Scholars, practitioners, and citizens concerned about the fate of humanity and the planet face a barrage of bad news. It can be difficult to find small rays of hope amidst all the failed negotiations, agreements, policies, and outcomes. Greening the Globe gives us some optimism. It turns out that cultural trends toward environmental stewardship are right before our eyes. The world has changed for the better, even when policies fail.

Some of the central insights of the book are quite gratifying. Scholars engaged in quantitative work well understand the difficulty of accounting for the joint effects of several small variables in complex interaction. Ann Hironaka encourages us to think of each variable—in this case, each small effort to address environmental concerns—as a single and seemingly inconsequential bee sting, and all the variables/efforts cumulatively as the quite potent force of a bee swarm. Environmental efforts in joint, cumulative, and complex interaction have mattered. This work is provocative and enjoyable.

For the book also to be persuasive, the reader must buy into the underlying assumption that there has been much progress in addressing environmental concerns. Progress or success is what it purports to explain, but the progress and success is assumed rather than proved. Readers who do not share the assumption will be left confused about what exactly is being explained.

“Social change” is the purported dependent variable of the study, but “environmental change,” or actual improvements in the health of the global environment, is the author’s (and probably the readers’) real cause for concern. At times, there is a clear sequence proposed, in that institutional processes supposedly “reconfigure the social world of individuals and organizations,” and the reconfigured social world ultimately brings about environmental change (p.16). At other times, however, evidence of social change is presented as evidence of “environmental change.” This is the heart of the difficulty: In the book and in the real world, there is, unfortunately, little evidence of meaningful environmental outcomes, such as reduced emissions of greenhouse gases, reforestation, soil regeneration, or improved water quality and quantity. The globe is not green; the globe is in trouble. For example, boundaries in three planetary systems—biodiversity loss, climate change, and the nitrogen cycle—have already been exceeded (Johan Rockstrom et al, “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 [September 24, 2009]: 472–75; Will Steffen et al, “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347 [February 13, 2015]: 736–45).

Hironaka focuses on social changes, such as pro-environmental attitudes, and at times seems to substitute “widespread change in pro-environmental attitudes and successful efforts at environmental change” (p. 13) for actual improvements in planetary health. However, even the optimism about attitudes and behavior may, unfortunately, not be merited. In terms of attitudes toward climate change, for example, many Americans are aware of the problem, but polls consistently show that few are worried about it or see it as a real risk or high priority (e.g., Matthew C. Nisbet, “Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement,” Environment Magazine 51 [no. 2, 2009]: 12–23). Cross-national studies show similarly low public knowledge, emotional engagement, and priority ranking (e.g., Lorraine Whitmarsh, Gill Seyfang, and Saffron O’Neill, “Public Engagement With Carbon and Climate Change: To What Extent Is the Public ‘Carbon Capable’?” Global Environmental Change 21 [2011]: 56–65).

At heart, the difficulty is that the book sets out to prove the value of the “world society perspective.” Some readers may care about this. Many more readers, however, will care mainly or only about the central puzzle of solving environmental problems. These readers may find the framework and constant advocacy for world society theory to be a needless distraction. Worse, they may not be convinced.

For example, the world society perspective downplays the role of actors. Caricaturizing competing arguments, Hironaka complains about studies that emphasize a “heroic actor,” “Herculean actor,” or “Smoking gun model,” in which a single individual or group swoops in and “causes” social change, while institutional structures are reified as “fixed, monolithic, and impervious to change” (p. 77). However, the literature is filled with sophisticated studies that acknowledge the malleability of institutions while also documenting the important actions of individuals, and so the ardent assertion of a dichotomy is a straw man. For example, Dale Jameison documents the critical roles of Al Gore, George W. Bush, and other actors in the creation and failure of the Kyoto Protocol (Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future, 2014), and Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document the critical roles of conservative scientists, foundations, Exxon Mobil, and other corporate actors in climate change denial (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, 2011).

Greening the Globe would have done well to engage the wider body of literature that provides evidence contrary to world society theory—to discuss globally important individuals and show that their contributions were insignificant or at least not as central as institutions. Instead, it is a book devoted to contemporary environmental issues that makes no mention of Gore, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, and the thousands of scientists who contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The latter omission is especially notable, because the IPCC is an institution and thus should support the book’s thesis, but IPCC findings were brought into the public arena by Nobel Prize–winning individuals. Perhaps these individuals did their pathbreaking work only because institutions enabled them, but such claims should be backed with systematic empirical evidence and thoughtful consideration of contrary empirical evidence.

Contrary empirical evidence is similarly omitted in Greening the Globe’s story of the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme. Hironaka claims that other nations had no environmental narrative prior to this institution-building, but authors such as Ramachandra Guha document that Gandhi was making linkages between environmental concerns and developmental concerns in 1928—well before Stockholm. Indira Gandhi is referenced (p. 39) for a much later statement, in which she pits the concerns of poverty and pollution against each other and thus supports the book’s claim of a lack of pre-Stockholm narrative. The quote feels cherry-picked.

Hironaka’s point that institutions matter stands on strong ground. The more extreme version of the theory—that institutions are primary in all cases and sometimes even deterministic—feels forced and based on selective reading of the evidence. The author is careful to affirm that multiple variables matter for any outcome, but the narrative and constant insistence on the primacy of world society theory suggests otherwise. More attention should be paid to struggles within institutions and the reasons that institutions sometimes have positive outcomes for the environment and sometimes do not. Importantly, a door should be left open for falsification. For example, the failure to address climate change, discussed on pages 126–36, should be presented as a challenge to world society theory, without the wishful, make-it-fit editorializing language of “it is a slow process with a great deal of momentum,” “the jury is still out,” and “promised improvements in the future.”

This book’s challenges do not detract from its important contribution as a reasonable source of optimism. It is helpful to be reminded that we have a global environmental agenda, work spaces, and persistent environmental institutional structures. Readers who teach or practice sustainability will be gratified to learn that they are bees who matter.