The Death of Nature and the Birth of Ecology: Natural History and the Preconditions of Ecology in Early Modernity

It has been commonplace in environmental thinking that the Western philosophical tradition is inherently hostile to the natural world and has fostered the exploitation of nature throughout history. Recent studies on the transition from the Renaissance emblematic world view to the scientific one can also be accommodated with a modified version of this thesis. However, even in the light of these recent advancements, it is still possible and, I argue, necessary to hold a more balanced and realistic view according to which early modern developments toward an ecologically more sensitive attitude would be tightly bound to the articulation of modernity’s environmentally destructive tendencies. Thus, any analysis that accuses early modern philosophy of reinforcing exploitation is inherently biased, one-sided and unhistorical. The preconditions of ecology and that of unlimited environmental exploitation resulted from the same intellectual developments at the end of the seventeenth century.

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