Unsurprisingly for a text of its sophistication and depth, the Daodejing in general, and its concept of “wuwei 無為” in particular, have been subject to a variety of applications, both popular and scholarly. Perhaps the most common topic to which the Laozian concept of wuwei has been applied is the issue of ecological degradation and the global environmental crisis. Taking wuwei and environmentalism as an important case study of applied wuwei, this chapter provides an overview of scholarly efforts to integrate the two topics. More specifically, this chapter discusses English-language works on environmentalism and wuwei from the 1980s onward. The chapter first provides a brief overview of the history of English-language discussions of early Chinese thought and modern environmentalism before moving on to a more detailed consideration of the place of wuwei within those discussions. It further argues that scholarship on wuwei can be broadly divided into a variety of approaches that differ in their understanding of “nature,” their characterization of wuwei and their views on how early Chinese Daoist thought relates to Western thought and the environmental movement, but which end up making arguments that overlap in significant ways.