NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT Lecture 1: The Romance of Nature in the Age of Industry Lecturer: Sarah Hodges
Dec 30, 2015
NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Lecture 1: The Romance of Nature in the Age of
Industry
Lecturer: Sarah Hodges
Defining and questioning nature
• ‘Perhaps the most complex word in the [English] language.’ (Raymond Williams)
• What is nature? • Are humans part of nature? • Does nature transcend history? • This much is clear: nature has a
history
Voltaire, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster
‘Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth! Affrighted gathering of human kind! Eternal lingering of useless pain! Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,” And contemplate this ruin of a world’
Nature…
• … is profoundly historical• …changes over time• …is bound up with “human”
history• …has no fixed meaning• Environment a better word to use?
Greater emphasis on human-nature interconnectedness
Lecture outline
•Nature and the scientific revolution
•Arcadianism•Romanticism •The Reaction to Industrialisation
The “March of Progress”
from caveman to
factory worker
Arcadianism
‘The ideal of a simple rural life in close
harmony with nature.’
Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, p.378
Romanticism
ThinkersGoethe (1749-1834)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
PoetsWilliam Blake (1757-1827)
Lord Byron (1788-1824)William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
John Keats (1795-1821)Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
PaintersCasper David Friedrich (1774-1840)
Joseph Turner (1775-1851)
Wordsworth:
One impulse from the vernal wood
Will tell you more of man,of moral evil and of good,Than all the sages can.
The sublime
• Romantic reinvention of mountains from feared and loathed places to awe-inspiring landscapes
• The sublime – intermingling of beauty and fear
• The sense of the sublime one of the most elevated emotional states a human could attain
Thoreau: ‘The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass; it is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me.’
‘The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organisation;
he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a
deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction, and
the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse
and sympathy... The most scientific will still be the healthiest and friendliest
man, and possess a more perfect Indian [Native American] wisdom.’
Thoreau in 1842: