¥Dominant 1620 to
1850, perhaps even now:
¥Moral and economic
ideological rationale for resource exploitation
¥nature and her
resources have no intrinsic value
¥nature unproductive and useless without
application of human labor
¥human welfare
depends on exploitation and development of nature
¥technologically optimistic that human
inventiveness and technology can overcome any resource problem
¥resources are
infinitely abundant for human use
¥rationale for
European conquest/colonialism
¥still explicitly or
implicitly a major countermovement to ÒenvironmentalismÓ
¥Lynn Townsend
White, Jr. White's main area of research and inquiry was the role of technological invention in the Middle Ages. He believed that the Middle Ages were a decisive period in the genesis of Western technological supremacy, and that the "activist character" of
medieval Western Christianity provided the "psychic foundations" of technological inventiveness. He also conjectured that the Christian Middle Ages were the root of ecological crisis in the 20th century, and wrote a highly influential article, "The Historical Roots of Our
Ecologic Crisis", published in the journal Science in 1967.