Environment

From the Renaissance onward, the idea of the environment underwent several successive and rapid transformations. The natural world became a sphere of aesthetic feeling and theist religiosity; it could restore well-being and reflect as well as be imbued with human emotion. It became an object of positivist study and exploitation for human economic activity during the industrial revolution and afterward. In the twentieth century, understanding of the environment was shaped by a broad range of factors such as extensive farming and overexploitation of natural resources; the systematic screening of floras in search of new molecules with previously unknown therapeutic activity; global transportation favoring the transfer of plants and animals into nonnative habitats, where they become invasive, threatening native biota; and the escalation in the size of industrial plants and commercial vectors. The latter concern is related to such major environmental catastrophes as the oil spill of the supertanker Torrey Canyon off the coast of England in 1967, and of a spill by the Amoco Cadiz almost ten years later (1978) affecting the beaches of France and England; the emission of a vapor cloud containing toxic dioxin after a chemical facility explosion in Seveso, Italy, in 1976; the partial meltdown of an atomic reactor at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979; and the explosion of a similar reactor at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, in 1986.

The absence of preventive regulations and of policies to compensate for damages to persons and the environment after such disasters, in addition to advances in genetic engineering enabling modifications in nature, and globalization, creating a feeling of ubiquity and a common model of thought, contributed during the last decades of the twentieth century to initiatives addressing uncontrolled technological development and the dangers posed to the environment. The modern ideology of continuous and cumulative advances in technological civilization and hence of social well-being came into question, with lingering concerns that history does not necessarily lead to a better future. This was accompanied by the notion that social and technological progress had led to humans being cut off from their environment. Perhaps in reaction to this feeling, an avid search for connection began, for a recovery of a direct and personal contact with nature, a reengagement with traditional environmental values. Such a return took several different forms and affected many if not all areas of contemporary societies in developed countries, from scientific research in traditional (natural) medicines, for instance, to repatriation programs, to protection of the intellectual property of local, namely traditional, communities on the uses of natural substances, to large-scale international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). "Ecotourism," environmental management, and sustainable development were all concepts aimed at leaving to future generations a healthy and viable world.