What was the public understanding of Nature in the 1980s? What were the individual duties to protect
Nature? And why was it common to describe Planet Earth as a sick patient that had to be cured from its
manifold diseases such as the pollution of the seas, nuclear disasters, the “Waldsterben” and others?
This thesis investigates how the concept of “Nature”, understood as a guiding principle of human
orientation, was conceived in a specific historical situation, the “era of ecology”. It deals with the
concepts of “nature”, “environment” and “ecology”, follows their intellectual roots and develops the
thesis, that the combination of romantical imagination, technological thinking and pantheism led to
paradigmatic and paradox claim of going back to nature by going forward by means of technology.
