Ecological Modernization in Evolutionary Perspective

Introduction

Since its formulation in the 1980s, Ecological modernization theory (EMT) has emerged as a major theoretical perspective within environmental sociology. EMT’s descriptive and prescriptive claims are being used to legitimate ecological reform programs in a growing list of countries (Mol, Sonnenfeld, & Spaargaren, 2009). Created as a counterpoise to Neo-Marxian and deindustrialization theories and to the purported eco-alarmism of the 1970s (Mol, 1997; Mol & Spaargaren, 1993), EMT rejects the assumption “that a fundamental reorganization of the core institutions of modern society” (Mol & Spaargaren, 2000, p. 19) is necessary to resolve the current ecological crisis. Despite its growing influence, ecological modernization theory has significant limitations both as a descriptive and as a prescriptive theory.

Taking the Darwinian revolution’s rejection of essentialism and developmentalism as the touchstone for ecological thinking (McLaughlin, in press), I argue that EMT is premised on a nonecological foundation. The claim that recent iterations of EMT are immune to such criticisms (Mol & Jänicke, 2009) reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of developmental theorizing. Moreover, the essentialist and developmental underpinnings of EMT preclude its elaboration into a descriptive theory capable of conceptualizing the dynamic interactions between social structures, human agency, and biophysical environments (McLaughlin & Dietz, 2008). As a prescriptive theory, these same assumptions serve to legitimate a restricted vision of modernization while marginalizing people and projects that depart from this vision. The tensions between the descriptive and prescriptive dimensions of EMT leave ecological modernization theorists caught in a dilemma. EMT’s theoretical deficiencies can only be overcome by abandoning essentialism and developmentalism. However, doing so would diminish the force of its normative claims and destabilize the political programs underwritten by those claims.

A potential solution to this dilemma, one that could put the search for solutions to the current ecological crisis on a more solid theoretical and empirical foundation, requires two steps. First, environmental sociologists should follow Darwin’s lead by rejecting essentialism and developmentalism in favor of population thinking. The latter can provide a clear mechanism for linking the dynamics of social structures, human agency, and biophysical environments (McLaughlin, in press). Second, they should abandon foundationalism and recognize that critical or emancipatory projects—such as the ecological restructuring of society—do not require developmentalist justifications (Antonio, 1989). I explore the possibility of such a shift by contrasting EMT with a multilinear evolutionary perspective on social change, premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape, which combines population thinking with moderate constructionist insights into agency and culture (McLaughlin, 2011). From the latter perspective, EMT’s prescriptive claims can be interpreted as a form of strategic essentialism (Spivak, 1985/1996).

The Idea of Progress

Any evaluation of ecological modernization (EM) must recognize that this concept is a variant of the idea of progress, a term traditionally treated by sociologists as synonymous with development, modernization, and “evolution” (Bock, 1956). Ideas of progress have a long history in Western thought as cultural frames and ideologies and as formal theories of social change (Peet & Hartwick, 2009; Rist, 2002). Both are constructed using an essentialist metatheoretical framework. Essentialists conceptualize change as the joint product of internal natural tendencies and secondary obstacles or interfering forces that produce diverse historical outcomes by impeding or deflecting those tendencies. Essentialism represents a frame-invariant approach to theory construction. Its goal is to analytically strip away the effects of external forces in order to uncover context-independent patterns (McLaughlin, in press).

Properly understood, theories of development are not deterministic but probabilistic (McLaughlin, 2001). Developmental theories privilege one path of social change as natural. However, its realization is in no sense inevitable. It is simply the path followed in the absence of other forces. Moreover, essentialist theories are perfectly compatible with permanent obstacles or interfering forces, for example, Malthus’s (1963) theory of population. Nevertheless, theories of progress or development invariably equate the natural with the good. This built-in tension between description and prescription makes such theories prone to conscious and unconscious political manipulation (McLaughlin, 1998). The desire to lend rhetorical force to the prescriptive claims of developmental theories creates a tendency—reinforced by the filtering of ideas of progress through Christianity (Rist, 2002)—to misinterpret their descriptive claims as entailing necessity. Misconstruing developmental theories in this way makes them more potent in the political sphere as cultural frames or ideologies by delegitimating alternative historical trajectories. In its initial formulation, EMT exhibited precisely these tendencies, a mistake that was then compounded by a failure to understand the actual character and limitations of developmental theorizing.

