Richard York
Biographic Data
| ID | 149125 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard York |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | York |
| SIGNATURE | YORK R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oregon |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0890-5803 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 114 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1403 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 114 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Two meta-methodological tensions to orient historical analysis in the social sciences
Recycling paradox
The Anthophilic rift
We develop a theoretical foundation for understanding the social drivers of biodiversity loss through an analysis of the pollination crisis. Together, settler colonialism and capitalism have disrupted the relationship between insect pollinators and the flowering plants that they pollinate on a global scale, what we call the ‘Anthophilic rift.’ Settler colonialism reshapes ecologies while capitalism homogenizes landscapes through its drive to make…
Colonizing Canis lupus
The hostility to wolves by segments of agribusiness and the general public in the United States is a puzzle, given that wolf predation is not responsible for a large number of cattle and sheep losses and has only a very modest economic effect on the livestock industry. Thus, the logic of profit-seeking in capitalism, although playing a role, is insufficient to explain the outsized and partisan opposition to wolf recovery. We argue that the logics…
Clouding climate science
The rebound effect and the challenge of moving beyond fossil fuels
William Stanley Jevons identified what has come to be known as the Jevons paradox: the observation that improvements in energy efficiency are often connected with rising , not falling, energy consumption. This insight informs the subsequent economic concept of the “rebound effect” and the expansive research investigating this relationship. We provide an overview of key empirical research, which establishes that large rebounds in energy consumptio…
How Robust Are Social Structural Predictors of Carbon Dioxide Emissions? A Multiverse Analysis
Due to the many plausible decisions researchers can make during the scientific process, varying results can be obtained to research questions. In the environmental sociological literature, key theories and findings highlight how modernization, militarization, demographic factors, and globalization and trade influence carbon dioxide emissions. We use multiverse analysis to address how robust central findings in this literature are to model specifi…
The Lagged Environmental Consequences of Demographic and Economic Change
Quantitative sociologists conducting environmental research often use temporally lagged variables to estimate the social drivers of ecological change. To highlight the relevance of temporal lags for this scholarship, we specifically look at the longitudinal relationship between demographic and economic change and two different environmental outcomes: land development and carbon emissions. For land development, we run longitudinal spatial regressi…
Poultry and fish and aquatic invertebrates have not displaced other meat sources
A plant by any other name
Despite the fact that plants make up 80% of biomass on Earth, sociology rarely examines human–plant relationships. Human societies are inherently dependent on plants, most obviously as the basis of food supply, ecosystems, atmospheric and climate regulation, and water cycles, as well as for sources of oxygen, medicine, fuel, and fibre. Society, or terrestrial animal life for that matter, could not exist without plants. Based on this recognition, …
Reducing the web's carbon footprint
The ineffectiveness of efficiency
Agriculture, Pesticide Use, and Economic Development
Modern agricultural production typically requires large quantities of chemical pesticides, a potential source of both environmental and human harm. Previous social science research has suggested that environmental problems such as those associated with pesticide use may begin to decline at higher levels of economic development. Using fixed effects models, we examine whether this possible relationship holds within nations and over time. This study…
Social science perspectives on drivers of and responses to global climate change
This article provides a review of recent anthropological, archeological, geographical, and sociological research on anthropogenic drivers of climate change, with a particular focus on drivers of carbon emissions, mitigation and adaptation. The four disciplines emphasize cultural, economic, geographic, historical, political, and social‐structural factors to be important drivers of and responses to climate change. Each of these disciplines has uniq…
Is Labor Green
In this article, we assess whether unionization of national workforces influences growth in national carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per capita. Political-economic theories in environmental sociology propose that labor unions have the potential to affect environmental conditions. Yet, few studies have quantitatively assessed the influence of unionization on environmental outcomes using cross-national data. We estimate multilevel regression models …
