As the environmental historian Frederik Albritton Jonsson has neatly summarised, the standard narrative on the rise of green consciousness ‘runs from the romantic critique of industrialization in Britain and the United States to the creation of the first national parks in these countries’. There are other competing accounts, and while Jonsson investigates the forgotten legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, the main alternative is actually represented by the line of scholarship that looks to colonisation by Britain and France (and the environmental degradation that resulted) as the trigger. What is not in dispute, however, is the importance of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the development of modern environmentalism, except that where the first account concentrates on the evolution of a poetic ‘green language’, the second concentrates on a scientific language of conservation. But whether it is nature poetry or colonial knowledge production being attended to, what is almost invariably communicated is an elite perspective. It should come as no surprise then that an environmentalism which traces its origins to the socially elevated (poets, scientists and, with Jonsson, the Scottish agricultural improvers) continues to accrue to itself the aspersions of elitism that it does in British mainstream society, or a misconception as unfortunate as American political economist Lester Thurow's that ‘environmentalism is an interest of the upper middle class. Poor countries and poor individuals simply aren't interested.’

Indeed, having surveyed the work of environmental historians on tree activism in India and postcolonial scholars on environmental justice, I am certain that many individuals from a background economically less well-off than mine were far more committed to the protection of the air, water and soil than I – an upper-middle-class Singaporean living in Nagoya – could ever be. The Himalayan villagers of the Chipko movement fought even harder, with more imagination and with greater success against deforestation in the 1970s than the American radical environmental activists of the Earth Liberation Front have ever done in the twenty-first century. As far as I am aware, not a single one of the 212 land and environment activists murdered in 2019 was American or British. Poorer individuals from poorer countries have risked and lost far more for environmental causes, and there is every likelihood that they will continue to do so given their situation of greater vulnerability to environmental degradation.