Toward a Sociology of Biodiversity Loss

On the Applicability of Dominant Theories in Environmental Sociology

Environmental sociology has a rich array of established theories that can help us understand aspects of biodiversity loss. Among these, the most commonly applied to empirical analyses are the Treadmill of Production (ToP) theory, Ecological Modernization Theory (EMT), human ecology, world polity theory, and global political economy theories (including world-systems, ecologically unequal exchange, and dependency theories). ToP theory (Schnaiberg and Gould 1994) posits that continued industrial development will drive higher demand for “natural resources” and thereby cause mounting ecological impacts, since development is driven by profit-seeking capitalists who do not consider generalized costs and benefits for society as a whole. In contrast, the central premise of EMT is essentially that through the institutionalization of ecologically minded industrial reform, “continued industrial development [offers] the best option for escaping ecological crisis” (Fisher and Freudenburg 2001:702). Human ecologists note the important role demographic, economic, and technological factors play in determining the scale of environmental impacts (York, Rosa, and Dietz 2003). World polity theory (Frank, Hironaka, and Schofer 2000) argues that international nongovernment organizations and progressive government bodies are central to institutionalizing environmental protections. Global political economy theories emphasize the role unequal trade relations (often established through the legacy of colonialism and military interventions) play in allowing affluent nations to exploit the natural resources of poorer nations (Jorgenson 2006).

There is a substantial literature assessing these theories with cross-national quantitative analyses, but this literature, for the most part, focuses on assessing the factors contributing to environmental problems that are more easily quantifiable than biodiversity, such as carbon dioxide emissions, other forms of air pollution, and indicators of resource consumption (e.g., Jorgenson and Clark 2012; York and Rosa 2012; York et al. 2003). There are several studies, however, that have applied these theories to cross-national analyses of indicators of threats to biodiversity, using endangered or threatened species listings as barometers of biodiversity and biodiversity loss (Clausen and York 2008; Hoffmann 2004; McKinney et al. 2009; McKinney, Kick, and Fulkerson 2010; Naidoo and Adamowicz 2001; Shandra, Leckband, and McKinney 2009; Shandra et al. 2010). These studies have results generally consistent with ToP (e.g., economic growth is a key driver), and, variously, have found support of ecologically unequal exchange (e.g., the threat to species is greater in less powerful nations), human ecology (national demographic characteristics matter), and world polity (the strength of environmental nongovernment organizations in nations is associated with lower rates of species endangerment).

These studies not only are important but also show the challenges of analyzing biodiversity loss. Due to a lack of data and the challenges of operationalizing biodiversity, these studies are unable to directly incorporate the ever-changing dynamics of the multiple dimensions of biodiversity. One obvious limitation of such analyses is that societal characteristics, such as the scientific, technological, and general institutional capability of each country to determine what species are endangered or threatened as well as the various political processes through which each species is designated as such, heavily mediate national data on endangered and threatened species. In addition, measures of endangerment do not track species extinctions (many of which may happen before the species have been identified by science), intraspecific loss of diversity, or decline in diversity of ecological communities. The theories used offer many important insights, but, as noted above, are more amenable to empirically assessing environmental problems that are readily quantified, like pollution emissions.

Unlike the quantity of emissions or resource consumption, the state of biodiversity is difficult to conceptualize, let alone measure as a one-dimensional quantity. Even bypassing the difficulty of what aspect of biodiversity to measure—for example, intraspecific genetic diversity, types of ecosystems, and so on—and focusing only on the number of extant species does not make for simple analyses. Mora et al. (2011) stated, “[i]n spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database . . . some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description” (p. 1). Note that this statement is not regarding tracking the status of various species, but it regards the even more basic step of first identifying and classifying them. In other words, our knowledge of the variation in our planet’s species is far less complete than our knowledge of the current state and history of its atmospheric composition and climatic regimes. What is more, the consequences of human activities for other species are not in direct proportion to the actions that set these processes in motion. Species, unlike greenhouse gases, self-replicate according to highly contingent (and increasingly socially driven) processes, rendering our relationships to them highly conditional and, comparatively, far more indefinite than our relationships with greenhouses gases.

