William Robert Catton, Jr. (January 15, 1926 – January 5, 2015) was an American sociologist known for his scholarly work in environmental sociology and human ecology. More broadly, Catton is known for his 1980 book, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, which is credited by younger generations of environmental scholars and activists as foundational for their own works.
Biography
William R. Catton, Jr. was the son of a Congregational minister. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 15, 1926, and served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946. After discharge, he enrolled at Oberlin College, where he met Nancy Lewis. The two were married in 1949; they had four sons.
Catton graduated from Oberlin with an A.B. degree in 1950, whereupon he entered the graduate program in sociology at the University of Washington. He earned his M.A. there in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1954, returning to the university in a professorship post from 1957 through 1969. Catton then moved to New Zealand, where he served as Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury from 1970 to 1973, when he returned to the USA, taking a post in the sociology department at Washington State University. There he remained until retiring into emeritus status in 1989.
Catton served as president of the Pacific Sociological Association 1984–85 and as the first chair of the American Sociological Association Section on Environmental Sociology.
He died on January 5, 2015, while visiting family in New Zealand. He was 88 years old.
Legacy
The academic field of environmental sociology
William Catton came of age in sociology when the major debates were about social-only theoretical orientations (structural-functionalism or consensus theory versus Marxism or conflict theory), and methodology (quantitative versus qualitative). His primary contribution was the articulation of an environmental sociological framework that challenged existing sociological theories in general from a completely different tack: by synthesizing sociological and ecological theory.
Catton joined with his colleague Riley E. Dunlap in 1978 to coauthor the first substantial paper that not only came to establish the field of environmental sociology but did so by advocating for a shift in paradigm. Titled, "Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm," Catton and Dunlap grounded their critique of then-mainstream sociology as bearing the burden of (what they would later call) the "human exceptionalist paradigm," by which humans were presumed exempt from the ecological constraints facing all other species.
In their view, sociological research and writing were fundamentally marred. The main stream failed to recognize that human dependence on finite natural resources (such as fossil fuel energy) along with human degradation of the air, water, soils, and biological processes on which humanity also depends would ultimately impinge on human social systems in powerful ways.
Thirty years later, the introductory paper (by Richard York) for the "Symposium on Catton and Dunlap’s Foundational Work Establishing an Ecological Paradigm" concluded that "The effect of Catton and Dunlap’s work has been profound, since it opened up a large swath of new terrain to sociological inquiry. It made possible the growing body of research in sociology that examines both human effects on the environment and the effects of the environment on society." York listed as "foundational" to the field not only the 1978 "New Paradigm" collaboration by Catton and Dunlap, but also their coauthored papers published in the Annual Review of Sociology in 1979 and American Behavioral Scientist in 1980. Together, these provided "an explicit intellectual grounding for environmental sociology — defined as the study of societal-environmental interactions."
Environmental writers and activists
Tom Butler, former editor of Wild Earth magazine, inserted a dedication to Catton in the 2015 book he edited, which was titled Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot. There, Butler described Catton as "peerless teacher on the perils of overshoot."