Organization & Environment

According to one perspective, organizations will only be sustainable if the dominant neoclassical model of the firm is transformed, rather than supplemented, by social and environmental priorities. This article seeks to develop a “sustainability business model” (SBM)—a model where sustainability concepts shape the driving force of the firm and its decision making. The SBM is drawn from two case studies of organizations considered to be leaders in operationalizing sustainability and is informed by the ecological modernization perspective of sustainability. The analysis reveals that organizations adopting a SBM must develop internal structural and cultural capabilities to achieve firm-level sustainability and collaborate with key stakeholders to achieve sustainability for the system that an organization is part of.

Research on urban development and environmental hazards has focused attention on problems associated with current industrial facilities, derelict industrial brownfields, and government-listed hazardous waste sites. Yet we continue to know very little about environmental contaminants remaining on past industrial sites that have since converted to other uses. This article develops a methodology for examining the prevalence of such sites and their historical conversion and then presents an illustrative case study of this methodology for New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1955 to 2006. Contrary to expectations, results show that most sites occupied by polluting industries in the past have since converted to other uses and that this conversion is most common in predominantly White neighborhoods. These findings extend and complicate extant research on urban industrial hazards and environmental justice, calling attention to the potential accumulation of historically generated contaminants not just in identifiable brownfields and lingering industrial corridors but also in neighborhoods throughout older cities.

Environmental theorists frequently argue that human—nature alienations are to blame for the increasingly severe global environmental crisis. This article offers empirical evidence that supports such claims. Data and theory presented here show that phenomenal dissociation— defined as the lack of immediate, sensual engagement with the consequences of our everyday actions and with the human and nonhuman others that we affect with our actions—increases destructive tendency and that awareness is not enough to curb destructiveness. This study begins to reveal some of the psychodynamics by which phenomenal dissociations lead to destructive tendency; discusses how modern institutions, organizational structures, and technologies propagate harms by mediating between actor and consequences; and argues that environmental psychology, which commonly focuses on attitudinal variables such as awareness and concern, must expand its reach to account for the pervasive phenomenal dissociations of contemporary life.

This article discusses Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. It is a key foundational work of critical reflection from the growing canon of American environmental writing, and this book remains well-worth reading by the general public, environmental policy-makers, and ecological thinkers. The analysis reviews the conflicted but enduring popularity of Abbey in the American environmental movement based upon his remarkable meditations in this book about the desert Southwest, modern industrialism, the Grand Canyon, and American society as these thoughts grew out of his work as a park ranger at The Arches National Monument.

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