Thus, where ToP, EMT, and ecological unequal exchange, for example, have a strength in parsimony in terms of explaining pollution emissions and resource consumption, this strength becomes a weakness if the questions we are asking demand that we view nonhuman nature as more complex than a basic supply depot and waste repository. These theories understand nature largely in terms of how certain elements of it may fit through production (or reform) processes. They ultimately do not examine ecological processes themselves. In fact, these theories have been generally labeled “impact” theories (e.g., Rudel, Roberts, and Carmin 2011; York et al. 2003), in that they focus on how human social processes affect the quantity of resource consumption and the production of pollution, and generally do not incorporate the dynamics of the ecosystems being impacted nor do they interrogate how ecosystems may impact human social processes. Despite early calls (e.g., Catton and Dunlap 1978) in environmental sociology to include these dynamics, they are largely left out, often due to the challenges of measuring and modeling such complex systems, and thus both nonhuman beings and the ecosystems they exist through enter into these analyses in a largely static, ahistorical, and lifeless form (see Rudel 2012 for an analogous critique).

As resource extraction (e.g., logging, mining) and pollution (e.g., toxic emissions to air, land, and water) are clearly key forces driving biodiversity loss, impact theories undoubtedly have made important contributions to helping us understand the ecological challenges we face. However, additional theoretical developments are needed to fully understand biodiversity loss. There are approaches in environmental sociology that compliment impact theories and recognize some of the key issues we address here, such as the importance of understanding historical processes and the nature of complex systems. The metabolic rift theoretical tradition (Foster 2000), which is based on Marx’s insights, focuses on the qualitative dynamics of socioecological systems, providing an approach that allows for more nuanced assessments than those from the primarily quantitative analyses common to impact theories. Theorizing in world ecology (Moore 2015) draws on metabolic rift theory to conceptualize the fundamental unity of socioecological systems, recognizing that the inner workings of capitalism at once shape nature and society (which are not separable from one another), rendering them co-constitutive. Critical human ecology (York and Mancus 2009) explicitly aims to incorporate historical processes and transhistorical forces into analyses, recognizing the importance of contingent events, as well as account for the dialectical interactions within ecosystems, including human systems. In addition, the social-biophysical stratification tradition (e.g., Stuart 2016) lays an explicitly critical realist foundation for examining interactions between and within human and nonhuman processes.

Our approach is in line with critical human ecology, metabolic rift theory, and the social-biophysical stratification tradition, but we aim to add further theoretical insights from the larger discipline that help us to understand the processes leading to, and the consequences of, biodiversity loss. Therefore, below we incorporate conversations from outside environmental sociology that we suggest provide a suitable foundation for appropriately conceptualizing biodiversity loss as an outcome emerging from interrelated social structural, spatial, and biophysical contexts and add insights to the existing body of theory in environmental sociology. Our aim is thus, in part, to build bridges between environmental sociology and the broader discipline, providing a platform for future collaborations.

We begin by establishing an ontological perspective that has the species that make up a key dimension of biodiversity at its center.

The Contexts of Interaction

It is vital to expand the fundamental sociological insight that no individual human can be properly understood without considering her social context and interactions with other people to include the fundamental ecological insight that no species, including Homo sapiens, can be properly understood without considering its biophysical context and connections with other species and abiotic processes. The interdisciplinary research tradition known as coupled human and natural systems (CHANS; Liu, Dietz, Carpenter, Alberti, et al. 2007; Liu, Dietz, Carpenter, Folke, et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2013) is grounded in this recognition, and provides an important vanguard for the approach to biodiversity loss we develop here. The CHANS approach aims to link local and global biophysical and social processes in analyses drawing on an understanding of complex systems. Although our approach is more informed by sociological theory, we consider it to fit in with CHANS scholarship.

