Environment in the Emile Durkheim’s Sociological Perspective

In recent years, the environment and arising challenges have attracted the attention ofvarious sciences.Number of sociology/psychological research in this field demonstrates this scholar’s attention to the environment. However, environmental sociology as a branch of sociology discipline was established too late. Some sought the reason in the leading Social Scientists pioneer’s thoughts and accordingly condemned them. One of these social scientists known responsible for the lack of attention to environment is Durkheim, the French leading sociologist. In this study, we tried to examine the concept of environment in the Durkheim thoughts and answer to the question that how his thoughts resulted in the late entering of environment to the sociology. The results of this study suggest that the notion of social realities and anti-reductionist view of Durkheim mind are influential important factors ignoring the effects of environmental variables on society. In addition, according to the result of this study, even though, the impact of Durkheim's view on mainstream of sociology has been relatively wide, but the inclusiveness of these thoughts was to doubt and Durkheim boundaries with environmental variables, after him have been gone in many cases.