Ecological Modernization as Progress

The concept of EM emerged in Germany in the early 1980s as a cultural frame put forward to justify a political program of environmental reform (Mol & Jänicke, 2009). Jänicke (1993/2009) underscores the continuity between EM and earlier ideas of progress, arguing that the former was “stimulated by a search for a consensual formula that would enable a redefinition and reorientation of established modernization ideas” (p. 30). EM theory was subsequently elaborated to provide a scientific scaffolding to support this political program. Thus, EMT “can be regarded as the social scientific elaboration and formalization of the underlying philosophy concerning environmental change articulated in the Brundtland Report” (Mol, Spaargaren, & Sonnenfeld, 2009, p. 6). Joseph Huber played a leading role in translating EM from a cultural frame into a social scientific theory. Huber (1991/2009) explicitly formulated EMT as a theory of development that starts “from the distinctions among primitive, traditional and modern societies” (p. 45). Like all theorists of development beginning with Aristotle (Rist, 2002), Huber compares social change to the growth of an organism, claiming that under EM “the dirty and ugly industrial caterpillar will transform into an ecological butterfly” (as quoted in Mol, 1995, p. 37). Huber (1991/2009) extends this organismic metaphor by describing society as a series of tightly integrated functional subsystems that undergo a continuous process of elaboration and differentiation. Specifically, he posits three stages of societal growth: (a) industrial takeoff, (b) the construction of industrial societies, and (c) an ecological transition to a new phase of superindustrialization (Spaagaren & Mol, 1992/2009). Science, itself conceptualized as inherently progressive, plays a critical role in these transformations.

Thus, contrary to Buttel’s (2000) assertion that “ecological modernization did not develop from a preexisting body of social-theoretical thought” (p. 132), Huber’s formulation demonstrates that EMT is firmly grounded in structural functionalism. Mol, Spaargaren, et al. (2009) acknowledge these roots when they argue that EM theorists have attempted to move beyond “EMT’s initially Eurocentric formulation” to avoid “the problems that undermined (structural functionalist) modernization theories of the 1960s and 1970s” (pp. 8-9). However, EM theorists have mistakenly concluded that the latter’s difficulties can be sidestepped simply by elaborating nondeterministic interpretations of EMT.

In his pioneering analysis of the Dutch chemical industry, for instance, Mol (1995) criticizes Huber’s “evolutionary—and in some respects deterministic—model of technology-induced socio-ecological change” (p. 43). Paradoxically, he states on the preceding page that EM is “irreversible” and that “the only possible way out of the ecological crisis is by going further into the process of modernization” (p. 42), which, like Huber, he conceptualizes as a process of social differentiation. In later works, Mol (2001) attempts to resolve this contradiction, though he never clearly articulates the difference between a natural and a necessary path of change. For instance, he adamantly maintains that EM is not a process of “evolutionary development that will ‘automatically’ unfold” but one that can be “accompanied by power struggles, standstills and even regression.” However, he insists that despite such temporal variability, EM has attained “a certain degree of permanence” (Mol, 2001, p. 210). A similar tension is exposed in his discussion of spatial variability, where Mol acknowledges that contextual forces found in specific nations and regions can give EM a specific “flavor” (p. 224). Nevertheless, he maintains that both types of variability remain within the “narrowly defined trajectories” identified by EMT (p. 69; see also Cohen, 2000; Mol, 2000; Mol & Jänicke, 2009).

