Durkheim on the Environment

Abstract

Pioneer environmental sociologists, Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton Jr., successfully laid the foundation of environmental sociology by pointing out the anthropocentric bias of mainstream sociology. The exemplary intellectual source of this bias could be found in the works of French sociologist Émile Durkheim whose methodological dictum stated that social facts could only be explained by other social facts. Here we call for a re-evaluation of Durkheim's role as perpetrator of the anthropocentric bias behind the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm dominating mainstream sociology. We do this from several directions but mostly by re-visiting his foundational writing on the topic, his inaugural lecture in sociology given at the University of Bordeaux in 1887. Our critical examination of that lecture makes it clear that Durkheim's idea of “social facts” was far richer, more nuanced, and more mindful of biological and other environmental factors than typically recognized in the sociology literature. We conclude that it might profit scholars to re-visit Durkheim, not as the party guilty for dismissing the environment, but as a foundation for understanding the dynamics between human and environmental systems.