The Second Darwinian Revolution: Steps Toward a New Evolutionary Environmental Sociology

Three decades after Catton and Dunlap's (1978, 1 980) pioneering work, the promise and potential of environmental sociology remain unrealized. Despite the proliferation of theoretical frameworks and empirical foci, a new ecological paradigm capable of theorizing the interactions between social structures, human agency, and biophysical environments has yet to emerge. I explore this impasse by tracing the parallels between the Darwinian revolution and recent shifts in metatheoretical assumptions within environmental and mainstream sociology and related disciplines. These parallels suggest that the social sciences are in the midst of a second Darwinian revolution. A fuller appreciation of this intellectual convergence can provide the first steps toward a new evolutionary environmental sociology.