Schnaiberg: Known as the 'Treadmill of Production,' both business and government want economic growth and private capital accumulation; the former must constantly increase its operations and earnings, while the latter must assure tax revenues and reelection.The government spends money to subsidize or socialize the costs of private production and accumulation in order to boost private accumulation (e.g., through public subsidy of research and development, transportation infrastructure, military procurement, tax incentives).Capital intensive accumulation leads to automation, unemployment, and maybe demands for job creation or welfare-state-style programs on the side of individuals displaced or disadvantaged by capital intense accumulation.In order to generate employment and state revenues adequate to pay the "social cost" associated with the dislocations of private accumulation, this tendency toward legitimation crisis necessitates a progressive increase in private capital accumulation subsidies.The essence of modern industrial capitalism's treadmill character is that capital intensive growth causes dislocations and political demands that drive even more governmental investment on and facilitation of capital intensive growth, Because the accumulation process often includes resource extraction ("withdrawals") and adds to pollution, the treadmill of production is directly connected to environmental degradation ("additions").

Environmental and natural phenomena are viewed as social constructions in Social Construction theories, which focus on understanding internal social interactions, i.e. the social processes by which specific environmental situations are socially identified as problems.
"The environment is a fluid idea that is culturally anchored as well as socially challenged," Hannigan says. (1995:109)

Any re-orientation of human relationships with nature, according to Murphy (Murphy 1994, 244), will be a response to people's ecological experiences of environmental deterioration in their daily lives, not a kind of abstract awareness of environmental concerns.He says that our understanding of the environment is based on experience since humans are intrinsically linked to the natural world and its processes (Murphy 1994, 246-247).Humans begin to identify with nature through experiences that lead to knowledge, not by viewing all of nature as one's self (universalizing), but by seeing one's self as dependent on and part of nature in a specific location (Murphy 1994, 248).

Hannigan, J. 2006. Environmental sociology: a social constructivist perspective. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge.