Ecologism takes ideological thinking in novel and challenging directions. Its starting place is largely or entirely ignored by other political ideologies: the idea of an intrinsic relationship between humankind and nature (or non-human nature, to avoid confusion with the notion of ‘human nature’). Of course, there is nothing new about this belief. The idea that human society is part of, or at least intimately connected to, the natural world is taken for granted in most traditional cultures and is a core belief of pagan religions and most Eastern religions.
However, such ideas only gained an ideological character when they were invested with political significance. This occurred because of the tendency of industrialisation to divorce humankind from nature, the latter increasingly being seen in economic terms, as a resource available to satisfy human ends. In that sense, ecologism emerged as, and has always constituted, a critique of industrial civilisation.
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