A Sketch of the Development of "Ecology"

"Ecology"-- I mean in the cultural rather than the strictly biological sense-- is a modern development.  I see it as coming from the integration of mystical nature-romanticism, modern biological science, and utopian and transhuman moralities.  It came out of modern world-historical cultural evolution-- it could not have existed previously, not in the gestalt in which we now have it.  Crucial in its development were the Enlightenment and Romantic movements.  The necessary elements became available and combined over the 19th century and "Ecology" as an alternative civilization had been roughly formulated by World War I, I would say, particularly in the German- and English-speaking countries.  After this, expressions of the ecological world-view are seen in different times and places, but it became a world-wide mass-culture movement through the decade from the early 1960s to early 1970s.  And it was inextricably bound up with the Counterculture uprising which occurred then.

Since then, I don't see innovations in the ideology of "Ecology" as much as in expressions of it.  The foundation has been laid, and in the current phase we try to build something substantial and enduring on it.