Environmentalism concerns how the various elements of nature – human beings and their societies, other living animals and plants, and minerals – relate to one another. How the environment is viewed is intrinsically linked to modernity, a process whereby not only the known world is organized in a rational way through science and technology, but where human beings, as uniquely sexualized subjects endeavoring to control the development of their very existence, require their rights to be understood and recognized.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in the West, the protection of nature was an objective mainly set by social actors using scientific and technical knowledge to persuade political institutions to promote the protection of living beings and minerals from industrial and urban expansion. A more rational approach to the protection of the environment began on a political level with a gradual allocation of even large areas of territory as natural parks in America, in Europe and in areas of other continents colonized by Western powers.

On the other hand, practices making reference to nature, but using science and technology to conduct studies on human beings, denying their basic rights, are to be considered anti-modernist. In the first half of the twentieth century, European and American research centers produced essays and set up research projects with the aim of establishing different genetic heritages of human beings, if not the existence of different human races, with the pre-eminence of one – the Nordic race.