EM theorists’ efforts to eliminate determinism from EMT are laudable and reflect an honest attempt to respond constructively to critics. However, they also expose two significant difficulties. First, they underscore the tension between description and prescription that is intrinsic to developmental theories. Given that EM began as a cultural frame deployed in the political sphere, it is not surprising that EM theorists initially succumbed to the temptation to lend rhetorical force to their prescriptive claims by equating the natural with the inevitable. It was equally predictable that historical evidence would force them to acknowledge that obstacles and interfering forces can cause periods of “stagnation” or even “reversals” (Mol, Spaargaren, et al., 2009, p. 5). However, EM theorists remain reluctant to concede that the latter may be permanent and still less that fundamentally different historical trajectories are possible. Doing so might drive too deep a wedge between EMT’s descriptive and prescriptive claims. Consequently, Mol, Sonnenfeld, et al. (2009) still contend that EM “has never been linear” but it nevertheless is a “cumulative process” (p. 5). Thus, there remains a providentialist subtext within EMT that suggests that despite obstacles and interfering forces, the path of social change privileged by EMT will win out in the long run.

A second difficulty is perhaps more damaging and reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of developmental theorizing. That is, rather than acknowledging that properly constructed developmental theories do not and never have entailed inevitability, EM theorists have concluded that since more recent versions of EMT have eschewed determinism, they are no longer developmental! And, thus, critiques leveled against earlier structural-functionalist theories can now be dismissed as “anachronistic” (Mol & Jänicke, 2009, p. 25). However, by recognizing that obstacles and interfering forces can impede or deflect EM, EM theorists do not escape developmentalism; they reinforce it. It is precisely through the systematic theorization of such secondary forces that developmental theories are elaborated. And even the most deterministic developmentalists, such as Herbert Spencer (Bock, 1956), recognized the operation of such forces—as does Huber (see below). The fatal descriptive flaw of developmental theories is not determinism, but a limited ability to theorize the diversity of social structures in space and time, the role of human agency in history, and the biophysical environment as an independent causal force (McLaughlin & Dietz, 2008).

Descriptive Limitations

Prescriptive Limitations

EMT’s descriptive limitations are compounded by its prescriptive shortcomings that are likewise rooted in essentialism. EMT’s providentialist subtext, noted above, is characteristic of developmental theories. As Rist (2002) argues, religiosity did not disappear with the Enlightenment; it simply “migrated elsewhere” as development became our “modern religion” (p. 21). Like other theories of progress, EMT arguably represents a secular retelling of the second creation story in Genesis—its proposed natural path of change represents Eden, the deviations caused by the obstacles, and interfering forces it identifies substitute for the apple, while the policy interventions it advocates to restore the “natural” correspond to the second coming. Such quasi-religious narratives short-circuit moral and political debate by placing their own values and preferences beyond question. Thus, by “closing off certain possible future scenarios while making other scenarios ‘thinkable’” (Hajer, 2009, p. 89), EMT functions as an antipolitics machine that turns moral/political questions into technical ones by taking the former for granted as natural and therefore good (Ferguson, 1990).

The result is a highly restrictive theory of social change that promotes a panglossian sociotechnical optimism, while marginalizing people and projects who depart from that vision by conceptualizing them as deviant, backward, or irrational. Thus, despite climate change and other global environmental threats, EM theorists refuse to put “revolutionary system change . . . on the agenda” (Mol & Jänicke, 2009, p. 19), change that would represent a deviation from their preferred developmental path. They likewise disparage “small-is beautiful” environmentalism as a vestigial carryover from an immature phase of sentimentalist and romanticist environmentalism—that is, an irrational era of environmental “innocence” that is neither “pragmatic” nor “professionalised” (Mol, Spaargaren, et al., 2009, p. 7). Huber (1991/2009) pejoratively labels advocates of the former as “eco-misers” (p. 42) while Cohen (2000) argues that the Dutch are fortunate not to have been “compromised by more idyllic or escapist modes of thought” (p. 92).

Technological paths consistent with these alternative cultural frames, such as soft chemistry, are rejected (Mol, 1997). Mol (2000) likewise dismisses the Mondragon cooperative experiment, the most successful in the world, as backward—that is, part of the “ideological luggage” (p. 47) of 1970s’ environmentalism. The potential of cooperatives, which are invariably more socially and ecologically embedded than capitalist firms (Gertler, 2004), to promote greater economic equality and environmental sustainability (Bray & Merino, 2003), even in the face of globalization (Taylor, 1994), is ignored. Indeed, Mol and Spaagaren (2000) claim that “all major, fundamental alternatives to the present economic order have proved unfeasible according to various (economic, environmental and social) criteria” (p. 23).

