When anyone says the word 'nature', we should ask the question, 'Which nature?' Naturally fertilized cabbage? Nature as it is, industrially lacerated? Country life during the 1950s (as it is represented in retrospect today, or as it was represented in days gone by to countryfolk, or to those who dreamed of country life)? Mountain solitude before the publication of hikers' guides to deserted valleys? Nature as conceived by natural science? Nature without chemicals? The polished ecological models of interconnectedness? Nature as it is depicted in gardening manuals? Such nature as one yearns for (peace, a mountain stream, profound contemplation)? As it is praised and priced in the supermarkets of world solitude? Nature as a sight for sore eyes? The beauty of a Tuscan landscape -- in other words, a highly cultivated art of nature? Or nature in the wild? The volcano before it erupts? The nature of early cultures, invested with demonic power, subjectivity and the living gods of religion? The primeval forest? Nature conceived as a zoo without cages? As it roars and rages in the cigarette advertisements of the city's cinemas?

....

Ecological protest does not ignite amid the social milieux in greatest danger, where poverty, filth, noise and risks have formed an unbreakable alliance of threats; it is ignited among the middle-income majority, whose standards of safety and of health were cultivated and developed during the golden years of the 1960s, on the basis of a (modest) share of affluence and property, knowledge and education. This majority now sees itself robbed by ecological despoliation of the fruits of its labours - leisure, house and garden. It is not the despoliation of nature, but the jeopardization of a specific cultural model of nature (whose contents and endangerment indicate the level of development of wealth production in Germany) that provides the sounding-board for the ecological alarm of an entire society. The image of nature destroyed, and whose destruction is experienced, is the counter-image of the hectically mobile, meritocratic, affluent society; and the latter jeopardizes the enjoyment of what has been achieved by all the tools of progress: cars, roads, consumption, mobility.

— Ulrich Beck Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk (Polity, 1995), p. 36 and p. 54