EcoAxes / Included ideologies
Included ideologies
Environmental movements, each with a researched entry and its place on the fourteen dimensions.
Classical environmental philosophies
AnthropocentrismThe position that moral value and moral standing belong to human beings. Duties about the environment are then duties owed to people, now and in the future, and not to nature itself.
BiocentrismThe view that every living organism has a good of its own and inherent worth, so that moral consideration reaches past humans and feeling animals to all living things. In practice it is carried by wildlife protection: bans on hunting, trapping, culling and the wildlife trade, strict habitat protection and non-lethal answers to conflict.
BioregionalismThe view, developed in the 1970s by Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, Kirkpatrick Sale and Gary Snyder, that human life should be organised around natural regions such as watersheds, mountain ranges and ecosystems instead of political borders. Communities learn to "reinhabit" their place, live within its limits and govern themselves at the scale of the region.
ConservationismThe "wise use" tradition. Public agencies should manage natural resources scientifically, for "the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time", keeping up their yield so that they are neither used up nor locked away.
Dark MountainThe cultural movement started by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine's 2009 manifesto Uncivilisation. It holds that industrial civilisation is coming apart and that politics, technology and campaigns cannot save it. It asks instead for grief, honesty, art, and a new rooting of human life in a wild world nobody controls.
Deep EcologyA philosophy holding that all living beings and ecosystems have value in themselves, that people should live as equals with the rest of life on earth, and that this needs deep changes to economic, technological and political structures.
EcocentrismThe view that ecological wholes, such as species, ecosystems, landscapes and the biosphere, have moral value in their own right, so human interests do not automatically outrank the integrity of the living world. Its most complete form, ecological holism, places value in whole systems instead of in the organisms that make them up.
Environmental PragmatismAn approach to environmental ethics and policy that puts aside arguments about the ultimate value of nature. It prefers practical problem-solving, accepts many kinds of value, and tests policies democratically, like experiments, by their results.
Gaian EcologyThe view, grounded in James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's Gaia hypothesis, that the earth's living things and its rocks, oceans and air form one self-regulating system that keeps the planet habitable. Humanity's task is to protect the health of that whole, which Lovelock came to believe might require nuclear power, adaptation and even strong central government.
Land EthicAldo Leopold's ethic, which widens the moral community to include soils, waters, plants and animals. It asks people to act as "plain members and citizens" of the land community instead of its conquerors, and judges actions by what they do to the integrity, stability and beauty of that community.
Neo-MalthusianismThe position, revived from Malthus in the mid-twentieth century and given its environmental form by William Vogt, Fairfield Osborn, Garrett Hardin and Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Human numbers and consumption are outgrowing the earth's ecological carrying capacity, so population and economic growth must be brought within fixed natural limits, by restraint enforced through law if necessary.
PreservationismThe tradition associated with John Muir. Nature should be protected from human use and development, for its own sake and for its value to beauty, spirit and science, through parks, reserves and wilderness areas. In conservation practice it takes the form of wilderness preservation, which keeps large areas free of roads, settlement and extraction.
Left and socialist ecologies
Anarcho-PrimitivismThe view that civilisation itself, starting with farming and the domestication of plants and animals, is the root of ecological destruction and human alienation. Its answer is to give up industrial technology and mass society for small foraging communities.
Deep Green ResistanceThe movement launched by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen's book Deep Green Resistance (2011). It holds that industrial civilisation is destroying the living world and cannot be reformed, and calls for an organised resistance, including underground sabotage of industrial infrastructure, to bring it down. It is included to complete the range of views, and is described here, not endorsed.
DegrowthThe movement and field of research holding that wealthy economies must deliberately cut the materials and energy they use and stop treating growth as a goal. That would let them live within the planet's limits and leave ecological room for the poor, with life reorganised around having enough, care, shared resources and living well together.
Eco-SyndicalismThe attempt to join revolutionary trade unionism with ecological politics. Workers in extractive and polluting industries have both the power and the reason to change how things are produced, and the labour struggle and the environmental struggle are the same struggle.
EcofeminismA body of thought and activism holding that the domination of women and the domination of nature are linked, in history and in ideas. An ecological politics must therefore be feminist, centred on care, subsistence, the body and a critique of thinking in opposed pairs.
Green Social DemocracyThe social democratic and democratic socialist programme best known through Green New Deal proposals. It would use the state to drive a fast, publicly led move to clean energy and infrastructure, expand public ownership and services, and tie climate policy to jobs, equality and justice, inside a democracy and without necessarily giving up growth.
Ecomodernist LeftA current on today's left, associated with Leigh Phillips, Matthew Huber and writers around Jacobin magazine. It dismisses degrowth as austerity and answers climate change with public ownership of energy and industry, a fast build-out of clean power including nuclear, and material abundance for working people.
EcosocialismA political tradition holding that capitalism's drive to accumulate is the root cause of ecological destruction, and that sustainability requires a democratic, planned, socially owned economy built around human needs and ecological limits. Its theoretical core is eco-Marxism, which reads the ecological crisis through Marx's idea of a "metabolic rift" between capitalist society and nature.
Green AnarchismAnarchism with ecology at its centre. It holds that states, capitalism and hierarchy cause ecological destruction, and that a free society of self-governing, cooperative communities living within ecological limits is both possible and necessary.
Productivist SocialismThe socialist tradition that dominated the twentieth-century Soviet Union and Maoist China. It saw the transformation of nature, through planned industry, great engineering works and the full development of the forces of production, as the road to human freedom, and treated nature mainly as material to be mastered for the people's needs.
Social EcologyMurray Bookchin's philosophy that humanity's domination of nature grows out of people's domination of one another. An ecological society must therefore be directly democratic, decentralised and without hierarchy, built from a confederation of municipalities and an economy owned by the community.
Liberal, reformist and market environmentalism
Green GrowthThe policy framework promoted by the OECD, the World Bank and UNEP from around 2009. The economy can keep growing while pressure on the environment falls, through investment in clean technology, putting prices on environmental costs, and innovation, so that protecting the environment drives growth instead of holding it back. Its theory is ecological modernisation, which holds that modern economies can be rebuilt so that growth and environmental improvement go together. In business it takes the form of corporate sustainability: ESG investing, net-zero and "nature positive" pledges, and the triple bottom line, on the view that companies will deliver sustainability because it pays.
Green LiberalismThe view that liberal principles, meaning individual freedom, equal rights, democracy, the rule of law and a regulated market economy, can and should be extended to protect the environment, including the interests of future generations, through strong public institutions and international cooperation.
Market EnvironmentalismThe approach that uses market tools to reach environmental goals at the lowest cost: tradeable permits, quotas, payments for ecosystem services, privatised water and carbon markets, all inside rules set by the state. It treats the market as the preferred instrument of environmental policy instead of its enemy. It rests on environmental economics, the discipline that puts prices on pollution and on ecosystem services. Its property-rights wing, free-market environmentalism, goes further and makes secure, tradeable rights the main tool in place of regulation.
Reform EnvironmentalismThe environmentalism of the large national and international organisations, from the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council to the Environmental Defense Fund and WWF. It protects land, wildlife, air, water and climate through law, regulation, lawsuits, elections, science and international agreements, working to reform existing institutions instead of replacing them.
Steady-State EconomicsHerman Daly's proposal for an economy of constant physical size. Policy holds population and the stock of capital at sustainable levels, and the economy keeps improving in quality while it stops growing in quantity, with markets working inside physical limits set by society as a whole.
Sustainable DevelopmentThe framework set out by the Brundtland Commission in 1987 and built into the Rio process and the Sustainable Development Goals. Development should meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own, joining economic growth, social fairness and environmental protection through international cooperation.