The marginalizations associated with EMT’s prescriptive claims are particularly troubling in relation to the non-Western world. EM theorists’ insistence that our environmental future should “not be ‘imported from the outside,’ but instead developed progressively from within the existing constellation of modernity” (Mol, Spaargaren, et al., 2009, p. 7) reflects an ethnocentric bias (Benton, 2002), which rules out, by definition, fundamental contributions by non-Western indigenous cultures and actors. Indeed, theories of development have a long history of generating categorical and normative foreclosures that disempower and silence members of “traditional” societies (McMichael, 2010). From colonial foresters’ exclusion of peasants from teak forests in Burma (Bryant, 1996), to the recent displacement of villagers by dams in India (Baviskar, 2001), the rhetoric of progress has been used to deny agency to anyone who questions this dominant discourse. Thus, similar to previous developmental theories, EMT’s theoretical devaluation of agency invariably denies agency in practice as well (McLaughlin, in press). Moreover, as Norgaard (1994) argues, in a third-world context, so-called progressive institutions not only disempower actors, they also eliminate any “basis for utilizing the knowledge of other cultures” (p. 73). Within a frame-invariant developmental framework, useful knowledge is assumed to flow in only one direction—from the more to less advanced (Robbins, 2004). Thus, EMT undercuts its own stated goals by ignoring “the potential for a multiplicity of paths to ecological sustainability which may rest in the diversity of non-Western cultures” (Christoff, 1996/2009, p. 110).

Lansing’s (1995) well-known analysis of the Balinese water temple system is a case in point. This traditional system of irrigation management, which is organized on a religious basis, equitably allocates water, controls pests, and has provided a stable rice crop without external inputs for hundreds of years. This ecologically embedded system was disrupted by the universalizing rhetoric and frame-invariant technological recommendations of the green revolution in the 1970s. Development experts, surveying Bali through the conceptual lens of modernization, initially failed to recognize “the very existence of the temple networks” (p. 100). Even when they did, these networks were dismissed as backward and nonscientific. It took Lansing and his colleagues years to convince the international institutions backing the green revolution of the value of this indigenous system that emerged, not through abstract, decontextualized rational planning, but through a frame-relative, evolutionary process of trial and error that matched social variation to local ecological exigencies.

Although EMT advocates a greening of progress, it shares precisely the same conceptual blinders as the modernization theories underlying the green revolution, blinders that render such “alternatives invisible and unthinkable” (McMichael, 2010, p. 238). Indeed, Mol (2001) insists that increasing economic and institutional homogenization render “fundamentally different environmental protection and reform designs in distinct nations or regions . . . increasingly anachronistic” (p. 67).

Ecological Restructuring Within Adaptive Landscapes

The contrast between the repeated failures of high modernist development projects (Scott, 1998), such as the green revolution in Bali, and the aptness and resilience of indigenous knowledge systems that have evolved through trial and error learning (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2000) suggest precisely where sociologists should look for new “approaches that question the development narrative” (McMichael, 2010, p. 233). Like earlier theories of development, EMT’s descriptive and prescriptive problems can be traced directly to its commitment to essentialism. While EM theorists can attempt to overcome some of these difficulties through the further elaboration of ancillary theories of obstacles and interfering forces, earlier developmental theorists have met with limited success employing this strategy. And ultimately, it is impossible, even in principle, to explain social adaptation within an essentialist framework. A more promising alternative is to abandon frame-invariant thinking in favor of frame-relative approaches to theory construction that rely on population thinking (McLaughlin, 2011).

