ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on deep ecology's approach together with other types of approaches to environmental issues and highlights their common and diverging features. It is possible to distinguish three main approaches to environmental issues: the prevalent European approach, a second one which has developed in Anglo-Saxon countries under the name of 'environmental ethics' and, finally, deep ecology. The chapter examines the general direction of the environmental policies that have been successively adopted in Europe, and more particularly in France, over the past three decades, to distinguish two main stages or periods. The first period was characterized by hostility towards anything that seemed close to a philosophy of the environment, whereas conversely, during the second phase, new philosophical and ethical concerns have become integrated in environmental policies. Environmental ethics and deep ecology aim at examining the representations, values and ideas that have defined humankind's relation to nature, today and in the past.
