ABSTRACT
One way of characterizing environmental problems is as a set of variations on the more general problem of how we are to maintain our values- our lives. Just as Romanticism, in its context, offered what seemed to be the only viable alternative to the excesses of rationalism in science and technology in the modern period. It is suggestive, that the fundamental principles of environmental philosophers seem not to be self-evident so much as ideologically necessary. Even in cases where Cartesianism is not singled out, the pattern holds: there is something wrong with the way we think about our environment and our relationship to it. While Rolston and other environmental ethicists make tacit assumptions about the way the world works in order to bolster their ethical project, it is the primary project of Deep Ecology to 'articulate a comprehensive religious and philosophical worldview'. By contrast, social ecology is a radical political movement that seeks to establish an 'ecological' society.
