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taken by the West since the Industrial Revolution is not a model that is 'sustainable'. Although
the governments of developing countries rightly demand that their citizens should have
opportunities and a standard of living like those in the West, there is a realisation that this
path to 'development' needs to be based upon a more sustainable model of resource usage.
This awareness is based on recognition that what surrounds us infl uences our well-being and
similarly that human action infl uences the well-being of our environment. The 'what' that
surrounds us is often referred to as the 'environment' or 'nature'; entities that are historically
held as being separate from society (Barry, 1999) - a view that is now being challenged.
It is impossible to pinpoint a single event that has raised environmental consciousness in
the latter half of the twentieth century, although according to Hodgson (1996) a legacy of
environmental concern can be traced to the poisoning of water and fi sh from chemical
discharges from the Chisso Corporation factory in Minamata Bay in Japan in the mid 1950s.
However, scientifi c enquiry, the work of NGOs, personal observations and the pervasive and
persuasive infl uence of media have combined to promote environmental discourses in society.
Science and media have combined to alert us to the fact that we live in a world where
resources are fi nite, perhaps never more poignantly than in 1968 as the world's population saw
for the fi rst time the earth as a sphere fl oating in space, as television images were beamed from
Apollo 8. In the decades since Apollo 8, there has been a realisation that environmental prob-
lems can take on different spatial dimensions; from localised pollution of rivers, acid rain and
nuclear fallout across regions (Holden, 2008), but perhaps most tellingly in terms of raising
the level of environmental debate to a global level and making us think into the future, is
global warming and climate change.
Whist we may have reached a juncture where there exists a commonality of environ-
mental discourse that as a global society we need to address and re-think our relationship to
our surroundings, approaches to achieving this are generally discordant. This is perhaps
unsurprising, given the infl uence of culture, religion, philosophy, economics and politics on
our constructs of nature and the values that we place upon the environment. As Holmes
Rol ston III (198 8 ) ob ser ve s, t he se va lue s ex tend beyond v iew i n g n at u re a s pu rely a n econom ic
resource, to include at least a life-support value, recreational value, scientifi c value, aesthetic
value, genetic-diversity value and historical value.
As these infl uences and values infi ltrate environmental discourse, Dobson (2000) differen-
tiates between 'environmentalism' and 'ecologism' on ideological grounds. The former has an
inherent acceptance that the environmental problems can be dealt with through a managerial
and technical approach without challenges to existing values or patterns of consumption.
Ecologism on the other hand argues that a sustainable and fulfi lling relationship with our
surroundings is dependent upon a changed relationship with the non-human world. Thus
environmentalism is willing to accept that existing political and economic structures are
capable of mitigating the environmental problems confronting society. In contrast, ecologism
challenges the existing economic and political structures as having the ability to respond to
environmental problems, instead emphasising that solutions can only be found through a
radical rethinking of our environmental values.
A similar distinction of environmental discourses is made in the use of the terminology of
technocentrism and ecocentrism (O'Riordan, 1981; Pepper, 1996; Reid, 1995). Technocentrism
is characterised by a belief that technical and management solutions can be found to environ-
mental problems through the application of science, often being applied within a reductionist
approach to the environment. This philosophy permits a divorced objectivity in decision-
making, emphasising the use of nature as a 'resource', thus rendering any subjective considera-
tion over the environment related to feelings or emotions as unworthy. This emphasis upon
