forces rather than afterthoughts to capital's logic? Third, a canon built on Global North experience faces critique from Southern political ecology, the environmentalism of the poor (Martinez-Alier), and decolonial scholarship that asks whose harm these categories were designed to register.

We invite theoretical contributions: critical syntheses, dialogue across paradigms, and empirically grounded theory-building, not findings-only papers. The aim is an argument among traditions about concepts adequate to a moment when ecological crisis coincides with democratic backsliding and resurgent extractivism. In keeping with the Congress theme, the panel treats theory not as settled inheritance but as something to be reworked under pressure.