Animals in Environmental Sociology

Abstract

It is well established that nonhuman animals have substantial social significance in human society (Arluke & Sanders, 1996; Irvine, 2008; Nibert, 2013). However, some aspects of sociological investigation have not fully engaged with the question of how animals are embedded in human social systems. Wilkie (2015) calls for a reimagining of C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination into an “animalizing of the sociological imagination” to recognize that animals are an integral part of human social systems and how we treat and engage with animals impacts human social life. It is curious that animals often are invisible in environmental sociology, a subdiscipline constructed in opposition to human exceptionalism (Tovey, 2003). When animals do appear, they are considered primarily as part of ecological systems or “wild nature,” with the billions who exist as food, domestic or service animals largely ignored (Tovey, 2003). Yet, it is clear that humans and other animals live in co-constituted, collaborative worlds (Despret, 2013; Haraway, 2008; Porcher, 2017). Indeed, animals are so embedded into the social fabric that society cannot be fully understood without including them, and we are challenged to “think from the animal” and ask “what matters for them?” (Despret, cited in Carter & Charles, 2018). To “think from the animal” involves a recognition that our engagement and use of animals alters natural and social systems in often profound ways. Engaging with environmental sociology from a sociology of animal studies perspective, this chapter begins a conversation on “thinking from the animal” by asking what matters for animals in environmental sociology?