One never knows how far to go in any direction, nor when to stop. So one chooses arbitrarily. This thumbnail history chooses to begin just on the 1800's side of the turn of the century.
Modern environmentalism is peopled by a very mixed group of folks and their motivations.
They consider themselves environmentalists due to love of wildlife, fear of civilized life, animal rights, hunting, mysticism, pragmatics, or even religious dogma. Today they are loosely and warily bound together under green banners of various depths of color, but even this loose alliance was once non-existent. Until those hands were joined, environmentalism was undefined and rarely potent. The hands came together in the 1960's, as did the consciousness-raising perspectives of so many other concerns. But the roots ran deep in time, and in this first section we can briefly explore those early prophets, as we anticipate the explosive developments of the sixties and seventies.