History of Environmental Sociology Academic Networks

One could argue that there were three original US networks of environmental (and natural resources) sociologists starting in the 1970s and 1980s.  They were located on the East Coast, West Coast, and Midwest (or third, i.e. Great Lakes coast).  Of note, this parallels the rise of US sociology itself earlier as the discipline developed on the East and West coasts along with the Great Lakes area, with the University of Chicago being the first sociology department. Other early major departments were at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, and Michigan.

The West Coast natural resources/environmental sociology network started at Washington State University with the pioneering efforts of Bill Catton and Riley Dunlap. This group was quickly joined by Gene Rosa among others. Their early students were Richard York, Aaron McCright, among others.  The Midwest network was established by Allan Schnaiberg at Northwestern University, around the development of the Treadmill of Production Theory, continually refined and expanded by his early students that included Ken Gould and David Pellow.  The East Coast Group was centered at Yale University under Bill Burch, Jr. His early students included Fred Buttel (Cornell/Wisconsin), Tom Rudel (Rutgers), Patrick C. West (Michigan), and Bill Freudenburg (Washington State/Wisconsin/Santa Barbara). Scott Frickle, (Washington State/Tulane/Brown), Dana Fisher (Columbia/Maryland/American) and Debra Davidson (Alberta) are from the Yale network via Bill Freudenburg and Fred Buttel (Wisconsin).  Dorceta Taylor (Washington State/Michigan/Yale) worked with Bill Burch, Jr. at Yale.  Of course, there were many other early scholars in environmental sociologists outside of these three networks, such as Don Field at University of Wisconsin Madison (later joined by Buttel and Freudenburg), Tom Dietz (George Mason/Michigan State University) joined later by Aaron McCright, with former students such as Rachael Shwom, Rutgers; Christopher Chase-Dunn (Johns Hopkins University/UC Riverside), Timmons Roberts, Andrew Jorgenson, but these three early networks dominated the field in the early years. Many environmental sociologists can trace their lineage to one of these three major networks.

As observed from reading above, early natural resources/environmental sociologists were mostly men, but in recent decades women have greatly increased their presence.  Note also that there were separate networks developing in Europe.  The US and European networks were linked in the 1990s largely by the efforts of Fred Buttel, Riley Dunlap, Arthur Mol, and others. Given the rise of climate change, environmental perspectives are rapidly now being integrated into the large sociology discipline, which was the original call of Catton and Dunlap foundational writings of over 40 years ago. This is broadening the reach of environmental scholars altering  the salience of these early networks.  For fun, in our department Steve and Norah can trace a lineage to the Yale network, with Steve via Patrick C. West (Bill Burch. Jr) and Norah via Debra Davidson (Buttel and Freudenburg (Bill Burch, Jr) + a U of Toronto connection); Norah and Steve joined distinguished professor, now emeritus, Tom Rudel (Bill Burch, Jr.) at Rutgers Sociology; Danielle via Timmons Roberts (Christopher Chase-Dunn) has recently joined our department expanding our lineage network.