Some societies protect certain plants and animals for reasons of religion or local economy (e.g. baobab trees are protected by people in many parts of Africa, and here and there rulers established reserves for hunting and recreation in parts of India before the fifteenth century). From the late seventeenth century European and American geographers, explorers and naturalists popularised natural history among the leisured classes, stimulated academics to seek better understanding of it, and encouraged policy makers to legislate for better treatment of nature. By the 1760s colonial powers were enacting legislation to try to protect forests on Tobago, Mauritius, St Helena, and other islands (Grove, 1992, 1995).
Two broad groupings of environmentalists (see discussion of environmentalism below) had evolved in Europe and America by the late nineteenth century.