The political ecology emerging in the 1970s was materialised in the heart of anti-establishment and utopian movements which were challenging the establishment. These movements, each in their own manner, were based on an educational project which placed the training of the individual as a political tool for social transformation. The explanatory model of reality proposed by scientific ecology fed these utopian and pedagogical movements, and spread the dissemination of new environmental values via an association-based militant engagement (mainstream education movements, environmental education). We shall interrogate this narrative of the ecology as a utopia by questioning its progress from a critical thought process towards its contemporary ideological integration. Militant movements have been transformed into think tanks, environmental educators have become relays for the application of socio-technical standards and integrative public policies and is thus progressively losing all its creative energy. But today the ecology seems once again to be supplying the cornerstone for a utopian desire which is manifesting itself in a more disseminated and maybe a more individual manner, but which can all the same be read via a “crumbling” everyday life which carries a hope of transformations both in speech and in practise at least at the micro level.

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