The politics of reaction has always had a powerful component of hostility to science and technology, and to the growth of urban areas. Hemming in the growth of the cities was the goal of early proponents of nature reserves and green belts. the countryside has in Europe, and I think in America, traditionally been a reservoir of support for the right, as the cities have of the left. Holding back urban spread was for many years a reactionary goal. You can see it in the politics of the prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan, for whom 'small-town America' was under threat from the immigrant-fed cities. The motif of 'pollution' to describe urban squalor was originally an upper class prejudice, seeing the growth of the working class in metaphorical terms as a dangerous 'miasma' that would spread disease.
Similarly the left has for a long time been associated with economic and technological progress. It was the left's utopianism (I mean that in a positive sense) that led it to champion modernist architecture, scientific enquiry, planned cities and new technologies.
It really is only very recently in historical terms that the left has become interested in coservation, holding back technology, challenging scientific rationality, low growth and so on.
There are of course two explanations for this new trend in left wing thinking towards environmentalism.
One. The left has wised up to the problem, no longer succumbing to knee- jerk rejection of environmentalist fears.
Two. That the influence of environmentalist thinking is a reflection of its own loss of confidence in the struggle to shape the future, leading the left for the first time to reject the idea of progress.
I tend to think that the latter is a better explanation. -- Jim heartfield