Organization & Environment

Allan Schnaiberg’s “treadmill of production” model has formed the single most influential framework of analysis within environmental sociology in the United States. Schnaiberg’s work is often characterized as “neo-Marxist,” but its actual relation to Marxian political economy has been left obscure. The following article examines Marx’s treatment of the treadmill as the crudest historical expression of the capitalist mode of production; the roots of Schnaiberg’s analysis in Baran and Sweezy’s conception of monopoly capital and Gabriel Kolko’s conception of political capitalism; the later divergence of the treadmill theory and Marxian political economy; the disappearance of the explicit critique of capitalism in the joint work of Schnaiberg and Kenneth Alan Gould; and the reconvergence of these traditions in the current phase of environmental sociology characterized by the debate with ecological modernization. The treadmill model demonstrates that the choice between barbarism and civilization is not simply a question of the organization of the human relations within society but also a question of the organization of the human relation to the environment.

The treadmill of production has identified and examined an inherent dynamic that results in the inexorable expansion of capitalism. Although it is argued that a number of benefits accompany this economic expansion, the treadmill of production literature has focused on the environmental costs. The treadmill of production embraces the legacy of C. Wright Mills with a focus on the entangled relationships between two aspects of Mills’s “power elite”—politics and economics. Building on Mills’s inclusion of militarism as one of the three pillars of the power elite, it is argued that there exists a treadmill of destruction that maintains a distinct logic relating to geopolitics and arms races that cannot be reduced to capitalism. The 20th century has witnessed unprecedented growth in the research, testing, storage, and employment of both conventional weaponry and weapons of mass destruction. In focusing on this development, the distinctive role the state plays in creating a treadmill of destruction is stressed.

The treadmill of production concept can be significantly enriched if it is incorporated into a world-systemic approach to the economic/ecological/political processes that development around dominant nations’ strategies for access to the raw materials that the treadmill requires that they consume at exponentially expanding rates.

The author illustrates the role of NAFTA in the undermining of government attempts to regulate environmental conditions and public health. Two case studies under NAFTA Chapter 11 are examined: (a) Ethyl Corporation v. Canada and (b) Methanex Corporation v. United States. It is argued that multilateral trade agreements have resulted in limiting the power of governmental bodies to regulate their own environmental conditions and that this has been a consequence of two historical processes: (a) the expansion of trade liberalization under free market systems—part of what Schnaiberg calls the “treadmill of production”—and (b) a shift in sovereignty from the nation-state and multinational corporations to consortia of the former two and newly created “supranational organisms”—what Hardt and Negri call “Empire.”

Here, the author reviews arguments about the uses of collaborative and performance-based information in environmental politics. The use of information is considered as a way to transform treadmill politics. In particular, recent experiments in participatory forest standard setting and certification operate to generate information about forest practice and policy for interested parties. The case that environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or other civil society groups armed with collaborative and performance-based information can push more effectively for social change is considered, as is the role of the state in (potentially) fostering information provision as public policy. Results presented here follow the completion of 40 interviews with certification actors in the United States, archival research on key documents, analysis of transcripts of industry and NGO conferences on certification, and field tours with managers of certified lands.

Sociology is known for its academic debates. These debates are vehicles to accumulate understanding and interpretation of a constantly changing modern order. In the environmental social sciences, one of the axes of debate recently centered between Treadmill of Production ideas and Ecological Modernization perspectives. This article reviews the nature of that debate and aims to move beyond it. In using the sociology of networks and flows, the future research agenda for the environmental social sciences is reframed and reformulated.