ABSTRACT
Paralleling the rise of concern about the impact of human behaviour on the environment, university courses were offered which attracted large numbers of students, and there appeared a number of pioneering studies which for the first time foregrounded the environment in the history of the modern world. This chapter considers these issues before moving on to discuss how the environment has been understood in the past. The study of human thought on the natural world has explored the ways in which the religions, philosophies and political ideologies of different cultures have perceived, and thereby acted upon the environment. In particular, an awareness of the vulnerability of the environment to human depredation emerged from, and was shaped by the complex thinking of European colonizers–a thinking which stood in many ways in sharp contrast to the material and mental exploitation that occurred. The influence of pre-modern thought was evident also in some of the foundational work of a global environmentalism.