It was precisely this shift in metatheoretical assumptions that lay at the heart of the Darwinian revolution (McLaughlin, in press). Rejecting essentialism allowed Darwin to reconceptualize biological change, not as a direction, but rather as a mechanism—that is, natural selection. The latter is an instance of what Mayr (1976) calls population thinking. Instead of ideal paths and interfering forces, Darwin took the variation that essentialists dismissed as his theoretical starting point and reconstructed evolution as a continuous process of interaction between the inherited variability within a population and a specific environment. Darwin’s multilinear theory is frame-relative because natural selection acts only locally, not globally. His concept of fitness describes the dynamic context-dependent relationship between variation and environment. Darwin’s theory constitutes the origins and touchstone for ecological thinking in both the biological sciences and postfunctionalist human ecology (McLaughlin, in press).

The contrast between frame-invariant and frame-relative thinking underscores my contention that EMT is premised on a nonecological foundation. Indeed, in terms of underlying metatheoretical assumptions, ecological (frame-relative) modernization (frame-invariant) is a contradiction in terms. Exposing and resolving this contradiction is a prerequisite to constructing a truly ecological theory of social change capable of conceptualizing the dynamic interactions between social structures, human agency, and biophysical environments. Such a theory can provide a sounder basis for formulating and implementing policies of ecological restructuring, policies that would reembed individual and corporate actors within local social, economic, political, and biophysical contexts. In recent decades, a series of multilinear, evolutionary theories—properly so-called—have emerged across the social sciences (McLaughlin, 2011). Hannan and Freeman’s (1989) organizational ecology and Dietz and Burns’s (1992) work in human ecology are two prominent examples of these emerging populational-based theories.

McLaughlin (2011) has attempted to build on these earlier theories by developing an alternative evolutionary model premised on the concept of a socially constructed adaptive landscape. The latter represents a negotiated and contested fitness terrain. The X and Y axes of the landscape describe characteristics of a population of social forms—for example, social roles, routines, or organizations. The Z axis represents the fitness of forms with various combinations of these characteristics, with fitness defined as the probability of a given form persisting or propagating in a specific environment relative to forms with a different set of characteristics. Individual and corporate actors adapt to this landscape through homeostatic, developmental, calculative, and populational mechanisms. They simultaneously employ human agency to actively reshape the landscape. By using alternative collective action frames and frame-alignment processes to mobilize resources and to create or exploit political opportunities, actors legitimate or delegitimate social structures and their associated technologies at various levels of analysis. Processes of legitimation involve the creation of a new peak or fold in the evolutionary terrain, increasing the fitness of a social form, while processes of delegitimation entail the reverse. Legitimation (delegitimation) also requires the construction (deconstruction) of social boundaries. The focus on boundary dynamics represents a moderate form of constructionism that avoids the pitfalls of radical or nominalist constructionism by conceptualizing categories in historical yet realist terms (McLaughlin & Dietz, 2008).

The above evolutionary framework has a number of advantages over developmental theories, such as EMT. On the broadest level, it integrates organizational sociologists’ insights into structure-environment interaction, constructionists’ attention to agency, language, culture and values, and political ecologists’ concerns with power, inequality, and processes of marginalization. It is also a frame-relative perspective that seamlessly integrates the biophysical environment as an independent causal force. And it can explain social adaptation through populational mechanisms. In contrast to EMT, it employs an eventful rather than a teleological temporality. The former treats time-and-place events as fundamental rather than superficial phenomena and insists that the critical role of timing and context implies that social change is “characterized by path dependency, temporally heterogeneous causalities, and global contingency” (Sewell, 1996, p. 264).

The combination of an eventful temporality and a conceptually robust theoretical framework provides a strong foundation for a potential program of cumulative research involving thick description and dynamic statistical methods. In contrast to EMT’s system-level conjectures about the natural dynamics of modernizing societies, this perspective focuses on the analysis of underlying processes of environmental contestation and associated organizational dynamics (Pulver, 2007). Moreover, rather than relying solely on case study methods and making assumptions about the structure of society once social processes have reached equilibrium—for example, when best industrial practices have diffused widely—the use of dynamic statistical methods would allow the time paths of change to be studied directly (Tuma & Hannan, 1984). For example, Sine and Lee (2009) recently used event-history methods to analyze entrepreneurial activity in the wind energy sector from 1978 to 1992 as a function of more than 25 different variables.

