Environmentalism is a broad term used to describe the ideology of social and political movements that emerged in the 1960s around concerns about pollution, population growth, the preservation of wilderness, endangered species, and other threatened non-renewable resources such as energy and mineral deposits. As such it is a vivid nexus for science, technology, and ethics interactions. Since the 1970s, environmentalism has proved to be one of the most powerful and successful of contemporary ideologies, although this very success has generated so many strains of environmentalist ideas as to threaten the meaningfulness of the term itself.

Intellectual Roots

Although modern environmentalism can be traced to multiple intellectual roots, in the United States there are three primary influences. The first are the U.S. romantic and transcendentalist movements, which found moral and artistic inspiration in the natural world. The greatest representative of these ideas is the nineteenth-century writer Henry David...