Conservative and traditionalist environmentalism
Agrarian ConservatismThe tradition most closely tied to Wendell Berry. It holds that small farms, settled communities and careful, affectionate husbandry are the basis of healthy land and a good society, and that industrial agriculture, the global economy and constant mobility wear down soil, community and character together.
Conservation ConservatismThe tradition of hunters, anglers and rural landowners who have organised and paid for the conservation of wildlife and habitat since the late nineteenth century. It rests on the sustainable use of game and fish, hands-on habitat management, funding by the people who use wildlife, and local practical knowledge. Preservation and environmentalist ideology are not its foundations.
Eco-AuthoritarianismThe position, argued most openly in the 1970s and revived in the age of climate change, that liberal democracy is too slow, too short-sighted and too captured by interest groups to respect ecological limits. On this view a strong, centralised government guided by experts, and coercive where necessary, must impose the restraint that survival requires.
EcofascismThe fusion of ecological concern with fascist politics. It holds that the natural order needs a people defined by race or ethnicity, rooted in its own soil and ruled by authoritarian leaders, and it presents population reduction, closed borders and the subordination of the individual to the nation as ecological necessities. It is included so that the range of views is complete. It is described here, not endorsed.
Environmental NationalismThe outlook that treats a nation's environment, resources and landscapes as national inheritance, to be protected and controlled by the nation for its own people, and that resists international authority over them. It ranges from resource nationalism and independence movements built on environmental protest to the "green nationalism" of some parties today.
Environmental ScepticismThe position, argued by Julian Simon and Bjørn Lomborg and carried in politics by the Wise Use movement and free-market think tanks, that the environmental movement has exaggerated how large and urgent environmental problems are. Human ingenuity and economic growth, it holds, tend to improve environmental conditions over time, and most environmental regulation costs more than it is worth.
Green ConservatismConservative environmentalism, given its fullest statement by Roger Scruton. It grounds care for the environment in love of home and place, in duties of inheritance between generations, and in local association and private stewardship, and it distrusts both large state programmes and international bureaucracy. It includes the traditionalist view that inherited ways of farming, building and living on the land hold a wisdom modern society has lost.
Libertarian EnvironmentalismThe libertarian position that environmental harms violate property rights and should be put right by strict liability in the courts, since pollution is trespass. Private ownership of land, water and wildlife, with the state limited to enforcing rights, would protect the environment better than regulation, public ownership or international agreements.
Indigenous, decolonial and justice-based approaches
Buen VivirThe Andean idea of living well in harmony with community and nature (sumak kawsay in Kichwa, suma qamaña in Aymara). Ecuador and Bolivia wrote it into their constitutions as an alternative to development. It goes with recognising the rights of nature and with a mixed economy aimed at sufficiency instead of growth.
Climate JusticeThe framework and movement that treat climate change as an ethical and political problem of unequal responsibility and unequal harm. Those who caused it, meaning wealthy countries, corporations and high-emitting individuals, owe emissions cuts, finance, help with adaptation and reparation to those who suffer most and contributed least, and climate policy must not repeat the injustices that produced the crisis. It includes the idea of ecological debt: the industrialised North owes the South for the resources it took and for the emissions it put into a shared atmosphere.
Convivial ConservationBram Büscher and Robert Fletcher's proposal for conservation after capitalism. It rejects both fortress conservation and the market-based "new conservation". Protected areas that shut people out become "promoted areas" that welcome them, tourism and offsets give way to a conservation basic income and direct democratic control, and the goal is people and nature living together.
Decolonial EcologyA body of thought holding that the ecological crisis and colonialism are one history. Modern environmentalism, it argues, has repeated a "colonial double fracture" by separating environmental questions from slavery, racism and empire, and an adequate ecology has to be decolonial, starting from the peoples and places colonialism turned into resources. It includes the critique of extraction, strongest in Latin America, which sees mining, oil and export farming as a model of development that sacrifices whole territories and the peoples who live in them.
