Ecological consciousness

is a consciousness of connectedness. It arose in the post-industrial era as a response to the excesses of industry and within the "small world" which industrial society--with its institutions of mass production, trade, communication, and interrelationship--created. The consciousness of connectedness arose in an environment of economic connectedness where it became clear that industry fed on the common resources of us all, and that "the global" is the sum total of "the local."

It is part of the "networked" society. Large labor unions are a response to industry, as well, but are part of the "institutional" society. Institutions are more clearly delineated, less organic, and more heirarchical in nature. They seem to exist in greater isolation from other things. Highly-regulated nation-states are more clearly of the institutional society, while the increasingly deregulated economies of contemporary nation-states have lost much of that insitutionality and actors within in them and between them operate more frequently in the networked society.