Making a mark: two thousand years of ecology, economy and worldview

We can make a history of the world as an ecological history of an empirical nature. But parallelling that is the history of human thought about nature. The two interact at both pragmatic and abstract levels but in essence the outcome is unpredictable and more akin to chaos theory than to environmental or technological determinism. So the pursuit of either environmentalist or cornucopian Utopias seems not only doomed to failure but likely to cause destruction along the way; a step by step improvisatory strategy seems the best we can do.