Similar methods could be used to study the influence of framing processes, political opportunity structures, and resource mobilization on rates of founding, disbanding, merger, and change in relation to ecological restructuring (McLaughlin, 2011). These methods would also allow the impact of external events on vital rates to be measured using period-effect variables and the interactions between organizational populations and industrial sectors to be measured with cross-effects variables (Hannan & Freeman, 1989). The latter could provide one means to study the aggregate-level effects of ecological restructuring, thereby avoiding the Netherlands fallacy (York & Rosa, 2003). Such an approach would not only dramatically advance sociological understanding of ecological restructuring but also provide a stronger basis for policy analysis and implementation.

By rejecting EMT’s overly systematic image of society and conceptualizing history as inherently multilinear, an evolutionary perspective can also avoid the marginalizing rhetoric of development that denies and obscures social diversity (McMichael, 2010). Moreover, since no single path of social change is privileged as “natural” and therefore “good,” it undercuts the providentialist tendencies and foundationalist commitments of EMT and other theories of development (McLaughlin, in press). Environmental sociologists and policy makers should see the rejection of foundationalism not as a loss but rather as a gain. Not only do critical and emancipatory projects not require developmentalist justifications (Antonio, 1989), but avoiding the categorical and normative foreclosures associated with theories of development can empower local and indigenous groups (McMichael, 2010). Thus, in contrast to the antipolitics machine of development, an evolutionary perspective opens rather than short-circuits moral and political debate by enhancing actors’ capacity for self-definition and by refusing to put either the means or the ends of environmental policy beyond dispute.

Finally, in contrast to EMT’s commitment to gradualism, an evolutionary perspective on social change is entirely compatible with rapid or radical change and would insist that whether or not the current ecological crisis requires a radical restructuring of the core institutions of modern society cannot be determined a priori. Rather, it will depend on the direction, rate, and ultimate magnitude of social and environmental change. As Hannan and Freeman (1989) argue, social reform movements and particularly revolutions involve, not just the transformation of existing organizations, but the wholesale creation and destruction of organizations and organizational forms. In terms of the above perspective, this would imply rapid changes in the number, location, and height of peaks on numerous adaptive landscapes.

Ecological Modernization as Strategic Essentialism

Although I have argued that EMT is premised on a nonecological foundation and that it has significant descriptive and prescriptive limitations, an interesting question to pose from the above evolutionary perspective is whether EM, considered not as a theory but purely as a political or cultural frame (Hajer, 2009), can nevertheless make a positive contribution to the ecological restructuring of society. Conceptualized in this way, EM can be considered a form of strategic essentialism. Spivak (1985/1996) coined this term to describe how diverse ethnic and minority groups sometimes make a conscious choice to essentialize themselves, albeit temporarily, in order to present a common identity or front that can then be used to facilitate political mobilization and action. The term has since taken on broader applications. I use it here to describe any attempt to use essentialist arguments and distinctions to manipulate the adaptive landscape(s) of one or more social roles, routines, or organizations.

The claim by EM advocates that EM represents a “realistic utopian” model (Mol, 1995, p. 398) that is helping to reshape the future through a double hermeneutic process is an instance of strategic essentialism as just defined. Given the broad range of meanings and usages of EM (Buttel, 2000), it is likely that some actors are pursuing this strategy quite consciously. That is, they may be intentionally portraying history, which they recognize as being inherently multilinear, as instead having a single “natural” developmental path of change in order to mobilize coalitions to channel society in this direction. Others, particularly advocates of EM considered as a sociological theory, may still believe that the prescribed path of EM is descriptively privileged. In fact, as suggested above, maintaining this tension between description and prescription serves to strengthen claims for EM in the political sphere, while resolving it and explicitly acknowledging that EM is merely another political or cultural frame might destabilize the political programs underwritten by those claims, or at least require them to be formulated on a different basis.

