Western thinking about the environment is tied inextricably to romanticism in the sense that romanticism becomes a shadow behind, and informs, contemporary Australian environmentalism, whose most popular expression is a wilderness without humans or society. It was in the romantic period-----the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries----that nature was reconceptualised in European thought as dynamic and self-generative, an animate, diverse whole of which humans are but a small part.

Ecocriticism holds that we need to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high-consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively. We struggle to adjust because we're still largely trapped inside the enlightenment tale of progress as human control over a passive and 'dead' nature that justifies both colonial conquests and commodity economies. The master western narrative of progress, is a calculus of progress, in which 'present distress can be claimed to be leading towards, and be justified by, a more perfect future'. The pervasively future-orientated societies of the west define an ontological break that determines that the past is finished.