Protecting the power to pollute
The environmental health risks associated with the production and use of fossil fuels have sparked grassroots resistance efforts throughout the world, leading to stricter regulations, lawsuits, defeated pipelines, and bans on hydraulic fracturing and wastewater injection in certain municipalities, states, and nations. Arguably, the hegemony that fossil fuel industries have long maintained is under threat, whereby the pass they have received to ex…
Energy transitions or additions
Anthrozoology
Anthrozoology is an interdisciplinary field that examines all aspects of human interaction with nonhuman animals. A prominent concern in the field is with ethical questions about how humans treat other animals, and how and why ethics vary across societies and change over time. A number of anthrozoologists are interested in the biological and ecological nature of nonhuman animals, how macrostructural human–animal relationships affect socioecologic…
Social Evolution and Environmental Context
We identify four common, but we argue fallacious, reasons social scientists object to theories that rely on environmental conditions to explain variation in the evolution of societies. First, some sociologists exclude environmental forces as beyond the domain of sociology. Second, environmental theories are often pejoratively labeled 'determinist,' and rejected on those grounds. Third, environmental theories are regularly dismissed as being funct…
Snakes in The Greenhouse
Control variables and causal inference
A common motivation for adding control variables to statistical models is to reduce the potential for spurious findings when analyzing non-experimental data and to thereby allow for more reliable causal inferences. However, as I show here, unless all potential confounding factors are included in an analysis (which is unlikely to be achievable with most real-world data-sets), adding control variables to a model in many circumstances can make estim…
Has (even Marxist) political ecology really transcended the metabolic rift
Toward a Sociology of Biodiversity Loss
Social processes are setting in motion a crisis of global biodiversity loss, yet those who study social processes are largely absent from discussions about this crisis. Recognizing that developing a single general sociological theory of the causes and consequences of biodiversity loss is infeasible, the purpose of this article is to engage a wide array of sociological traditions that, whether or not they have thus far incorporated environmental p…
Hydraulic Fracking, Shale Energy Development, and Climate Inaction
With the recent election of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency, fossil fuel interests are poised to advance their entire energy agenda on a number of key fronts. Not only has Trump taken steps to increase oil and gas fracking, create more energy infrastructure projects, ramp up foreign fossil fuel exports, resurrect the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, and bring back coal production to Appalachian communities, but he has also worked to dis…
The asymmetric environmental consequences of population change
Footprints on the Earth
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 …
Community Economic Identity
Economic changes and the machinations of the treadmill of production have dramatically reduced the number of jobs provided by extractive industries, such as mining and timber, in the United States and other affluent nations in the post–World War II era. As the importance of these industries to national, regional, and local economies wanes, community resistance to ecologically and socially destructive industry practices threatens the political pow…
Carbon metabolism
The Globalization of Environmental Concern and The Limits of The Postmaterialist Values Explanation
Conventional wisdom has long held that widespread citizen concern for environmental quality is limited to wealthy nations. Both academics and policymakers assume that residents of poor nations are too preoccupied with satisfying their “material” needs to support the “postmaterialist” value of environmental protection. This view was challenged by results of Gallup's 24-nation “Health of the Planet” (HOP) survey conducted in 1992, as the HOP found …
Energy transitions or additions
Does Renewable Energy Development Decouple Economic Growth from CO 2 Emissions
We assess how renewable electricity production interacts with GDP per capita to influence CO 2 emissions per capita, analyzing cross-national data from 1960 to 2012. We find an interaction effect between the quantity of renewables and GDP per capita, where, counterintuitively, economic growth is more closely tied to emissions in nations with a large share of their electricity from renewable sources and growth of renewable electricity has a smalle…
A rift in modernity? assessing the anthropogenic sources of global climate change with the STIRPAT model
