Organization & Environment

This article analyzes sustainability values reports published by The Body Shop International and bythe Royal Dutch/Shell Group. The authors show how corporate discourses expressed in these precedent-setting texts both reflect and influence sociopolitical struggle over the meanings and practices of sustainable development. Specifically, the authors examine metaphors of transparencyand care used to describe corporate rationales for increasing stake-holder communication, including reporting. Drawing on distinct discursive domains of business accountancyand personal ethics and sentiment, these metaphors promise to reconstruct the interface between the firm and society. Exploring the quite different assumptions on which each of these metaphors relies and their implications for corporate practices of sustainable development, the authors consider whether sustainability values reporting and the dialogue that it claims to facilitate can promote more democratic and socially and environmentally responsive corporate decision making, even as they impose new forms of managerial control.

In this article, the author constructs a sociological narrative as a means of describing and analyzing a project to incinerate an estimated 700,000 tonnes of toxic sludge created as a byproduct of a century of steel making in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada. On one level, the author’s objective here is to document some of the events that have taken place at what is considered one of the worst toxic sites in Canada. On another level, though, the author attempts to outline a method through which we maybetter understand the dynamics of environmental movements. Specifically, in this case, the author uses a multidimensional conceptualization of success and failure that includes scientific, technological, economic, political, social, and cultural components.

William Cronon’s Changes in the Land presaged a radical turn in environmental thought. His seminal work dramatically reconstructed our view of precolonial New England. He dismissed entirelythe received history that portrayed precolonial America as an uninhabited pristine wilderness. In the process, he gave Native Americans agency and forever blurred the line between humans and nature. Since Changes, it has become impossible to realistically think about humans as distinct from the “environment.”

Environmental historymayhelp explain feudalism’s demise and capitalism’s ascent in the 16th century. Medieval Europe was riven by profound socio-ecological contradictions. Feudalism’s environmental degradation pivoted on the lord-peasant relationship, which limited the possibilities for reinvestment in the land. Consequently, feudalism exhausted the soil and the labor power from which it derived revenues, rendering the population vulnerable to disease. The Black Death decisivelyaltered labor-land ratios in favor of western Europe’s peasantry. This new balance of class forces eliminated the possibility of feudal restoration and led the states, landlords, and merchants to favor geographical expansion—an external rather than internal spatial fix to feudal crisis. This external fix, beginning in the Atlantic world, had capitalist commodityproduction and exchange inscribed within it. Capitalism differed radicallyfrom feudalism in that where earlier ecological crises had been local, capitalism globalized them. From this standpoint, the origins of capitalism mayshed light on today’s ecological crises.