ABSTRACT
It is difficult to believe that a Green philosophy could have developed without a growing understanding of the natural world and the development of the science we now call ecology. Although the term, coined in 1869, is of recent origin, Worster in his history of the subject traces its prehistory back centuries earlier. He distinguished between ‘arcadian’ and ‘imperial’ forms of the subject. The arcadian ecologist, epitomized for him by Henry David Thoreau, believes that nature ‘has an order, a pattern, that we humans are bound to understand and respect and preserve’ (Worster 1991: ix). The imperialist, of whom Engels in The Dialectics of Nature is a splendid example, seeks to understand nature in order to control nature more efficiently for his species’ exclusive benefit (Parsons 1977). The sciences of life have played a contradictory role, providing greater understanding and sympathy for the natural world yet equally increasing our ability to dominate, control and destroy.
