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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.

This chapter explores the domestication of Marx's critique of political economy within Marxist-oriented environmental sociology, and treadmill of production (ToP) theory, in particular. The aim is to explicate the theoretical resources for a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation. Shortcomings of ToP theory pertaining to the conceptualization of capital and value are identified. The reasons for these shortcomings, including how they might be addressed, are elaborated by reconsidering key aspects of Marx's critical theory of modern capitalist society. The chapter contributes to current discussions in both critical theory and environmental sociology by demonstrating the continued relevance of Marx's critical theory for understanding the political-economic, social, and ideational dimensions of planetary degradation. In contrast to ToP theory, which critically examines the production of wealth by counterposing finitude and limits against the expansionary tendencies of economic growth, the critical theory approach advanced in this chapter conceptualizes the acceleration of environmental degradation following World War II in terms of a ToP of value, whereby the necessity of the value form is continuously established in the present. The chapter discusses how Marxian critical theory facilitates a critical examination of the widespread growth of environmentalism as concomitant with the spread of neoliberal capitalism.

Despite their salience as tools for understanding society–environment relationships, coupled natural and human (CNH) systems approaches have consistently failed to offer realistic pictures of the political processes that shape efforts to create sustainable societies. Engagement with William R. Freudenburg’s work on political inequalities in the regulation of natural resources and its incorporation into CNH work would address this source of weakness. Over the course of two decades, Freudenburg introduced a set of concepts that describe the political mechanisms through which politically powerful polluters prevent environmental policy reforms. Freudenburg and Gramling’s last book, about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, integrates Freudenburg’s political concepts into a CNH analysis and produces an explanation for the oil spill that is exceptional in its empirically accurate treatment of the role of political inequalities in shaping environmental outcomes. Future progress in CNH systems analyses hinges to a great degree on its ability to portray power dynamics in realistic ways. The Freudenburg–Gramling book on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill shows us how to do so. It represents an intellectual legacy which Bill Freudenburg would have been proud of.

Drawing upon Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work, we argue that, just as capitalism produces abstract labor, it coproduces both abstract mind and abstract life. Abstract mind is the split between mind and nature and between subject/observer and observed object that characterizes scientific epistemology. Abstract mind reflects an abstracted objectified world of nature as a means to be exploited. Biological life is rendered as abstract life by capitalist exploitation and by the reification and technologization of organisms by contemporary technoscience. What Alberto Toscano has called “the culture of abstraction” imposes market rationality onto nature and the living world, disrupting biotic communities and transforming organisms into what Finn Bowring calls “functional bio-machines.”

The benefits of green space and nature are increasingly recognized and translated into public health policy and practice. Alongside this trend, inclusion of all people into parks and nature has been an important area of parks and recreation practice. Nature inclusion for those with disabilities, youth, seniors and immigrants has become a focus of Alberta Parks in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism Parks and Recreation in Western Canada. This study was designed to examine the experiences of participants in two such government-supported inclusive nature activities, including day trips and more extensive week-end or week-long nature experiences for adults with disabilities and caregivers.

Two phases of qualitative data collection occurred as part of a pilot project. The first phase was comprised of eight semi-structured interviews (four adults with cognitive, developmental, emotional/mental health or physical disabilities and four caregivers). In a second phase 27 participants (also adults with a range of disabilities and paid, voluntary or family caregivers) engaged in a semi-structured reflective writing process during the existing nature activities (day trip, week-end or week-long inclusive nature experiences).

This is one of the first studies in the field to embrace the benefits of adopting both a human capabilities approach, emphasizing that human diversity is fundamental to equality and development, and an ecopsychological view, with a concern for individual perspectives and well-being as fundamentally interconnected to the environment.

Three dominant qualitative themes of inclusive nature experiences emerged: ‘Sensory Activation’, ‘Reimagined Social Relations’ and ‘Reinvented Self’. Inclusion in nature for both caregivers and adults with disabilities holds promise as an activity that can support mental well-being through a reimagining and equalizing of relationships and one’s experience of self in the physical environment.

Such evidence is important for decision-making and programme development among collaborative partners, including not-for profit disability-related recreation organizations and both public health and parks departments of government. In particular, the findings highlight areas for further activity development targeting those with sensory impairment and relationship disharmony.

This introduction to the essays that follow argues that the chief problem with the dominant understanding of world affairs in the disciplines of International Relations and International Political Economy, including their Marxist versions, is an a historical, non-contradictory and economically cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In their place, geopolitical economy is a new approach which returns to the conception of capitalism embodied in the culmination of classical political economy, Marxism. It was historical in two senses, distinguishing capitalism as a historically specific mode of social production involving by value production and understanding that its contradictions drive forward capitalism’s own history in a central way. This approach must further develop and specify uneven and combined development as the dominant pattern in the unfolding of capitalist international relations, one that is constitutive of its component states themselves. Secondly, it must understand the logic of the actions undertaken by capitalist states as emerging from the struggles involved in the formation of capitalist states and from the contradictions that are set in train once capitalism is established. Finally, it must see in the ways that class and national struggles and resulting state actions have modified the functioning of capitalism the possibilities of replacing the disorder, contestation and war that are the spontaneous result of capitalism for international relations the basis for a cooperative order in relations between states, an order which can also be the means for realising the permanent revolution and solidifying its gains on the international or world plane.

The works of Stephen Bunker represent early, sometimes unacknowledged, contributions to a sociological imagination regarding the role of nature and raw material extraction in processes of social change. By engaging debates defined within a world-systems frame of national state power and cycles of capital accumulation, Bunker's work maintains the hierarchy of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral states. While bridging the local and the global in unusual ways, his emphasis is predominantly on the external limits posed by nature and global markets on peripheries and the converse advantages offered to cores, thus allowing less room in the analysis for questioning which particular totality(ies) of social structure and relations are open to sociological inquiry. Gleaning the contributions from a socionatural approach and relating them back to Bunker's commodity-based approach may expand the purview for analyses of the intersection of the natural and the social. In this chapter, I argue that attention to ‘nature’ in its multiple socionatural occurrences contributes to an understanding of the structuring of power in time and place. I rely on geographer Eric Swyngedouw's deployment of the concept of ‘socionature’ and the framework of actor-network theory to explore the benefits as well as challenges of a more relational, nondualistic sociological analysis of society and nature.