Environmental JusticeThe movement and principle that no community should bear an unfair share of environmental harm or be denied a fair share of environmental goods, and that affected communities must have a real voice in decisions. It began in the struggles of Black, Latino, Indigenous and poor communities in the United States against toxic sites near their homes, and has since spread worldwide.
Food SovereigntyThe right of peoples to healthy, culturally appropriate food produced by ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to decide their own food and farming systems. The peasant movement La Vía Campesina has advanced it since 1996, tied to agroecology, land reform and the defence of seeds, commons and small producers against corporate agriculture.
Indigenous StewardshipThe assertion by Indigenous peoples of their right to govern, care for and relate to their lands, waters and non-human kin under their own laws, knowledge and responsibilities. It goes with growing recognition that territories governed by Indigenous peoples hold much of the world's remaining biodiversity.
Land Back EnvironmentalismThe movement led by Indigenous peoples in North America, and echoed worldwide, that demands the return of land and jurisdiction to Indigenous nations. It treats return as the foundation of justice and as the most effective way to restore ecosystems, on the evidence that lands governed by Indigenous peoples are the best conserved on earth.
Political EcologyThe field, drawing on several disciplines, that explains environmental change and conflict through power, property and political economy. It holds that no environmental problem is free of politics: who damages, who conserves, who benefits and who pays are questions of justice before they are questions of technique.
Popular EnvironmentalismThe environmental struggles of peasants, fishers, Indigenous peoples and the urban poor to keep the land, water and forests their livelihoods depend on, against mines, dams, plantations and polluting industry. Joan Martinez-Alier named it ecologismo popular, also translated as "the environmentalism of the poor". Its defenders often never called themselves environmentalists: for them, nature matters first as the source of a living.
Technological and modernist environmentalism
Appropriate TechnologyThe movement inspired by E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful and Ivan Illich's Tools for Conviviality. It prefers technology sized to human communities, cheap, simple, repairable, employing people and locally controlled, to the large, capital-heavy, centralised systems of industrial life. It began as a programme for poor countries and grew into a model for everyone.
Bright Green EnvironmentalismThe outlook Alex Steffen named in 2003. It holds that sustainability will come from better design, clean technology, dense well-planned cities and invention, and not from sacrifice. It sets itself apart from "dark green" calls for simple living and from "light green" shopping gestures. It includes natural capitalism, Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins's programme of much more productive use of resources, copying nature's designs and reinvesting in ecosystems, so that business helps repair the environment.
Eco-AccelerationismThe left-accelerationist position on the ecological crisis. The way through is to push modern technology further, past capitalism: full automation, plentiful clean energy, synthetic biology and engineering on a planetary scale, all under democratic, post-capitalist control, giving "fully automated luxury" to everyone while repairing the planet. Slowing modernity down is the wrong answer.
Ecological CivilisationThe doctrine of shengtai wenming, written into China's constitution in 2018 and central to Xi Jinping's thought. A strong state that plans ahead should lead society into a new stage of civilisation in which economic growth and ecological protection go together. Its tools are huge investment in clean technology, tree planting and restoration, binding ecological "red lines", and the principle that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets".
EcomodernismThe position set out in An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015). Humanity can protect nature by decoupling from it: by concentrating farming, energy and settlement on a small footprint through technology, nuclear power and genetically engineered crops included, so that the rest of the planet can be left wild. A "good Anthropocene" of prosperity for all and restored ecosystems is possible through modernisation, without restraint. It is the most developed form of technological environmentalism.
Planetary StewardshipThe framework from Earth system science holding that humanity has become a planetary force and must operate within measurable planetary boundaries. Staying within them needs global monitoring, governance and active management of the Earth system, with science informing binding international institutions.
Precautionary EnvironmentalismThe outlook built around the precautionary principle. Where an activity threatens serious or irreversible harm to health or the environment, a lack of full scientific certainty is no reason to delay protective measures, and the burden of proof falls on those who want to introduce a new technology, chemical or organism, not on those who want to hold it back.