Ascientific consensus has emerged indicating that the global climate is changing due to anthropogenic (i.e., human induced) driving forces. Our previous research reformulated the well‐known I=PAT (environmental Impacts equal the multiplicative product of Population, Affluence, and Technology) model into stochastic form, named it the STIRPAT model, and used it to assess the effects of population and affluence on carbon dioxide loads. Here we exten…
Environment and Urbanization
The rapid urbanization of the world's population (accompanied by the rise of megacities) and the profound growth in the scale of impacts on the natural environment were two dominant trends of the twentieth century. Today over 3 billion people, nearly one‐half the human population, live in urban areas (United Nations 2004). Humans have altered the composition of the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change, have changed land cover over a …
The Ecological Rift
Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision--if we don't alter course.…
Tracking the Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecological Impacts
Despite the pivotal role human factors (anthropogenic drivers) are presumed to play in global environmental change, substantial uncertainties and contradictory conclusions about them continue. We attempt to further discipline the human factors issue by estimating the effects of two anthropogenic drivers, population and affluence, on a wide variety of global environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, emissions of ozone depleting su…
Directional Asymmetry in Sociological Analyses
The authors present a straightforward method for assessing symmetry and asymmetry in the effect of an independent variable, on the basis of its direction of change, on a dependent variable in statistical models and provide two different empirical illustrations: (1) the effect of economic change on electricity production in nations and (2) the effect of change in income on wealth accumulation among individuals. In so doing, the authors also demons…
Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales
Ironically, even though fossil fuels provided substitutes for the main uses of whale oil, the rise of fossil fuel use in the nineteenth century served to increase the intensity of whaling. The connections between fossil fuels and whaling are an example of the unanticipated consequences that frequently come with technological change. I draw on political-economic theory to explain why fossil fuels served to escalate rather than eliminate whaling. T…
The Invisible Animal
Animals have had a profound influence on human societies, playing a major role in the course of human history. However, their presence and theoretical significance has been overlooked in sociological theory, while being the central concern of the growing field of anthrozoology (the study of the interaction between humans and other animals). To illustrate how a focus on other animal species can improve our understanding of sociocultural evolution,…
De-Carbonization in Former Soviet Republics, 1992-2000
I use panel data to empirically assess the effects of a variety of theoretically important structural factors on national level CO2 emissions in the former Soviet republics, a context of de-modernization and peripheralization. Several theories address the effects of modernization on the environment, but they neglect to consider the environmental consequences of de-modernization. Unlike the trends in most other nations over the twentieth century, …
Women's status and carbon dioxide emissions
Rifts and Shifts
Humans depend on functioning ecosystems to sustain themselves, and their actions affect those same ecosystems. As a result, there is a necessary "metabolic interaction" between humans and the earth, which influences both natural and social history. Increasingly, the state of nature is being defined by the operations of the capitalist system, as anthropogenic forces are altering the global environment on a scale that is unprecedented. The global c…
Understanding the Jevons paradox
There is considerable debate about the connections between efficiency and levels of resource consumption, particularly about the Jevons paradox and the rebound effect. To help clarify a variety of misunderstandings, we distinguish between the empirical claim that efficiency is often associated with rising resource consumption and the causal claim that efficiency leads to greater resource use. We show that at a variety of levels, a positive correl…
Gender Equality and State Environmentalism
There are several compelling reasons to expect that gender equality may serve to foster state environmentalism. However, most previous research on environmental politics has neglected gender. To help further our understanding of the connection between gender and environmental politics, the authors empirically assess the association between the representation of women in national Parliament and environmental treaty ratification, using a large samp…
Demographic trends and energy consumption in European Union Nations, 1960–2025
Marxism, Positivism, and Scientific Sociology
Marxism and positivism are often thought to be incompatible perspectives in sociology. Yet, Marxism has a long history of commitment to scientific inquiry. Here, we juxtapose these two scientific paradigms—Marxism and positivism—in ways that can enhance both, while highlighting in particular the power of the former. We argue that many of the key theoretical claims of Marxism can be explored in terms of analytic concepts congruent with and easily …
