Connecting Sociologies of Extraction, Monoculture and Pollution

This chapter discusses the topics of extraction, monoculture and pollution to bring environmental factors in from the margins of critical social theory to a more central place, while also accounting for global imperial and colonial legacies. Thinking with, and through ecological lenses enables social theory to better account for human existence and relationships as materially living, or vital. An ecological account sees human-human and human-nonhuman interactions as material relationships that are situated in broader conceptions of life, territory and world. This chapter offers a theoretical review of environmental and ecological perspectives, bringing several historical strands of environmental history, historical ecology and world ecology together with radical and conservative stances on ecological reparation and liberation ecology. Thinking with these strands leads this chapter to propose that a vital sociology should centre a biocentric way of thinking that engages specific historical problems of extraction, monocultures and pollution. This biocentric approach is both materialist and relational in its approach to problems of global historical injustice, possible remedies and alternative, decolonial futures.