Conservation philosophies and practice
Animal LiberationThe movement and ethic grounded in Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights (1983). It holds that a sentient animal's interests count as much as similar human interests, which makes factory farming, most meat-eating, animal experiments and the hunting and trapping of wild animals serious wrongs, and it calls for an end to treating animals as property.
Community-Based ConservationThe broad approach that treats local and Indigenous communities as the rightful stewards and main agents of conservation. It pursues biodiversity goals through their participation, rights, knowledge and livelihoods instead of keeping them out, and ranges from sharing the benefits of state parks to full community ownership and governance of protected land. It includes community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), the southern African model that gives communities legal rights over the wildlife, forests, fisheries and grazing they live with.
Compassionate ConservationThe movement, given formal shape around 2010, that brings animal welfare ethics into conservation. It holds that the wellbeing of each wild animal matters morally and that conservation should "first do no harm". Wherever another way exists, it refuses to kill individual animals, invasive and overabundant ones included, for the sake of populations, species or ecosystems.
Evidence-Based ConservationThe approach, modelled on evidence-based medicine and associated with William Sutherland and Andrew Pullin, that conservation decisions should be judged by measured results for nature. Systematic reviews of which interventions actually work should guide them, and money and effort should go where they buy the most conservation.
Fortress ConservationThe model of conservation that protects nature by keeping people out. Strictly protected areas are enforced by rangers and law, and the people who live in or next to them are removed or barred, on the belief that human use and wildlife cannot coexist. The name comes mostly from critics. Its defenders speak of strict protection or "nature needs half".
Private Land ConservationThe approach built by The Nature Conservancy and thousands of land trusts. It protects nature by buying land, holding conservation easements and working with private owners, so that wild habitat is kept from development through property, contracts and philanthropy, without state regulation or changes to the wider economy.
Radical Wilderness DefenceThe movement launched by Earth First! in 1980, drawing on Edward Abbey's fiction, that defends wild nature by direct action, civil disobedience and sometimes sabotage. It rests on the ecocentric conviction that wilderness has value in itself, and that mainstream environmentalism has bargained it away.
Restoration-Centred ConservationThe approach that puts active repair of damaged ecosystems at the centre of conservation, alongside protecting intact ones. It restores forests, wetlands, rivers, grasslands, reefs and soils toward reference conditions through deliberate intervention, as organised by the Society for Ecological Restoration and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030). Its engineering wing, ecological engineering, designs ecosystems such as constructed wetlands, living shorelines and built reefs, using natural processes to do most of the work.
RewildingRestoring ecosystems that sustain themselves by bringing back natural processes. Above all it returns missing species, especially large herbivores and predators, and reduces human management, so that nature can look after itself again. It runs from the continental plans for cores and corridors of the 1990s to the European and British rewilding movements of the 2010s. Trophic rewilding, its best-known form, focuses on the return of large animals and their effects on everything else.
Rights-Based ConservationThe framework that makes respect for human rights a binding condition of all conservation, including the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities to land, resources, consent and participation. Conservation that violates rights is illegitimate whatever its ecological results, and securing rights is itself an effective way to conserve.
Sustainable-Use ConservationThe approach, built into the Convention on Biological Diversity and the work of the IUCN, that using wild species, through hunting, fishing, harvesting, trade and ranching, can be made sustainable and can create the incentives and money that conserve species and habitats. "Use it or lose it" is a legitimate conservation strategy alongside strict protection.
Religious and spiritual environmental ethics
Buddhist InterdependenceThe modern development of Buddhist teaching into an environmental ethic and movement. It draws on dependent origination (interdependence), compassion for all sentient beings, non-harming, non-attachment and the critique of craving. It runs from the engaged Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama to Thailand's forest monks who ordain trees, and to Buddhist economics in the line of Schumacher and P. A. Payutto.