Bridging Environmental Science with Environmental Policy
Objective . Sound environmental policy is fully dependent upon sound science. However, we have little scientific knowledge of the driving forces behind environmental change. We use the well‐known I = PAT formulation (environmental i mpacts are the multiplicative product of p opulation, a ffluence, and t echnology) as a framework to assess the relative impacts of driving forces. Methods . We introduce the concept of plasticity —the potential for e…
The Midas Effect
Global climate change is perhaps the most serious problem the world faces. Despite its severity, mainstream economic approaches to addressing the problem fail to get to the root cause - the capitalist global economy - falling instead for 'the Midas Effect', the notion that ecological values can be converted into economic values. Here we highlight the severity of the global climate crisis, which requires that atmospheric carbon levels be reduced (…
Critical Human Ecology
We lay the foundations for a critical human ecology (CHE) that combines the strengths of the biophysical human ecology tradition in environmental sociology with those of historical materialism. We show the strengths of a critically informed human ecology by addressing four key meta-theoretical issues: materialist versus idealist approaches in the social sciences, dialectical versus reductionist analyses, the respective importance of historical an…
Agricultural Exports and the Environment
The mass consumption of agrochemicals, including manufactured fertilizers and pesticides, by industrialized agricultural systems worldwide threatens human health and the health of ecosystems. The production of these agricultural inputs is a highly energy- and capital-intensive process, and their application contributes to a variety of direct and indirect impacts on the environment. This study is an analysis of the relationships between internatio…
A Tale of Contrasting Trends
We assess threats to environmental sustainability by examining the trends in three measures of the ecological footprint (EF) the total EF, the per capita EF, and the EF intensity of the economy (EF/GDP) for China, India, Japan, and the United States. from 1961 to 2003. The EF, an estimate of the land area needed to sustain use of the environment, is the most comprehensive measure of anthropogenic pressure on the environment available and is growi…
Grants, Awards, Prizes
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Derek Mahon as translator
Derek Mahon has devoted much of his productive life to translation, especially from the French. This paper studies his handling of French texts, distinguishing those which he has freely recreated from those which he has assimilated to his own style and those where he has made himself subservient to the character of the original author. Attention is drawn to his inventiveness, his wit, his moderation and rationality, his concern for effective and …
Auden and Rilke
This article traces Auden's references to the poetry of Rilke, showing his influence to be strongest in the late 1930's. It then compares some poems by Auden with similar works by Rilke. It argues that Auden shared with Rilke a concern with the development of the individual from childhood and with the relation of the individual sensibility to the external world and also an aesthetic and symbolist dimension, but that the effect of this in his writ…
Bridging Environmental Science with Environmental Policy
Objective . Sound environmental policy is fully dependent upon sound science. However, we have little scientific knowledge of the driving forces behind environmental change. We use the well‐known I = PAT formulation (environmental i mpacts are the multiplicative product of p opulation, a ffluence, and t echnology) as a framework to assess the relative impacts of driving forces. Methods . We introduce the concept of plasticity —the potential for e…
Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory
We raise four challenges to the claim of ecological modernization theory (EMT) that continued modernization is necessary for ecological sustainability. First, EMT needs to go beyond merely demonstrating that societies modify their institutions in reaction to environmental problems and show that such modifications lead to ecological improvements. Second, EMT must show that late stages of modernizing processes lead to the ecological transformation …
STIRPAT, Ipat and ImPact
Cross-National Variation in the Size of Passenger Car Fleets
A rift in modernity? assessing the anthropogenic sources of global climate change with the STIRPAT model
Ascientific consensus has emerged indicating that the global climate is changing due to anthropogenic (i.e., human induced) driving forces. Our previous research reformulated the well‐known I=PAT (environmental Impacts equal the multiplicative product of Population, Affluence, and Technology) model into stochastic form, named it the STIRPAT model, and used it to assess the effects of population and affluence on carbon dioxide loads. Here we exten…
