This article examines the phenomenon of influence of social ecology movement on the development of environmental journalism in Russia in the 19-20th centuries. There are a number of objective reasons related with specifics of Russia's historical development - why the position of nature in the Russian society value hierarchy had been constantly changing. Under the circumstances, the defining role of keeping it among social priorities belonged to social ecology movement. The article evaluates the weight of the contribution that social ecology movement of tsarist and Soviet Russia made to the development of environmental journalism. It is important to study this subject matter as participation of environmental activists in the development of environmental journalism predetermined a number of its peculiar features and lines of development. In this article we are going to describe the development stages of environmental journalism in Russia in the light of ecology movement development: we will indicate functional