Moreover, as many biologists, geneticists, sociologists, geographers, philosophers, CHANS researchers, and others have understood for some time (e.g., Liu, Dietz, Carpenter, Alberti, et al. 2007; Tansley 1935; West-Eberhard 2003; York and Mancus 2009), species are not simply acting in an environment, they are co-evolving with their environment. Each organism is at all times altering its surroundings, just as it is being altered by them. To consider the species, or any element of analysis, we must then extend beyond the element in itself to its full host of relationships.

In a strictly social sense, this general ontological point is not new to social theory. As Emirbayer (1997) emphasized, the best of social theory has demanded a similar “relational” perspective, one in which we do not conceive of social processes as static, atomistic elements, but as dynamic, unfolding relations. We must analyze the elements and mechanisms under examination within their, as he puts it, “spatiotemporal contexts . . . (through) their relations with other elements within fields of mutual determination and flux” (p. 288). Indeed, for more than 150 years, a wide variety of otherwise incongruous social theory has, at least implicitly, held a similar general perspective. From the inverted Hegelianism of Marx, whose philosophy is founded upon the dialectic among and between material and social change, to the Kantian approach of Simmel (1971), who noted that “we can only view individuals through their relationships with others, for . . . (i)n brief, he [sic] influences and is influenced by them” (p. 23), to Abbott (1992) and Bourdieu (1992), numerous scholars emphasize that individual actors are incomprehensible without incorporating the ever-evolving contexts and processes through which they operate.

Today, a more explicit relational perspective has gained wide acceptance in many corners of sociology (see Alimi, Demetriou, and Bosi 2015 for review). Relational sociology was directly embraced, for example, by Tilly (1995, 2003, 2008), who over his career transformed from “an old structuralist” to what he called a “relational realist” (Tarrow 2008:225), and whose later work can render our emphasis on the contexts of interaction more tangible. In Tilly’s examinations of, for example, broad regularities in social movements and state formations, he specifically avoided explaining phenomena in terms of direct cause-effect relationships among recurrent structures, processes, or categories of actors. Instead, Tilly approached social phenomena—from the proletarianization of a peasant class to a coup d’état—as by definition differing from each other in terms of relational circumstance, sequence, plasticity, and boundedness. Nevertheless, Tilly (1995) insisted that this variability does not make proletarianizations or coups d’états any less explicable. It only demands a different sort of explanation. Instead of imagining, he suggested, that social revolutions, for example, are “like ocean tides, whose regularities (can) be deduce(d) from sufficient knowledge of celestial motion” one should understand that they are “actually confronting phenomena like great floods, equally coherent occurrences from a causal perspective, but enormously variable in structure, sequences, and consequences as a function of terrain, previous precipitation, built environment, and human response” (p. 1601).

Sociological explanations of anthropogenic biodiversity loss, we contend, should heed Tilly’s advice. Biodiversity loss is a broad, transhistorical process, but one that cannot be explained through regularities in cause-effect relationships among variables. Instead, what is required is an approach in which valid analysis rests upon a relational ontology. Here, processes of biodiversity loss are represented as continuous, bounded, dynamic, and complex, yet also as processes that are nevertheless fully intelligible through interdisciplinary examination of how various human and environmental processes come together to produce them.

For our argument, we therefore expand this widely accepted relational position in sociology to include not just human processes but nonhuman processes, thus recognizing how we, as do all living beings, operate among a multitude of ever-changing, open-ended, ontologies. Our argument, like Latour’s (2005), is therefore one that explicitly includes nonhumans in social analysis. However, unlike Latour (1987)—who writes that “we can never use . . .—Nature—to explain how and why a controversy was settled” (p. 99)—we will include nonhuman material processes as legitimate and influential sets of open systems, both connected to and separate from human processes, that can be relied upon as referents in analysis, knowing full well that knowledge about them is socially mediated (see Malm 2017 for discussion).

Accordingly, we should not understand the genesis of all human or social “impacts” on ecosystems—including those that lead to biodiversity loss—to take place outside the contemporaneous socioecological structures and influences through which the impacts were set in motion. This is because impacts may only become such through the co-determinism of a panoply of human and ecological processes; they are conditioned by and through them. This is true of both species extinction and species protection. Indeed, as Brechin et al. (2003) cogently argued, “social justice and effective nature protection, go hand in hand” (p. x; also see Brechin et al. 2002).

