Environment and Climate in Comparative Historical Sociology: A Surprising Lacuna in Need of a Critical Turn

Paul Gellert, University of Tennessee
Alex Moulton, Hunter College

Comparative-historical sociology has yet to engage with scholarship on nature and environment. Amid a flowering of topics and themes in the third and fourth wave, this paper addresses the surprising lacunae of climate and environment in comparative historical sociology (CHS). This absence is surprising at a time of global and multi-scalar climate crises with increasingly tangible impacts. The paper argues that there are multiple contributions of CHS from both second wave and more recent third and fourth wave scholars that could be fruitfully applied to studies of nature and environment. Beyond adding much needed historical sensibility, methodological and ontological insights of latter wave CHS, particularly its unsettling of categories and concepts, can contribute to relational analyses of human and more-than-human environments. Conversely, both classic studies of the socionatural environment from environmental historians, geographers, political economists and others will enhance CHS, particularly by addressing the interconnectedness of environment with other social realms, usually analyzed separately. Newer post/de/anti-colonial studies attuned to Indigenous geographies and environmental and climate justice open avenues for comparative discussions of "apocalypse” and alternative worldbuilding. Attentive to these avenues, the paper proposes an agenda for a critical comparative-historical environmental sociology

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 Presented in Session 79. Comparative-Historical Environmental Sociology Part One: Empirics and Theory