Environmental degradation became an issue in those locales where citizens suffered the unintended consequences of modern industrial development. In England, workers first experienced the grim conditions associated with the Dickensian city in the mid-18th century. In the rest of Europe and North America, the degraded industrial landscape emerged by the mid-19th century, and globally such conditions emerged in the 20th century. By the end of that century, the condition of the environment had become an issue not only for the world’s industrial workers but also for an increasingly diverse population who could no longer isolate themselves from the fouled water, polluted air, and multiple health hazards that derive from industrial capitalism. Historians and philosophers attribute the emergence of a degraded natural environment to various sources. The historian Lynn White, Jr. (1907–), for example, argued that the anthropo-centric assumptions of mainstream Christianity are largely responsible...