What is more, human and ecological processes are increasingly co-determined across wider spaces than ever before. As Liu et al. (2013) argued, because of recent developments in trade, transnational land deals, technology transfer, and other factors, human and ecological systems are increasingly interactive across formerly distant places. They capture this development through the concept of telecoupling, which stands for “socioeconomic and environmental interactions between couple human and natural systems of distances” (p. 25). A relational perspective of biodiversity should then be sensitive to how contexts of interaction are ever less bounded by space.

To explain biodiversity loss through direct cause-effect relationships among variables is to ignore the full concert of relevant factors—some possibly stronger than others but still causally significant—that comprise such complex, open, dynamic, and increasingly telecoupled systems.

Approaching Biodiversity Loss on a Social Scale

The massive loss of biodiversity on a global scale is not unprecedented in geologic history. There have been other episodes during the history of Earth, with five previous mass extinctions standing out, the most recent of which wiped out the dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago. Human social processes cannot threaten long-range biodiversity from the perspective of this, geologic, time scale.

However, importantly for humanity and the other creatures who currently occupy Earth, what we can do and are doing is threaten the dynamics of biodiversity in terms of our own, human, time scale. We can threaten the (relative) stability of many ecosystem processes, a stability that contemporary social processes inherently rely upon. And this situation is historically unique. Never in the history of the planet has one species mobilized the material world, literally transforming the earth and altering global biophysical processes, at the scale and speed at which humans are doing so at present.

If we are to understand biodiversity loss, we must attempt to understand, at appropriate temporal and spatial scales, the myriad social processes through which this transformation of the material world is being carried out. Such social processes are obvious in our cities, agricultural land, and factories. However, as Mitchell (1996) pointed out, even the most seemingly Edenic landscapes are often the result of human influence and were established at considerable human cost. In particular, he demonstrates the duel complexion of California landscapes, in that they can “appear unworked . . . natural” (p. 6) while, at the same time, the (often exploitative) social processes through which a landscape came to be, the toil by which forests are cleared, rivers deepened, and canals built to produce a particular scene, are easily forgotten. In terms of this article, we can safely add that along with the human labor it took to produce such landscapes, potentially now extinct species that may have created and relied upon the relative stability of the transformed landscape are hidden as well. Understanding biodiversity loss on our own, human time scale is then to look both where human influence is obvious and where it is not. In turn, focusing on the many social processes by which biodiversity loss is occurring does not strictly delimit our focus to social processes per se, subsuming nonhuman nature into the social. Rather, the point is to recognize all relevant systems, processes, and interactions—human, nonhuman, and biophysical—at appropriate scales.

Understanding what scale is appropriate is no easy task. The restructuring of political, cultural, and economic life associated with globalization has challenged researchers to confront the problem of conceptualizing social scale (Herod 2011), and resultant discussions have centered upon the degree to which the national, regional, and/or local have been influenced, or even totally up-rooted, by the global. This conversation has transformed previous stable notions of scalar differentiation, as it has become increasingly clear that understanding social life as an ever-more dynamic process means examining tensions between the local and the global. Although this debate is far from resolved, what it has made clear is that the scales, spatial and/or temporal, at which we approach any problem shape “how we engage with the material world” (Herod 2011:251). It is therefore important to be reflexive about the view from a particular scalar position, noting that potential scales of analysis typically are not discrete, naturalistic categories, but rather created for analytic convenience.

