Modern environmentalism and it’s piggy back “Gaia” spirituality are spinoffs from French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Enlightenment movement of 18th century Europe, where the intelligentsia was chafing under the censorship and anti science suppression of the Vatican. In looking for a substitute “spirituality” of equal authority, the Enlightenment intelligentsia focused on some bad translations of a few of the Hindu Vedas, sacred texts.
This glomming onto “eastern mysticism” became a parlor topic among the ruling class aristocracy who liked what they found in the Brahminic caste system which fit their ideas of a perpetual serfdom class like a glove.
Meanwhile Rousseau’s ideas of the “noble savage” and “back to nature” became the foundation for German Romanticism which was also welcomed into ruling class salons because the ruling class detested capitalism and industry and upsetting to their way of life and introducing “new money” from capitalists and entrepreneurs into their exclusive circles. The French aristocrat, Arthur Compte de Gobineau, one of the first modern racist theoreticians, combined this nature worship with anti-semitism and social Darwinism and began the aristocracy’s march towards Nazism.
Nature worship suffused the Hitler Youth movement in the form of the first hippies, the Nazi “Wandervogel” movement that sent Nazi youth out into the countryside as minstrels and “community organizers” to spread the word of Nazism and Nazism’s “roots” initiative which evoked Nordic paganism and living in harmony with nature. The Nazis saw themselves as the new Brahmins and protectors of the pure “Ayrian” race, a notion borrowed from Vedic texts. Occult interests were a hobby of the wealthy, preyed upon by such proto-Nazi occultists as Helena Blavatsky and her “Theosophy” movement. This is why we find a strange acceptance for hippie environmentalism among the ruling class, whose hedonism and dissolute “idle rich” lifestyles are part of the hippie hot tub/massage/herbal remedy esthetic.
Much of this is spelled out in Prof. Dorothy Figueira’s scholarly “Aryans, Jews, Brahmins”.
Thanks for the “enlightenment” on the subject.