The damage inflicted to nature by humankind was acknowledged early by one of the fathers of the environmental movement, Aldo Leopold, who expressed a kind of pain experienced by many in today's "wounded world".

In 1949, Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.