Environmental efforts and the environmental movement were forged not so much by general theory and preconceived thought as by day-to-day concern and action. They arose from the varied ways people confronted their surroundings and found them either helpful or harmful for the realization of their aspirations. Such action implied large ideas about human beings and nature, economics and politics, the social order, inequality and power. But daily environmental action and events were so demanding that only rarely were those active in environmental affairs able to think about the larger implications of what they did.

Yet the assumptions implicit in environmental argument and action comprised a set of ideas through which one could understand the American social and political order. If brought together, more modest strands of environmental inquiry added up to ideas about the changes that Americans experienced in the years after World War II and the directions in which these changes were leading.

The few expressions of formal ideas about the environment were narrow in scope. One involved the ethical relationship of human beings and nature, which stressed the “rights of nature” more than the role of nature in society. This was the recurrent theme of the journal Environmental Ethics, one of the few reflective rather than action-oriented environmental publications. Another approach, called “deep ecology,” stressed the need for a nature- rather than human-centered environmental ethic. It was promulgated by several eloquent writers but had few followers. Neither of these viewpoints was widely expressed.