Response

Abstract

Polarised choices have been a recurrent feature of environmental debate in Australia and other Englishspeaking “New World” societies: either development or environment. The countercultural environmentalists of the 1960s and ’70s viewed nature as locked in battle with society, ecology as pitted against technology, wilderness as the antithesis of the city. The field of environmental ethics that emerged at this time reflected these binary distinctions in a stark moral choice between modern anthropocentrism (human-centred ethics) or environmentalist ecocentrism (nature-centred ethics). During the 1980s, environmental concerns were taken up in modern institutions, becoming a routine aspect of science, law, bureaucracy, education, media and electoral politics. By the early 1990s, the label “environmentalism” was attached to a wide variety of competing moral positions. The resulting intra-environmentalist debate has often polarised around “dark green” or radical advocates of wholesale transformation of modernity and “light green” or reformist advocates of incremental evolution towards eco-modernity.