William R Catton, Jr

Biography

William Catton was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 15, 1926. He served in the US Navy from 1943 to 1946. After his military service he enrolled at Oberlin College, where he met Nancy Lewis. The two were married in 1949 and produced four sons, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

Catton graduated from Oberlin College 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 his Ph.D. in 1954. He was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Washington State University. 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.

Catton died on January 5, 2015.

Intellectual development

William Catton started his professional career as a mainstream sociologist, without a special focus on the environment. However, in the course of his early research he worked with John Hendee, a USFS forest ranger, and Frank Brockman, a National Parks naturalist who became Professor of Forestry at the University of Washington. Catton became sensitized to population issues by noting the congestion at campgrounds in the natural parks he visited in the northwest US and Canada. He was also influenced by the museum exhibits in the Visitor Centers in these parks.

From an early point in his career Catton was dissatisfied with the qualitative slant of sociology and wanted to put the discipline on a more quantitative and thus scientific footing. He felt that this orientation would help sociologists guide human societies to a better future. This "neopositivist" attitude was directed towards ecological issues after Catton resigned his position at the University of Washington in 1970 and moved to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He had become discouraged by the rapidly swelling student body at his old university, and by the adverse social effects of a sharp population increase in the Puget Sound region.

In New Zealand, Catton once again associated with foresters and became familiar with that country's national park system. His "Aha!" moment came at the Visitor Center in Westland National Park. An exhibit there represented the case of land newly made bare by a receding glacier. It showed the sequence of changes in vegetation at increasing distances from the retreating ice, representing earlier and earlier time periods. This example of ecological succession - the transformation of ecosystems over time - showed plant species altering their environment, thereby making it less suitable for them but more suitable for successor species. Another revelation came when he picked up the book Violence, Monkeys, and Man, which reinforced his personal view that higher population is associated with greater stress and violence. With these two experiences, Catton's broad aim to make sociology more scientific became the specific aim to make the discipline more cognizant of the biogeochemical processes associated with the environment. This paradigm shift led quickly to the writing project that produced Overshoot.

Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

Overshoot was started during Catton’s three years in New Zealand, and completed after he returned to the US in 1973 to become Professor of Sociology at Washington State University. It took considerable time in the late-1970s for him to find a reputable publisher who did not assume that the market for books on ecology was saturated, so Overshoot was not published until 1980. During this period Catton, in collaboration with fellow scholar, Riley Dunlap, produced a series of influential articles on ecological issues. Although Overshoot has never been a major seller, it has remained in print continuously since 1980, and it has recently been translated into Russian and Spanish.

The core message in Overshoot is that, "... our lifestyles, mores, institutions, patterns of interaction, values, and expectations are shaped by a cultural heritage that was formed in a time when carrying capacity exceeded the human load. A cultural heritage can outlast the conditions that produced it. That carrying capacity surplus is gone now, eroded both by population increase and immense technological enlargement of per capita resource appetites and environmental impacts. Human life is now being lived in an era of deepening carrying capacity deficit. All of the familiar aspects of human societal life are under compelling pressure to change in this new era when the load increasingly exceeds the carrying capacities of many local regions — and of a finite planet. Social disorganization, friction, demoralization, and conflict will escalate." Catton here also coined the term Cosmeticism for "faith that relatively superficial adjustments in our activities will keep the New World new and will perpetuate the Age of Exuberance."

Overshoot continues to be a source of conceptual insight and existential inspiration regarding the ecological basis of human societies, especially to those aware of the massive threat posed by peak oil, climate change, and other ecological pressures Catton either identified or anticipated. Years ahead of its time because of the clarity of formulation of a fully ecological paradigm, the book supplies scientific analysis of what E.O. Wilson has called "the bottleneck" of ecological pressures and threats resulting from human actions on the natural environment.

Intellectual contribution and critiques

Positively, 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). However, his inherent attraction to nature and understanding how the earth’s ecosystems operated afforded him the insight that human social systems including their economies operate within parameters of the natural ecology or they destroy it. Catton’s primary contribution is the trailblazing articulation of an environmental sociological framework that challenged existing sociological theories in general from a completely different tack: by synthesizing sociological and ecological theory. He argued that the prevalent idea of human control over nature, instead of being a great achievement, might only be a reflection of exploitation of natural resources that were actually finite.

To set the tone for his work and the era and intellectual conflicts in which it was published, one of his observations is that, "Monumental social changes (and troubles) in the 21st century will be misunderstood (and thus worsened, I believe) insofar as people ... continue interpreting events according to a [pre-ecological] worldview that insufficiently recognizes human society’s ultimate dependence on its ecosystem context." He originated the formulation of Homo colossus as a quasi-species and detritivore, ecologically distinct from ancestral Homo sapiens.

A notable aspect of Catton's writing is its expansion beyond the specialization silos so often seen in academia and sometimes reflects greater whole-systems understandings of Earth's biospheric life-support machinery than others whose fields of specialization are more narrowly focused. In this respect, Catton advances, by his books in particular, core ecological understandings that are needed by policymakers and sectors of academia whose whole-systems expertise by background and training is otherwise limited.

While some would critique his suggestion that past 'Homo sapiens' were different — somehow living and evolving in ecological balance, in a scientific sense his suggestions are accurate in that humankind's ability to amplify individual impacts, damages, and wastes by technology has been combined with an ongoing and explosive growth in human numbers. Although this has been questioned in some respects (Boas, 1998, Eco Homo; Redman, 1999, Human Impacts on Ancient Environments) and by historical environmental sociological work (Chew, 2001 World Ecological Degradation, 2007 The Recurring Dark Ages; Whitaker, 2009 Ecological Revolution), it remains significant that humans, ancient or present, have been involved in processes that degrade the environments upon which they depend (Krech, 2000 The Ecological Indian: Myth and History). Catton's essential perspectives of natural science are consistent with, and have contributed to a broader understanding of, core carrying capacity as a limiting factor of the natural world as well as other limits and realities of natural ecosystems.

Awards and honors

Books (sole author)

Books (co-author)

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