Footprints on the Earth
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 …
Political Economy and Environmental Crisis
Humanity and Inhumanity
The Treadmill of (Diversifying) Production
A key issue in the debate between treadmill of production (To P) theorists and ecological modernization theorists centers on the effect of modernization on the environmental sustainability of societies. This article proposes that due in part to a focus on case study evidence, ecological modernization theorists often observe trends toward environmental sustainability only in specific and nonrepresentative cases rather than general trends in typica…
The Ecological Footprint Intensity of National Economies
At least three perspectives—industrial ecology (IE), ecological modernization theory (EMT), and the “environmental Kuznets curve” (EKC)—emphasize the potential for sustainability via refinements in production systems that dramatically reduce the environmental impacts of economic development. Can improvements in efficiency counterbalance environmental impacts stemming from the scale of production? To address this question we analyze cross‐national…
Cross-national meat and fish consumption
Tracking the Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecological Impacts
Despite the pivotal role human factors (anthropogenic drivers) are presumed to play in global environmental change, substantial uncertainties and contradictory conclusions about them continue. We attempt to further discipline the human factors issue by estimating the effects of two anthropogenic drivers, population and affluence, on a wide variety of global environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, emissions of ozone depleting su…
Tracking the Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecological Impacts
Despite the pivotal role human factors (anthropogenic drivers) are presumed to play in global environmental change, substantial uncertainties and contradictory conclusions about them continue. We attempt to further discipline the human factors issue by estimating the effects of two anthropogenic drivers, population and affluence, on a wide variety of global environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, emissions of ozone depleting su…
Manufacturing the Love of Possession
The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life by Michael DawsonThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Dialectical Materialism and Nature
Two commonly held views about the nature of Nature lead to a systematic misunderstanding and mismeasurment of natural processes. The “economistic” view conceives of the natural environment as a repository of resources, available for human exploitation, and “services” provided by mechanistic ecological processes. The economistic perspective leads to a failure to properly recognize the sharp distinctions between ecological and economic processes, b…
The Treadmill of Production
Kyoto Protocol Participation
Natural History and the Nature of History
Over 500 million years ago, Pikaia, a two-inch-long worm-like creature, swam in the Cambrian seas. It was not particularly common, nor in anyway would it have appeared remarkable to a hypothetical naturalist surveying the fauna of the time. Pikaia is the first known chordate, the phylum to which Homo sapiens and all other vertebrates belong. As the late Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary theorist, and dialectical biologist, posited i…
Dialectical Nature
Richard Levins wrote in these pages (July-August 1986) that an appreciation of history and science is necessary to understand the world, challenge bourgeois ideological monopoly, and transcend religious obscurantism. Knowledge of science and history is needed in order not only to comprehend how the world came to be, but also to understand how the world can be changed. Marx and Engels remained committed students of the natural sciences throughout …
Homo Floresiensis and Human Equality
The discovery by a team of Indonesian and Australian researchers of the remains of a previously unknown species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, on the Indonesian island of Flores was characterized by some scholars as the greatest discovery in anthropology in a half-century and was selected by Science magazine as the leading runner-up for the 2004 "breakthrough of the year" (first place went to the discoveries of the Mars Exploration Rovers that in…
Gender Equality and State Environmentalism
There are several compelling reasons to expect that gender equality may serve to foster state environmentalism. However, most previous research on environmental politics has neglected gender. To help further our understanding of the connection between gender and environmental politics, the authors empirically assess the association between the representation of women in national Parliament and environmental treaty ratification, using a large samp…
Carbon metabolism
Sociology (64 works) · Economics (58 works) · Ecology (52 works) · Political science (47 works) · Biology (38 works) · Philosophy (36 works) · Law (33 works) · Epistemology (32 works) · Energy, Environment, Economic Growth (31 works) · Environmental ethics (30 works)