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“Beyond the Nature/Society Divide: Learning to Think about a Mountain” was published in 1995 (Freudenburg, Frickel, & Gramling, 1995) just as environmental sociology was entering into its first internal philosophical debate, waged between materialists and social constructionists. Today the debate has moved beyond the article’s relatively modest arguments, but the work continues to be cited and earn critical attention for its contributions to that earlier conversation. This remembrance essay recalls the article’s publication history, begun in 1992, leading to its eventual publication in Sociological Forum and offers philosophical, sociological, and personal reflections on that process.

In this introductory chapter, we briefly outline the history of the political economy of raw materials, focusing particularly on the relationship between raw materials and economic development. We then introduce the chapters of this volume, and we conclude by discussing future directions for research in this area.

The differences of urban and rural as social spaces, their functions in society, as well as their mutual dependence have been a subject of scientific thinking since the antique times. This chapter revisits the topic from a sociological point of view, studying the evolution of the functions of rural in relation to urban, and how this evolution was reflected in the basic streams of rural research. The text ends by discussing rural research in relation to present social, economic and ecological tendencies. It is argued that the post-productionist phase of rural studies is losing its plausibility, because of the return of material functions for the countryside, during such recent trends as the global food crises and the greenhouse effect. This chapter discusses the prognosis made by the three founding fathers of rural sociology, Pitirim Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmerman and Charles J. Galpin (1932) that the society is melting together into a ‘rurban’ society, and takes distance from this prognosis for several reasons, for example because ecological tendencies seem to renew rather than diminish the differences between rural and urban. It is further argued that ecosystems have increasing impacts on societies in the form of adapted ‘greenhouse rationalism’. Such changes place rural research in a crossroads, posing the question whether to pay attention to increasingly important impacts of ecosystems on society, or not.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse and problematize the relations between international forestry companies and wood energy in the context of climate change in Chile and Sweden.

Based on interviews, field observations and analysis of documents, case studies of international forestry companies and wood energy in local areas of Chile and Sweden are examined comparatively. A conceptual framework combining political ecology and environmental communication is developed to approach the cases.

The paper finds that the two international forestry companies studied here have widely incorporated the use of wood energy as a renewable and carbon neutral energy strategy for their forestry business. Second, the paper finds that wood energy is used as a way to reproduce forestry development in the two countries, which is contested by NGOs and activists which are today articulating critical approaches to forestry development in the two countries. Third, related to the former finding, the paper finds that the incorporation of wood energy into the forest sector’s interests in Chile and Sweden takes place in the context of important social-ecological conflicts related to industrial forestry development.

The paper’s analytical framework helps to analyse the social-ecological nature of international business and the way they organise material practices and communicative meaning around renewable energy. The paper’s findings and analysis shed light on important problematic aspects of the material and symbolic struggles around renewable energy in the context of climate change. The comparative dimension of the analysis has the value to offer a cross-border analysis to improve the understanding of some of the most important aspects of international businesses concerning wood energy today.

The purpose of this paper is to review and synthesise academic research in environmental accounting and demonstrate its shortcomings. It provokes scholars to rethink their conceptions of “accounts” and “nature”, and alongside others in this AAAJ special issue, provides the basis for an agenda for theoretical and empirical research that begins to “ecologise” accounting.

Utilising a wide range of thought from accounting, geography, sociology, political ecology, nature writing and social activism, the paper provides an analysis and critique of key themes associated with 40 years research in environmental accounting. It then considers how that broad base of work in social science, particularly pragmatic sociology (e.g. Latour, Boltanksi and Thévenot), could contribute to reimagining an ecologically informed accounting.

Environmental accounting research overwhelmingly focuses on economic entities and their inputs and outputs. Conceptually, an “information throughput” model dominates. There is little or no environment in environmental accounting, and certainly no ecology. The papers in this AAAJ special issue contribute to these themes, and alongside social science literature, indicate significant opportunities for research to begin to overcome them.

This paper outlines and encourages the advancement of ecological accounts and accountabilities drawing on conceptual resources across social sciences, arts and humanities. It identifies areas for research to develop its interdisciplinary potential to contribute to ecological sustainability and social justice.

How to “ecologise” accounting and conceptualise human and non-human entities has received little attention in accounting research. This paper and AAAJ special issue provides empirical, practical and theoretical material to advance further work.

In line with various scientific papers warning against an inconsistent use of this adjective for food qualification, the purpose of this paper is to point out the sweeping assertion that “local” equates to “ecological”.

Looking beyond the measurement of carbon emissions to assess impacts on the environment, this paper addresses ecological issues in terms of interactions with the environment. To this end, it enhances an under-the-skin approach that goes through “local” fruit and vegetables to look into seed management and plant breeding practices.

This method, tested with 2 vegetative species – apple and potato – on 12 case studies in Europe, allows to build a typology that discriminates between: producing food without reproducing plants, grafting trees and storing tubers for maintaining landraces, and sowing seeds to restart the breeding process from the early beginning, trying in this way to enhance the capacity of plants to better fit with their environment. The typology matches a gradient that describes various degrees of intensity of environment–society relationships, from disconnection to adaptation – conceived on the one hand as already stabilized and on the other hand as still evolving.

This analytical framework sheds light on contradictions that many local food networks have to face while yearning for a recognition by a geographical indication.

The paper argues that vegetal material might be a fruitful research object for tracking the controversies that unfold along the construction of local food products. It discusses social constructivist approaches of terroir while advocating for a materialist approach.

Profiles the development of the project IWW/Earth First Local 1, a group which brought loggers and environmentalists together in an attempt to combine labour and ecology issues. Describes anarchosyndicalist ideas that formed the basis of this alliance, suggesting that these have some merit for present day ecologists. Considers the common ground shared by labour and ecology movements and presents some learnings from the project for future mainstream environmental policies.

This paper develops a model of social vulnerability. Specifically, it aims to (1) determine the factors of social vulnerability to flood risks and (2) interrogate the discursive structure and framing of vulnerability within the local domain of disaster governance.

This is a descriptive-survey research design mobilized through sequential exploratory mixed method.

For ordinary people, vulnerability is due to five factors: (1) government inaction, (2) age-based frailty, (3) disability-based social exclusion, (4) weak social capital and (5) material susceptibility. Moreover, there are two patterns of discursive structure surrounding the risk of flooding in Davao del Norte: (1) where Cavendish banana is a favored export commodity of those who are in power, the Pressure-and-Release Model fits within the narrative of land-use changes in the province, and (2) where the local domain of disaster governance frames the DRR as a “hero-villain” normative duality.

At the policy level, the findings should inform the current government practices in development planning to mitigate flood risks, specifically the proposed Philippine National Land-use Act and the pending Bill to create the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) Department. Operationally, the “hero-villain” finding challenges the self-awareness of disaster managers and functionaries whose technical trainings inculcated a one-size-fits-all approach to disaster response.

The findings support the theory that disaster and disaster risks are socially constructed realities.

This paper teased out the gap between the people's risks perceptions in Davao del Norte and the government's DRR episteme, and it points to power relations that impede its closing.