So long as we incorporate applicable scalar differentiations among and between nonhuman and biophysical processes, approaching the problem of biodiversity loss is not entirely different from more traditional analyses in the social sciences. For instance, while the spatial scale at which contemporary social processes are affecting global biodiversity is unparalleled, periods of human driven extinction are not historically unique. There is compelling evidence that indigenous peoples across the Americas, Aboriginal peoples on the Australian continent, Polynesians in Hawaii, as well as many other societies throughout human history, have set in motion regional extinction events (Burney and Flannery 2005). From the perspective of global biodiversity, these discrete events had only a modest impact. From the perspective of the Hawaiian Islands, however, the impact of colonization by Polynesians was extraordinary and understanding Polynesian migration is instrumental to understanding biodiversity in Hawaii. What is more: to understand how Polynesian migration set in motion these localized extinction events, at the very least, we need to incorporate both the processes that led to the migration and biophysical processes endemic to Hawaii, processes that operate at vastly different temporal (human sociocultural time vs. evolutionary time) and spatial (the Pacific Ocean vs. a small island chain) scales. Indeed, the scales at which to investigate biodiversity loss must be set by the processes under study, not determined a priori (Haila 2002). How to bound the context, what spatial scale to examine and how far back in time to investigate are dependent upon the demands of the case at hand (Sewell 1996:878).

Various dynamics integrate in different ways at different scales, and to appreciate this we should cast our nets wide. As far as is possible, focus should first be on higher scales, and then on reducing the problem to make it analytically manageable. Doing so will provide a perspective that incorporates how relevant background conditions generate the social gravity against which such dynamics operate (York and Clark 2006). For example, many important social processes operate quite differently under twenty-first century capitalism than they did during the time of Polynesian migration to Hawaii. As these distinctive background conditions set the stage for social action, it is important we include their unique dynamics.

A concrete example will further ground this point. Populations of the Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri), the largest great ape, have declined 77 percent over one generation from 1994 to 2014 and have been confined to eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (Plumptre et al. 2016). At a national scale, the DRC’s brutal civil war and mining operations are mostly responsible for the Grauer’s gorilla now being critically endangered, as militias and miners will often hunt, then eat or sell them as bushmeat to other militias, miners, or in expanding urban and rural bushmeat markets (Guynup 2017). At a global scale, however, the ongoing presence of militias and miners is in part a result of the digital revolution. Explosive growth in computer and cell phone use meant that demand for coltan, a metallic ore mined in the DRC which allows capacitors to handle high voltages and temperatures, exploded as well. Although coltan mining is not the only cause of civil war (Laudati 2013), the United Nations has identified coltan mining as “the engine of the conflict in the DRC” (United Nations Security Council 2001:IV 215). As of 2014, militarized conflict related to coltan mining has induced an estimate 2.5 to 9 million human casualties (Moran et al. 2014), and such conflict has directly coincided with the decline in Grauer’s gorilla populations.

To be clear, we are not claiming that transformations in global capital demands are singularly responsible for the critical status of Grauer’s gorillas. Nevertheless, they have certainly fused with Grauer’s gorilla populations in ways which have, at least in part, set the stage for their near extinction. Indeed, as Vandermeer and Perfecto (2005) demonstrated, these and other global processes such as international banking and the increasing commodification of global agriculture are indelibly connected to current processes of biodiversity loss.

In total, to best capture the dynamics that drive species declines it is necessary to incorporate multiple scales. First, researchers should pay attention to how relevant background dynamics (here the global expansion of cell phone and computer markets) operate and change, and then they should reduce these dynamics spatially and temporally to understand exactly how global, local, and other unique forces interact at various causal strengths to change biodiversity. A corollary to this point is that, while it is quite clear that anthropogenic biodiversity loss is not purely set in motion by capitalistic social processes, there can be no doubt that the dynamics through which anthropogenic biodiversity loss operates underwent substantial changes as much of the human world shifted to a capitalist economy. The biodiversity loss crisis became global in scale during this shift and continues to evolve through this shift. Incorporating the implications of this change in background conditions is vital for analysis. Although contemporary relationships between social and ecological processes cannot be fully explained by capitalistic processes, they do increasingly work through them (Foster 2000; Malm 2017; Moore 2015; York and Mancus 2009).

Biodiversity between General Processes and Sequences of Events

The key metatheoretical theme underlying this article is that to understand biodiversity loss, we must combine theoretical approaches that seek to understand how broad structures and contexts shape historical circumstances, to capture the full range of multiscalar variegation through which the global phenomenon of biodiversity loss occurs, along with analyses of how sequences of particularistic historical events unfold, to respect the specific contexts and relationships of extinction events. In doing so, we can consequently theorize the global phenomenon of biodiversity loss as a general process while simultaneously investigating specific instances of loss (or threats to biodiversity) in a historical manner, focusing on the particular dynamics, general or specific, that impede or catalyze them.

