ABSTRACT
We are now in the fourth environmental revolution. The first was associated with the rise of romanticism in the early eighteenth century. The mood was captured by poets and writers in many countries – for example Wordsworth, Emerson, Muir, Chekov and Tolstoy. They saw in the natural world an allegory of how human society ought to live. Nature was an exemplar – it set standards and guided morality. Human activity was judged to be ethically linked to natural processes and purposes (see Petulla, 1980; Thomas 1983; Pepper 1984).
