¥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.