The tension between general processes and specific, event-based, explanations (as opposed to the general determining the specific), and the respective roles of general patterns and historical contingency, are, again, part of established sociological theory. Abbott (1988), for example, has long demonstrated that sociological analyses need not assume that causality can only flow from the big down to the small or between attributes or events of similar size, but rather should incorporate how causality can carry “from small to the large, from the arbitrary to the general, from the minor event to the major development” (p. 173). The specific, in other words, can shape the general. General structures are thus not to be conceived as given, unchanging conditions, but rather as processes that undergo sometimes unpredictable changes over the course of history. An eventful, sequence-based, perspective ensures an approach that accepts social processes as “fluctuating entities” (p. 182), as opposed to ahistorical variables, and thus captures the active relationship between, as he puts it, the “small” and the “large.” Sewell (1996) has a similar view in that social change can be understood through the tension between specific sequences of events and general social structures. Sewell (1992) noted that the term “structure” is perhaps “impossible to define adequately” (p. 1), but is nevertheless essential to sociological work. His working definition is that structures are “constituted by mutually sustaining cultural schemas and sets of resources that empower and constrain social action and tend to be reproduced by that action” (p. 27). For Sewell, such social structures can be remarkably durable, and will often persist even in the face of the long-term accumulation of small-scale changes. When structural change does take place, however, it frequently occurs through events that are more than just the accumulation of smaller moments, but historical sequences that actually “tend to transform social relations in ways that could not be fully predictable” (Sewell 1996:843; also see York and Clark 2006:435–38 on this general point). Theorization should therefore incorporate both the contextual specificity, and potential power, of the event (or sequence of events), and recognize that such events, no matter how transformative, take place against the general dynamics of relevant social structures that can either facilitate or inhibit them.

For instance, Rudel (2009), in his exemplary examination of anthropogenic landscape transformation, draws on this literature to compare suburban sprawl in New Jersey and large-scale agricultural expansion in the Ecuadorian Amazon. He demonstrates that a proper sociological explanation of landscape transformation emphasizes “the role of strategic actions by states and coalitions of interested parties in transforming landscapes” (p. 129), but only incorporates such actions within the contingent sequence of transformative events in which they fall. In addition, Rudel insists, these sequences of events should be set against broader historical patterns, in this case the “special opportunities to profit from landscape transformations” globally after World War II (p. 133). Rudel thus frames anthropogenic landscape transformation as a general process, but nevertheless investigates specific events in a historical manner, focusing on the particular dynamics which either inspire or limit distinct paths.

Similarly, there are various general processes, both sociological and ecological, that give us insight into the biodiversity loss crisis. For example, basic ecological patterns, such as those related to energy flows through trophic structures and the regularities between biodiversity/extinction rates and the size of habitat islands provide important anchors for biodiversity analysis (Burney and Flannery 2005). Also, the general properties of capitalism, including its growth dynamics, and the general structure of demographic processes are important for understanding how contemporary social forces influence extinction rates (Browswimmer 2002). But, as we have emphasized, to understand how and why the characteristics and survival of specific ecosystems or species have changed over time, particularistic historical analyses are needed that recognize the importance of what events have actually occurred and in what order for explaining changes in the relationships that makeup biodiversity. Therefore, a central part of the foundation we lay here is an appreciation for the need for both generalist analysis and attention to particular contexts. The extent to which a particular change in biodiversity is due to a general process or to a specific sequence of unpredictable events should be an empirical question, not an a priori preference. In any one instance, there will be both general processes occurring and particularistic events that explain the happenings. In the next, penultimate, section, we provide a short case study to render this point, as well as those above, more concrete.