Catholic Integral EcologyThe teaching of Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si' (2015) and the documents that followed it. "Everything is connected": the ecological crisis and the social crisis are one, and the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor are the same cry. The answer is an integral ecology that joins care for creation, justice for the poor, a critique of the technocratic mindset and of consumerism, and a change of lifestyles and institutions.
Christian StewardshipThe main Protestant and wider Christian environmental ethic. The earth is God's creation, entrusted to humanity to care for and use responsibly, so destroying it is a failure of stewardship and a sin against the Creator. It grew in answer to Lynn White's charge in 1967 that Christianity was to blame for the ecological crisis, and now includes evangelical "creation care", mainline Protestant eco-theology and Orthodox teaching.
Confucian Tianren HeyiThe Confucian ideal of tianren heyi, the unity of heaven and humanity, read as an environmental ethic. People complete a moral cosmos instead of standing outside it, so caring for nature belongs to self-cultivation, to duty toward ancestors and descendants, and to good government. A classical saying puts it: "the humane person forms one body with heaven, earth and the myriad things".
Daoist ZiranDaoism, from the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi to the later religious tradition, read as an ecological philosophy. It teaches non-interference (wuwei), naturalness (ziran), harmony with the Dao that runs through heaven and earth, few desires, and the worth of the small and the yielding. Western environmental philosophers have developed this reading since the 1960s, and in China so have Daoist institutions and the official language of "ecological civilisation".
Eco-SpiritualityA broad, mostly informal movement that finds the sacred in nature itself: in the earth, the cosmos and the web of life. It draws on Indigenous traditions, Romanticism, process theology, Gaia theory, neopaganism and the "new cosmology". It holds that the ecological crisis is at bottom a spiritual crisis of disconnection, to be healed through reverence, ritual and a renewed sense of belonging to the living earth.
Hindu Dharmic EcologyThe many Hindu sources of environmental ethics: the divine present in nature, sacred rivers, trees, mountains and animals, dharma as the order of the cosmos and of society, ahimsa, and the ideal of simple living. Modern thinkers and movements have built on them, from Gandhi's village economy to the Chipko forest movement, the Bishnoi tradition of protection and the campaigns to clean the Ganga.
Islamic AmanahThe Islamic ethic of amanah, the trust of the earth that humanity accepted (Qur'an 33:72). Honoured as ashraf al-makhluqat, the noblest of creation, people hold the earth on God's behalf and answer for it. They are bound by tawhid (the unity of creation), mizan (balance) and the bans on fasad (corruption) and israf (waste), and guided by the lands the Prophet himself protected, the hima and the sanctuary of Medina.
Jain AhimsaThe Jain teaching that every living being has a soul (jiva), down to the beings with a single sense that live in earth, water, fire, air and plants, and that the highest duty is ahimsa, non-violence toward them all. With the vows of non-possession (aparigraha) and limited consumption, it is probably the most demanding ethic of restraint toward life in any world religion, and a modern environmental movement rests on it.
Jewish Bal TashchitThe body of Jewish law, text and practice that grounds care for the earth in the teaching that "the earth is the Lord's" (Psalm 24:1), that people are placed in the garden "to work it and to keep it" (Genesis 2:15), and in commandments such as bal tashchit (do not destroy), shmita (the sabbatical rest of the land) and tza'ar ba'alei chayim (the ban on causing animals needless suffering). Since the 1980s it has grown into a distinct eco-theology and movement.
Shinto Chinju no MoriThe Shinto reverence for kami, the sacred presences in mountains, rivers, rocks, trees and the land itself. It is embodied in the chinju no mori, the forests left uncut around Japan's shrines for centuries, and modern movements for forest protection and native forest restoration have taken it up as a model of nature protected because it is sacred.
Sikh Sarbat da BhalaThe Sikh teaching that the one Creator is present throughout creation, summed up in the closing verse of the Japji Sahib: "Air is the Guru, water the father, and earth the great mother of all". Joined to the ideals of honest work, sharing and the welfare of all (sarbat da bhala), it has grown into a modern environmental movement of tree planting, river restoration and community service.