Sociological work on environmental issues is traced through the development and evolution of the field of environmental sociology. After overcoming the larger discipline's reluctance to incorporate the physical environment into sociological analyses, sociologists have conducted a diverse and ever-expanding range of work on environmental issues. The social construction of environmental problems was an early emphasis, leading to important insights concerning the processes by which various conditions come to be recognized and accepted as societal problems. In the 1990s, influenced by postmodernism, some sociologists adopted a strong constructivist orientation aimed at deconstructing issues such as global warming, prompting a critical reaction from scholars working from a realist perspective. The resulting debates led to a détente, but their legacy can be discerned in two current orientations toward the use of scientific indicators of ecological conditions. “Agnostics” tend to analyze environmental controversies, discourses, and science (especially climate science), while “pragmatists” employ measures such as ecological footprints, greenhouse gas emissions, and toxic waste inventories to analyze the causes and impacts of ecological deterioration. Analyzing solutions to environmental problems has become a major focus of the field, resulting in debates between optimistic proponents of ecological modernization and their more pessimistic critics from political economy and human ecology perspectives.