The Case of Kudzu

The spread of the Kudzu (Pueria Montana) plant in North America provides an informative example of the processes leading to biodiversity loss. Today Kudzu, an invasive species, is having a significant impact on biodiversity in the American southeast. It is a heavy, hardy vine with massive roots that allow it to survive repeated herbicide applications. It quickly grows in such thick blankets that it suffocates anything below it, and as a result often uproots trees and collapses human structures in the process (Britton, Orr, and Sun 2002). To understand how this state of affairs came to be, however, we must understand the interrelated biophysical and social processes, both general and specific, which set this state of affairs in motion.

Kudzu was intentionally introduced to North America from Asia in 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and then again to the southern United States in 1883 at the New Orleans Exposition. It was first introduced for culture, then for economy. Early marketers successfully promoted it as an ornamental vine to be hung atop porches and courtyards, and it quickly proved to be a popular source of shade. At this early stage of introduction, it was often supported by a trellis or other structure that did not allow the plant much contact with the ground, inhibiting normal reproduction through denying the plant the ability to take root (Blaustein 2001). By the turn of the twentieth century, however, it spread beyond the front porch with the encouragement of U.S. Government, which launched a massive promotion campaign and provided funds for it to be planted to reduce soil erosion in agricultural lands (Winberry and Jones 1973). Consequently, it was soon planted on more than 1.2 million hectares of farmland (Blaustein 2001). With the arrival of the dust bowl—which was caused by an interaction of climatic change, colonialism, and agricultural practices (Holleman 2016)—many of these hectares and porches were left unattended. Unmonitored, Kudzu spread out of human control with no natural enemies or established role in the food chain (Miller and Edwards 1983). By 1953, it was removed from U.S. Government lists of permissible cover plants, and by 1997, it was listed as a federal noxious weed. Today it covers over 3 million hectares in the United States, mostly in the south, and spreads over 50,000 more each year (Grebner et al. 2011).

Over this period, its impact on southern ecosystems, economies, and cultures has been enormous. Kudzu climbs power poles and electrical lines, toppling many over, costing power companies $1.5 million per year (Britton et al. 2002), and otherwise significantly impacts forestry and agricultural operations with an overall economic impact between $100 to $500 million annually (Forseth and Innis 2004). Many people in the American southeast have grown accustomed to its inevitable presence and, according to Blaustein (2001), today respond to an encroaching plant with a mixture of “humor, irony or even romanticized hopelessness” (p. 58). It is widely known not only as “the vine that ate the south” but also as the “mile a minute vine,” the “typical government gift,” and the “Sodom vine” (p. 59). Since at least the 1990s, it has even become an adopted element in southeastern homes. It is used in ornamental basket-weaving (Hoots and Baldwin 1996), in Christmas wreaths (May 1998), and is sometimes consumed after being given a tempura-style bath and then fried in canola oil (Brill 2011).

Its impact on southern economies and cultures is likely equaled by its impact on biodiversity. The southeastern landscape has high levels of endemism—many species used this region as a refuge as they retreated from glacial advance during the last ice age (Stein, Kutner, and Adams 2000)—and this “high level of endemism and regional diversity could be permanently endangered by the spread of P. Montana” (Forseth and Innis 2004:407). It is a homogenizing force, one that aggressively blankets landscapes, causing death in established vegetation either through shading or its sheer weight. For instance, Munger (2002) noted that Kudzu arrests landscape succession, the cyclical process by which plant communities change over time, in trees and shrubs (if not as much in smaller perennial plants). In addition, the spread of Kudzu “has the potential to raise ozone levels in the region by increasing nitric oxide (NO) emissions from soils” (Hickman et al. 2010). Although it is important to note that not all invasive species have negative impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity (e.g., Servick 2018), Kudzu is producing more problems than not.

There is no question that to accurately comprehend the threat of Kudzu to biodiversity, we must comprehend interactions across and between biophysical and social processes. Both social and biological parties were active; social actors brought Kudzu from one continent and established it on another, just as Kudzu ultimately affected social processes enough to be listed as a federal noxious weed and to be adopted, if begrudgingly, as a part of southern culture. General processes, such as biophysical energy flows (in this case Kudzu blocking light to plants below it) as well as the properties of capitalist world trade and agricultural practices, played a large part. In this example, then, the capitalist world market, contemporary agricultural practices, and southern culture are among the most relevant social structures that interacted with each other as well as with biophysical energy flows to facilitate the spread of kudzu.

