I don't know about "has become". I've known it to be the goal as far back as the 1980s. (Anything before then is before I started forming memories.) I think it

I don't know about "has become". I've known it to be the goal as far back as the 1980s. (Anything before then is before I started forming memories.) I think it probably comes from the same place as organic food and suchlike: a conflation of "more natural" with "better for the environment." They're not necessarily the same thing, and we're finding increasingly many situations where doing things in a "more natural" way is actually pretty terrible for the earth's ecosystems when seven billion humans are trying to do it at a planetary scale.