Footprints on the Earth: The Environmental Consequences of Modernity

By Richard York, E. Rosa, Thomas Dietz. American Sociological Review, 2003

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Growing evidence demonstrating clear threats to the sustainability of the ecosystems supporting human societies has given rise to a variety of sociological theories of human-environment interactions. These environmental impact theories fall into three general perspectives: human ecology, modernization, and political economy. These theories, however, have not been empirically tested in a common analytic framework. Here, a framework that relies on ecological principles is adopted and modified. Using a revised stochastic formulation of that framework and the most comprehensive measure of environmental impact to date—the ecological footprint—the factors driving the environmental impacts of societies are assessed. The overall findings support the claims of human ecologists, partially support the claims of political economists, and contradict the claims of modernization theorists. Basic material conditions, such as population, economic production, urbanization, and geographical factors all affect the environment and explain the vast majority of cross-national variation in environmental impact. Factors derived from neo-liberal modernization theory, such as political freedom, civil liberties, and state environmentalism have no effect on impacts. Taken together, these findings suggest societies cannot be sanguine about achieving sustainability via a continuation of current trends in economic growth and institutional change.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/98c1cc03ddae5b239ecb619be5531de5e2926ea3

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Citations in the corpus

Economic growth and its impact on environment: A panel data analysis (2011, methodology): “IPAT formulation later gave rise to similar formulations called as ImPACT, STIRPAT (York et al. 2003).”
Human drivers of national greenhouse-gas emissions (2012, unknown): “Several studies found that urbanization tends to increase energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions 19,22,29,33,51–54 .”
Consumption and Environmental Degradation: A Cross-National Analysis of the Ecological Footprint (2003, unknown): “Recently, researchers modeled and tested the effects of population, af uence, and other factors on total national-level ecological footprints (York et al. 2001, 2003).”
The political-economic causes of change in the ecological footprints of nations, 1991-2001: A quantitative investigation (2007, methodology): “…of populations has a relatively proportional eVect on the total footprints of nations and other environmental outcomes, and per capita diVerences do indeed exist that cannot be explained by this societal characteristic (e.g., Jorgenson, 2006a; Roberts, 2001; Rosa et al., 2004; York et al., 2003).”
Global biodiversity decline of marine and freshwater fish: A cross-national analysis of economic, demographic, and ecological influences (2008, background): “Wealthy nations may be able to somewhat curb the impacts on their own environments by importing natural resources (and thus ‘‘exporting’’ environmental impacts) or by moving polluting industries and hazardous waste to poorer nations (Frey, 1998; York et al., 2003a).”
Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory (2003, unknown): “…combined impacts from energy use, including fossil fuel, fuel wood, nuclear power, and hydropower, we found that the impact per unit of productionincreasedwith total production, so that the total impact from energy increased at an escalating pace with development (York et al., 2003, unpublished).”
Examining the Impact of Demographic Factors on Air Pollution (2004, background): “This confirms the results reported by Dietz and Rosa (1997) and York et al. (2003).”
Coupled Human and Natural Systems (2007, background): “Over the past 50 y, humans have changed ecosystems more than in any other period of human history (17) and have rapidly increased ecological footprints (77, 78), and these impacts have been projected to grow by about 2% per year between 2001 and 2015 (79).”