Excerpt from the book Futures by Design

(Doug Aberley (ed), New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, 1994)

As the industrial revolution of the mid-1700s gained momentum, many strands of reaction and alternative prescription arose in response. This history is little understood, but five important strands of resistance can initially be identified. Utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier (1772-1837), Robert Owen (1771-1858), and Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) worked to describe and create new and humane settlements and societies.
Geographers led by Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) and Jean Brunhes (1869-1930) championed stewardship of vital region-based cultures as the foundation of stable human nature interrelation. Anarchists Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). and Elie and Elisee Reclus (1827-1904;1830-1905) openly confronted forces of centralised political and economic control.
The synthetic science of sociology was pioneered by Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and Frederic Le Play (1806-1882), and later evolved into the potent applied human ecology of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). Ecology itself was formally created by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), for whom the belief that humans and nature were inextricably linked became the centrepiece of a unified philosophy, science, arts, theology, and politics.
The unique attribute of these movements was that they did not focus on a reductionist speciality, but on principles which defiantly and diametrically opposed the scientific world view. The main principles of this juxtaposition were:

• Systems, not isolated things
• Patterns, not categorical order
• Co-operation, not competition
• Process, not prescription
• Quality, not quantity
• Connection, not separation
• Biocentric, not anthropocentric
• Decentralisation, not centralisation