Publication Type

Book Chapter

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

1-2021

Abstract

Consumption is a major contributor to environmental degradation and change. However, it was not until 1992—at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—that consumption was seriously addressed by the global community. The consensus that emerged was that the global South had a “population” problem and the global North had a “consumption,” or more correctly, an “overconsumption” problem. It proved to be a durable formulation. Within environmental sociology, the prominence of the IPAT (Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology) equation (Ehrlich & Holdren, 1971) has contributed to this framing of the environment/consumption relation, although the rise of a global middle class suggests that consumption is increasingly a global concern, particularly with respect to climate change. The implication of consumption as a central problem has led to the application of sociological theories of the “drivers” of consumption, a robust literature on “sustainable consumption,” and sectoral studies of particular types of consumption. Given the variety of topics within the field of consumption, this review is not comprehensive. We have omitted some major environmental concerns such as toxics, water, and food, which are covered elsewhere in the volume. In this paper we focus on incorporating consumption theory into environmental sociology. While environmental sociologists have made considerable progress toward understanding consumption in recent years, the field has historically been more oriented to studying production and the state, as its major theories focus on those areas. However, the recent expansion of research in the sociology of consumption more generally is productive for advancing this area within the sub-field.

Keywords

consumption, environmental degradation, United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, global South, global North, overconsumption, IPAT equation (Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology), environmental sociology, drivers of consumption, sustainable consumption, sectoral studies, global middle class, climate change, sociological theories, production, state, sociology of consumption

Discipline

Place and Environment | Sociology

Research Areas

Sociology

Publication

Handbook of Environmental Sociology

Editor

Beth Caniglia, Andrew K. Jorgenson, Stephanie Marlin, Lori Peek, David Pellow, and Xiaorui Huang

First Page

71

Last Page

87

Publisher

Springer

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77712-8_5

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