Environmentalism

Abstract

In the mid-twentieth century, the term environmentalism became commonly used to refer to efforts to protect the natural environment from human abuse and disrespect. Attitudes to safeguarding the environment, however, had already been taking shape for some time, based on interpretive practices that affirmed the values, needs, and desires of some people and not others, and rarely those of nonhuman animals. Changing perceptions of species, race, gender, class, and wealth influenced who had the privilege, knowledge, and opportunity to recognize abuses of nature, envision environmentalist possibilities, and act on them. Philip P. Morgan observes, for example, in a study of Caribbean ecology across centuries, that global capitalism, extractivism, and ecological dispossession have skewed which parts of the human population and the natural world have been recognized as worthy of attention and the forms this attention has taken.