All societies exploit their environments and all have to establish rational limits for the conservation of the resources they need.

The search for the right balance has become one of the great projects for the global community in the 21st century. The idea that nature is worth conserving for its own sake, quite apart from its human uses, forms part of religious traditions in which nature is sanctified: Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, for example, and traditional Western paganism. In modern, secular traditions of thought, environmental concerns surfaced in the sensibilities of late 18th-century romanticism, which revered nature as a book of secular morality, and (so the historian Richard Grove has argued) may have developed among European imperialists awestruck at the custodianship of far-flung 'Edens'.