JB Foster argues that modern environmentalism doesn't take off until the first nuclear tests in the 1940s, and even then, much of it was liberal in character. In the couple of centuries before that, local environmental degradation such as smog and water pollution might trigger protest. Marx's theory of a metabolic rift was, according to Foster, the first really ecological theory in the modern sense, and even then, Marx's ecology was not widely appreciated among Marxists until the 1990s.

All that is to say that the mere concept of an ecosystem is relatively new and, in the late 20th century as science fiction really took off, ecology was still abstract for most people. It's only in the 21st century that ecology has asserted itself concretely and shed its abstract veneer. Now it is without question not only that ecology matters, but that its scale is global rather than local, systemic rather than individual.