Dealing with Environmental Risks in Reflexive Modernity

Since the early 1970s sociologists have been attempting to incorporate environmental questions into social theory. The main objective of these efforts has been to gain a better understanding of the birth and development of environmental issues in society and the way society changes in dealing with them. During the 1970s and early 1980s the debate between distinct schools of thought in what we would now label environmental sociology focused on the main institutional dimensions of modern society that should be held responsible for the environmental crisis. To some extent this phase of intellectual development can be interpreted as the environmental ‘application’ of a more general sociological debate dating back to the 1960s that concentrated on questions relating to whether industrialism, capitalism, or surveillance was the common denominator characterizing modern Western societies.1