In turn, the specific contexts of contingent phenomena were also important, such as the particular sequence of events that led to kudzu first being introduced through Centennial Expositions for aesthetic purposes, then recommended by the United States government for erosion control just before the dust bowl, and finally transforming into a significant ecological, economic, and cultural hazard after being left to its own devices in numerous novel ecosystems. None of these events could have happened without the previous event, and all were operating against multiple social and biophysical histories and scales. Notably, the introduction of kudzu occurred in the context where the world was linked by increasingly rapid forms of transportation, and as a result should be considered a late nineteenth century example of telecoupling. Established ecosystems in the American South had been highly disturbed by agriculture and other human actions at this specific telecoupled moment, opening a niche for a species like Kudzu. Indeed, as Alderman (2015) observed, “Kudzu’s historical development” in the southern United States should be conceptualized, “as a series of distinct stages (for) it is increasingly difficult to characterize the vine and its relationship with humans in terms of a single, universal status or role” (p. 52).

In all, to approach an applicable framework, this short example demonstrates the importance of incorporating both general processes and specific events in our analyses.

Conclusion: Framing Contexts and Events

We envision not only a landscape of possibilities for sociological research on biodiversity that is based on analysis of biophysical contexts and social structures, but also the way actual possibilities are realized dependent upon the chronology of contingent events. The processes involved may include the historical legacy of a certain kind of subsistence agriculture, the creation of a dam, the characteristics of a small island versus a large continent, a specific cultural practice or particular economic system, or the recent formation of a regional trade agreement. Whatever these processes may be, our primary goal is to understand the means through which they combine to drive biodiversity loss. To do so, we contend, it is important to conceptualize biodiversity loss as an outcome that emerges from interrelated social structural, spatial, and biophysical contexts and/or events that can either facilitate or inhibit it, rather than simply looking for general cause-effect relationships among variables. We have demonstrated how the foundation for such analysis can be found in both classical and contemporary sociological theory, from a relational ontological perspective to a view that consistently operates among the tension between general processes and specific events.

Moreover, we contend that environmental sociology would greatly benefit from incorporating theoretical perspectives from a wider body of sociological inquiry that explicitly focus on the topics we have outlined above: contexts of interaction, scale, and tensions between general processes and events. Environmental sociology has recently carved out a central place within the discipline, a development facilitated by increased attention to core sociological concerns such as inequality and stratification (Scott and Johnson 2016). Critical engagement with core theoretical concerns in historical sociology and social theory will further this trend, just as it will provide grist for important theoretical and substantive developments regarding biodiversity as well as environment and society relationships writ large.

Likewise, we have demonstrated that broader conversations in sociology, in particular conversations in relational sociology (Alimi, Demetriou, and Bosi 2015; Emirbayer 1997) and historical sociology (Abbott 1988: Sewell 1996; Tilly 2008), contain theoretical premises that can clearly be directed toward questions regarding biodiversity loss and connected environmental issues, for example, invasive species. Nevertheless, surprisingly little of this sociological literature has taken the environment seriously. As such, in addition to organizing and directing this literature to build a theoretical approach for sociologists to appropriately investigate the problem of biodiversity loss, one contribution of this article stems from how we employ tools from a wide array of established, largely nonenvironmental, sociological theories, and transform these approaches as we incorporate nonhuman actors and more general biophysical processes. Identifying such spaces across the discipline is now essential, for contemporary questions regarding social change involve, at minimum, awareness of environmental problems and changing relationships with biophysical processes. One aim of this article is then to use the contemporary crisis of anthropogenic biodiversity loss to highlight critical, ongoing theoretical spaces for broader, more generalist, sociological conversations about these issues. Mobilizing multiple traditions and combining their foci on social worlds with biophysical processes will not only enrich sociological theory but also broaden its applicability as we move forward in a century many believe will be in large part defined by the increasing dynamism of our indelible relationship to the nonhuman world.