ABSTRACT
At first glance, modern anxieties over the various aspects and implications of environmental deterioration have rather shallow roots. We may be too easily persuaded to seek the origins of current concerns in the much-trumpeted coming exhaustion of non-renewable resources, intensifying fears of global overpopulation, the alarming implications in rampant pollution, recurring energy crises, and speculations on the connections between deforestation and the spectre of land degradation. The commonest inclination is to examine the environmental attitudes and behaviours of urbanized, relatively well-educated Western communities to identify the primary locus of these modern preoccupations. Anchored thus in space and time, our understanding is severely limited and ultimately unsatisfying; as a corollary, ‘environmentalism’ in its many guises is readily criticized for dubious intellectual and cultural foundations, and is conveniently discounted as an irritating ‘peripheral’ movement dependent on episodic engagements with mainstream society. That is why it needs to be asserted that environmental concern is as old as human society itself-is indeed an essential ingredient, a measure, of the human condition-and that the adoption of any constricting perspective deprives us of a rich legacy of thought and action which might prove to be our greatest resource.
