d ecology comes from the Greek oikos , meaning HOME. The underlying idea is that the earth is a place of close relationships -- that plants, animals, minerals and humans are important to each other and together constitute an INTEGRATED whole. Ecology, as a scientific discipline, studies the interconnections between SPECIES and habitat. Contemporary environmentalists, however, often forget that the earth is home to all its component parts. To protect the earth, they only concentrate on preserving it as a physical object, not as a set of intricate relationships. The earth is seen as merely a house: a material structure, a shelter, an ABODE to support us and our things.Even the greenest of liberals often sport this mind-set, SEEING the earth as a storehouse of natural resources -- oil, timber, plants, animals and others that we use to fuel our cars, build our houses and feed ourselves -- and as an absorptive mechanism that we use to assimilate our wastes. Forests consume carbon dioxide, oceans dissipate toxic substances, and the earth's soil buries solid wastes. Liberal environmentalism is about using the earth's resources and its absorptive capacities in a sustainable manner. It entails figuring out how best to use more resources and emit wastes without overshooting the carrying capacity of the planet.Liberal environmentalism has been important in identifying and containing many harmful activities: Clean Air Act, National Forest Management Act and Clean Water Act all represent liberal victories that go a long way in safeguarding the environment. Moreover, in the present political climate, where those so-called 'fiscally responsible' continue to push for the emasculation of environmental laws, liberal environmentalism perhaps stands as the most reasonable response, arguing that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth, corporate enterprise and technological prowess.Yet, reasonableness and genuine environmental protection are two different things. Liberal environmentalism is so compatible with contemporary material and cultural currents that it implicitly supports the very things that it should be criticising. Its technocratic character gives credence to a society that measures the quality of life fundamentally in terms of economic growth, control over nature and the maximisation of sheer efficiency in everything. By working to show that environmental protection need not compromise these maxims, liberal environmentalism fails to raise deeper issues -- about who we are, our place in the global ecosystem and our relationship with the other species that also inhabit the earth, issues that strike at the core of a genuinely ecological politics -- that more fundamentally engage the dynamics of environmental degradation.