Environmental Sociology and the Sociology of Natural Resources: Institutional Histories and Intellectual Legacies

While environmental sociology and the sociology of natural resources nominally focus on the same subject matters, in practice the literatures in the two subdisciplines have tended to be quite separate intellectual enterprises. Environmental sociology and the sociology of natural resources have different origins, their practitioners tend to have distinctive institutional locations, their problematics are different, and their theoretical tendencies differ considerably. I provide an overview of the divergent courses that have been taken within these two areas of inquiry, with stress on their institutional histories and intellectual legacies.