Environmental sociology strikes me as a deeply moral endeavor. I argue that understanding the good is not only relevant to the project of even having an environmental sociology. As well, there is an environmental sociology to the very idea of the good and its typical conception as being the non-political, removed from the human and therefore untainted and unpolluted by our desires and their corrupting hungers. The apartness with which we now typically regard both nature and the divine gives these realms innocence in our minds – which we then marshal in pursuit of our ambitions, yielding the common and deeply problematic paradox I call non-political politics. Such attempts at moral externalization characterize much of political debate in the present day, but has old roots. I show how the non-political idea of the good arose during bourgeois transition of the late Iron Age, and remains caught up in a social and economic conflict of long-standing and yet little notice: the pagan–bourgeois conflict and the ancient triangle of ideological separation between nature, the divine, and the human that this conflict birthed.

In the final chapter of this far-reaching handbook, we turn to the future of the field, giving special attention to the most exciting and promising developments in theory and practice. But first, we want to retrace our steps to remind the reader of our intentions in putting together this collection.

Environmental sociology has become quite broad and highly multifaceted in a short period of time. As one of us has noted elsewhere (Bell & Ashwood, 2016), in the late 1990s social scientists had just begun thinking about environmental questions. Now, however, the idea that the social sciences have something to offer to the study of environmental problems is unlikely to give one pause.

As with any edited collection, when planning the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology we imagined who would be using the text, and when they would be using it. We considered a researcher, starting on a new project and looking for approaches to better understand a complex environmental problem; a student, having been exposed to environmental sociology, excited by some ideas and looking to become better oriented with the field; a teacher, looking for readings to assign to students in the upcoming semester; or a practitioner, whose interest lies somewhere in that liminal space straddling town and gown. We thought of the purpose of handbooks, in a world where a quick search on the Internet can generate an article to answer any question, and sometimes an article to seemingly support just about any belief. In this context, a handbook can act as a reliable reference point that includes a broad, but not boundless, survey of ideas and a quick, but not superficial, snapshot of some of the empirical work that supports and elaborates those ideas.

As with any edited collection, when planning the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology we imagined who would be using the text, and when they would be using it. We considered a researcher, starting on a new project and looking for approaches to better understand a complex environmental problem; a student, having been exposed to environmental sociology, excited by some ideas and looking to become better oriented with the field; a teacher, looking for readings to assign to students in the upcoming semester; or a practitioner, whose interest lies somewhere in that liminal space straddling town and gown. We thought of the purpose of handbooks, in a world where a quick search on the Internet can generate an article to answer any question, and sometimes an article to seemingly support just about any belief. In this context, a handbook can act as a reliable reference point that includes a broad, but not boundless, survey of ideas and a quick, but not superficial, snapshot of some of the empirical work that supports and elaborates those ideas.