Since the late 1980s, ecological thought and the European eco-movement have gone through a phase of fundamental transformation which has been widely acknowledged but not yet theorised in any satisfactory way. Against the tide of the general preference for empiricism and concrete policy making, this book insists on the indispensability of theoretical models which may help us to interpret social processes, including environmental change and the multi-level discourse about it. It questions why radical ecological criticism has had such little impact on contemporary society, despite the urgency of the issues it highlights, and offers a challenging theoretical critique of ecological thought itself.