The Two Environmentalisms

A momentous shift in American intellectuals’ understanding of humanity, culture, and nature began in the 1960s and 1970s. Symbolic of the transition was a gradual substitution of primary definitions of the term environmentalism, from the malleability of human values, knowledge, and goals due to the overwhelming importance of culture, to the care and respect for the complex web of relationships across the diversity of species. The significance of environmentalism in its earlier definition was eroded as the post-World War II intellectual consensus pairing cultural environmentalism and human distinctiveness unraveled for a number of reasons, including the appeal of biological arguments to segments of the left coalition as well as questions raised by the debates about behaviorism and linguistics. In retrospect, it also seems that the shift in definition to the ecological sense of environmentalism was itself a stimulus rather than simply a symptom of the transition. As humanity assumed a new position as part of rather than separate from and dominating the natural world, a new characterization of environmentalism underscored the new message encoded in the changes in biological and psychological research.