On the basis of a close reading of two early articles by Patrick Geddes, which form the basis of his later approach to sociology, it is argued that Geddes should be reclaimed by sociologists from the geographers and the town planners, as the founder of a distinctive environmental sociology in Britain at around the turn of the last century. Certain of Geddes' arguments are seen to be comparable with those of Durkheim, in particular, and Marx to a somewhat lesser extent. Moreover, his work contains a distinctively sociological account of the 'structuring' of social (and environmental) reality via the creative agency of human beings actively working in a variety of environments. Geddes' naïve optimism may make him as much Utopian as sociological, but does not invalidate his contribution to the development of a classical environmental sociology.

After the appointment of its first full-time professor in L.T. Hobhouse in 1907, British sociology lost an environmental approach that might have substantially altered the shape of the discipline. The environmental approach was that of Patrick Geddes, who made the relationship between people and their environments central for individual and social well-being. In spite of the fact that urban Britain was undergoing environmental crisis due to the negative effects of unrestrained industrialization, a range of other circumstances, personal as well as political and both inside and outside the academy, conspired to coalesce in the more or less deliberate exclusion of Geddes' ideas. The paper suggests that sociologists need to take a radically reflexive approach to the history of their own discipline that recognizes its embeddedness in the wider social world, since both individual and social action, as well as structural forces, may be as influential as quality or coherence in determining the fate of the ideas and theories that they create. In Geddes' case, this leads to a re-examination of both the historical context and the debate surrounding the establishment of sociology at the London School of Economics.finding evidence of so-called 'neglected' examples of environmental sociology, Catton and Dunlap raise a number of questions about how sociological work comes to be categorized as sociology, and about the sorts of processes that lead to some ideas becoming institutionalized while others fade into obscurity. Thus, if we are at all interested in how and why sociology in Britain took on the shape it did after 1907, a shape that excluded an environmental approach, we need to look beyond its intellectual institutionalization and development to its societal context. A key question here is to ask how it happened that Geddes, who took an approach to sociology in which environmental issues were central, and whose influence extended to both Europe and America in his own time (Fowle and Thomson,

We found it difficult to know how best to reply to Steve Fuller's comments on our articles in this issue of The Sociological Review. The 'Patrick Geddes' and 'Victor Branford' who appear as the ostensible objects of his comments are so unrecognisable that we wondered if he had discovered doppelgängers who happened to write on vaguely similar topics. We also failed to recognise the arguments of our own papers and began to wonder whether Fuller had slipped into the pages of The Review from a parallel universe in which things are subtly, but significantly, different from those in the world that we inhabit.In fact, Fuller's reading of sociology's past, driven by his intellectual agenda, is one that demands the wholehearted denial of the achievements of two of Britain's sociological pioneers. Among these achievements was Geddes' and Branford's attempt to construct a sociological perspective that was neither biologically reductionist nor in thrall to an 'exuberant' human exceptionalism apparent in the work of some of their contemporaries (Catton, 1976;Catton and Dunlap, 1978). Moreover, Geddes' environmental conservationism is a theme that resonates with a current sense of urgency surrounding how we should live in the face of impending environmental disaster. However, to acknowledge the importance of such a realist approach to the relationship between humans and their environment would do significant damage to Fuller's own commitment to a wholly constructivist future for sociology.Since he cannot ignore their contribution, Fuller is forced to make a number of claims that anyone familiar with the work of Branford and Geddes will recognise as untrue. We are accused of 'political correctness' in that we deliberately misrepresent Geddes and Branford and that we 'airbrush' aspects of their argument that others would find unacceptable (Fuller, 2007: 653). Fuller sees us as engaging in a deception aimed at surreptitiously enthroning The Sociological Review, 55:4 (2007)

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