Conceptualized in this way, EM can be seen as a powerful rhetoric for manipulating adaptive landscapes in the current political-economic environment. More specifically, it serves as an effective injustice frame to challenge more traditional concepts of modernization that have served for centuries as the dominant ideology in the Western world. McLaughlin (2011) argues that the weakening of dominant ideologies opens political opportunity structures, making adaptive landscapes more pliable and thus subject to change. It also creates spaces in the evolutionary terrain where individual and corporate actors can form new networks capable of elaborating injustice frames that redefine “what was previously seen as an unfortunate but tolerable situation . . . as inexcusable, unjust, or immoral” (Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986, p. 474). The mounting environmental impacts associated with modernization have created just such a situation. Along with competing injustice frames, EM has moved into the resulting political gap with a clear diagnosis of the problem, a proposed solution, a rationale for taking action, and a means for defining the boundaries between proponents and opponents of EM.

Thus, the success of EM as political program and perhaps, secondarily, EMT as a social scientific theory, can be attributed, not to the clarity of the latter’s conceptual propositions (Buttel, 2000) or the robustness of its empirical findings (York et al., 2010; York & Rosa, 2003), but rather to the fact that EM is an interpretive package or injustice frame that has considerable frame resonance (Snow & Benford, 1988) within Western democracies where a cultural belief in progress has dominated at least since the Enlightenment. In this respect, it is instructive to compare the framing strategy of EM advocates with that employed by Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. McAdam (1994/1996) argues that King was successful because the injustice frame he helped to construct drew on core American values, such as democracy, Christianity, and nonviolence to create a deeply resonant ideational frame. A belief in progress, in the form of a movement toward these values and more equal opportunity, was also implicit in King’s message. Moreover, King’s emphasis on Christian forgiveness and charity reassured White Americans who feared more radical and violent change and promised redemption and healing to a racially divided America. Finally, his use of nonviolent but disruptive tactics, which drew an expected violent response in cities like Birmingham, allowed King to impute clear identities to both protagonists—peaceful God-fearing Christians—and antagonists—evil villains—of the movement

Consistent with their pursuit of less radical goals than the civil rights movement, proponents of EM have used institutionalized rather than disruptive tactics. However, otherwise their framing strategy is similar to King’s in its production of a deeply resonant ideational frame, which is grounded in some of the very same traditional Western values. It strikes just the right rhetorical balance for a successful injustice frame by being new yet still familiar (Tarrow, 1998). Thus, EM is premised on a commitment to democracy and its associated modern institutions. It redefines rather than rejects traditional notions of progress. As argued above, it has a providentialist subtext and an implicitly Christian narrative of redemption modeled after the second creation story in Genesis. EM’s commitment to nonviolence and gradual change is also reassuring to publics, corporations, and governments that are deeply divided by environmental issues and fearful of more radical change. It also imputes clear identities to both protagonists—rational believers in science and progress—and antagonists—irrational romanticists and sentimentalists—of EM. Finally, its emphasis on limiting more direct forms of environmental regulation is consistent with the increasing dominance of neoliberal ideologies.

Overall, EM presents a hopeful vision of the future (Buttel, 2000), a series of ameliorative win-win scenarios that are nonthreatening and require limited sacrifice. Thus, from the above evolutionary perspective, it should be no surprise that proponents of EM have been successful in mobilizing resources and creating and exploiting political opportunities to begin changing—through process of legitimation, delegitimation, and boundary formation—the number, location, and height of peaks on the adaptive landscapes of industrial and other forms of organization. By changing the fitness of various social forms, it is altering their probabilities of persisting and propagating. And, thus, EM can justifiably claim to be reshaping the future through a double hermeneutic process.

However, the same evolutionary perspective would insist that these benefits of EM as a cultural frame must be weighed against a series of risks and losses. From an evolutionary perspective, history is inherently open-ended and multilinear; there is no privileged path of social change and no built-in bias toward environmental deterioration or improvement—that is, “the future is not set” (York & Rosa, 2003, p. 274). Thus, whether more radical changes are needed than those envisioned by EM is a purely empirical question. By ruling out radical change, EM risks putting more “serious efforts aimed at environmental protection on the ‘back burner’ in favor of policies aimed at enhancing globalization and economic growth” (York et al., 2010, p. 86). Moreover, as discussed above, EM and EMT also marginalize alternative environmental frames and nonscientific epistemologies, including indigenous cultural frames and practices that ultimately may be critical to the resolution of the current ecological crisis. As in the case of Balinese water temples, the only valid test of the efficacy of such alternatives is not their location on the context-independent scale of modernization, but a pragmatic one—whether they work or not in a specific context.

