The Environmental Goffman: Toward an Environmental Sociology of Everyday Life

While environmental sociology has imported many macro theorists from the larger discipline, it has almost completely ignored Goffman. The primary project of this article is to fill that gap by proposing and initiating a Goffmanesque environmental sociology of everyday life, primarily through Goffman's 1974 work, Frame Analysis. In doing so we address two issues central to environmentally relevant everyday experience: (1) the commonplace appreciation of oNature,o such as that experienced at parks, on hikes, and being outdoors generally, and (2) the commonsensical notions of onatureo and onaturalnesso as used in everyday conduct. In the first task, we make a contribution both to Goffman's frame analytic theory and to environmental sociological theory with our notion of an out-in-nature frame. In the second task, we undertake to identify and formalize for environmental sociology instances implicit in Frame Analysis of how notions of nature mask social interests.