Thus, in relation to pure research, an evolutionary approach to ecological restructuring would advocate the empirical study of the actual environmental implications of alternative cultural frames and practices. In applied terms, it would underscore the benefits of a more ecologically pluralist and experimentalist approach to the current crisis by opening “the black boxes of society, technology and nature” (Hajer, 2009, p. 91). That is, it would seek to enhance human agency and cross-cultural learning—in all directions—by attempting to discover, retain, and evaluate the widest diversity of environmental solutions—including indigenous solutions from non-Western societies (Robbins, 2004) and/or solutions that question the core assumptions and institutions of modern society. Likewise, rather than delegitimating cooperatives and other socioecological experiments, an evolutionary perspective would see them, at an absolute minimum, as abeyance structures (Taylor, 1989/1997) that are preserving and cultivating alternative socioecological solutions as insurance against unpredictable social, economic, political, and environmental change. Finally, it would stress that human adaptation is a context-dependent process, which must always take into account social, economic, political, and biophysical variations in time and space. Rather than superindustrialization, it would emphasize radical relationalism based on frame-relative thinking (McLaughlin, in press). And, thus, it would insist that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions and that building sustainable societies may entail a diversity of legitimating cultural frames and a mixture of associated high and low technology strategies.

Conclusion

The above analysis reinforces Buttel’s (2000) contention that EMT’s rise to prominence has not been based on this perspective being “a well-developed and highly-codified social theory” but instead on “broader political-economic factors” (pp. 123-124). The concept of EM first emerged as a cultural frame put forward to justify a program of environmental reform. The success of this political program has been based first and foremost on an effective framing strategy that has deep cultural resonance in Western societies. This strategy was buttressed by the subsequent development of EMT, which provided an imprimatur of scientific authority for its social, technological, and moral preferences. EMT, in turn, has benefitted from its association with this broader political program. Each of the latter’s successes seems to confirm both its predictions and prescriptions. Nevertheless, a close analysis of EMT reveals a number of serious limitations. After three decades of elaboration, EM theorists have yet to generate a descriptive perspective capable of theorizing the interactions between social structures, human agency, and biophysical environments. EMT’s prescriptive claims continue to needlessly marginalize people and projects who depart from its particular utopian vision and whose alternative perspectives and practices may be critical to building a sustainable future. The root of these difficulties is essentialism and its associated explanatory strategies.

Despite its numerous limitations, EMT and other theories of development nevertheless persist within both sociology and the broader culture. Indeed, Rist (2002) argues that the idea of development “is like a dead star whose light can still be seen” (p. 230). In addition to a commitment to foundationalism and the cultural resonance of such arguments, developmentalism persists because sociologists in general and environmental sociologists in particular have failed to construct a viable alternative that can fully integrate the biophysical environment into social theory. I have argued that evolutionary theories of social change, which reject both essentialism and nominalism in favor of population thinking, can provide such an alternative. Specifically, I explored McLaughlin’s (2011) model of evolutionary change within socially constructed adaptive landscapes as an approach to addressing the descriptive and prescriptive limitations of EMT. By moving beyond the “monoculture of linear time” (Agostino, 2008, p. 232) and conceptualizing social change as a mechanism rather than a direction, this perspective provides a more coherent explanation of the dynamics and diversity of social structures in space and time. It also enhances both the theoretical incorporation and political deployment of agency. And, by employing population thinking within a frame-relative framework, it seamlessly integrates the biophysical environment and explains human adaptation. Finally, by rejecting foundationalism and conceptualizing history as inherently multilinear, it avoids the marginalizing rhetoric of EMT and other theories of development. Properly developed, I believe this perspective can provide a more solid theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding and politically redressing the current ecological crisis.