NATURE AND THE
ENVIRONMENT
Lecture 1: The Romance of Nature in the Age
of Industry
Dr Chris Pearson
How did the relationship
between humans and nature
change in the modern age?
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
Lisbon earthquake, 1755
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 as a site of relaxation
Nature…
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… 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
René Descartes (1596-1650)
‘Reason… is the only thing which
makes us men and distinguishes
us from animals.’
René Descartes, Discourse on
Method and The Meditations
Carl von Linné (Linnaeus)
1717-1778
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
Claude Lorrain: Landscape: Cephalus and Procis reunited by Diana (1645)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality (1755)
Gilbert White (17201793)
A Natural History of
Selbourne (1789)
Romanticism
Thinkers
Goethe (1749-1834)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Poets
William 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)
Painters
Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840)
Joseph Turner (1775-1851)
William Blake:
‘May God keep us from single vision
and Newton’s sleep!’
‘To cast off Bacon, Locke and Newton
from Albion’s covering, to take off his
filthy garments and clothe him with
Imagination.’
Wordsworth:
‘…to dissect is to murder.’
Coleridge condemned:
‘…the extreme overrating of the
knowledge and power given to the
improvements of the arts and
sciences, especially those of
astronomy, mechanics, and
wonder-working chemistry’.
John Keats:
‘I am certain of nothing
but the holiness of the
Heart’s affections, and
the truth of the
Imagination.’
Wordsworth:
One impulse from the vernal wood
Will tell you more of man,
of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Caspar David
Friedrich
(1774-1840)
Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains (1807-08)
Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Mists (1817-18)
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
Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons (1810)
Turner, Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps (1812)
Safety first for Rousseau:
‘I must have torrents, rocks, pines,
dead forest, mountains, rugged paths
to go up and down, precipices beside
me to frighten me for the odd thing
about my liking for precipitous places
is that they make giddy, and I enjoy
this giddiness greatly, provided that I
am safely placed.’
Samuel Johnson dismisses the
romantic view of nature:
‘We had a pleasing conviction of the
commodiousness of civilisation, and
heartily laughed at the ravings of those
absurd visionaries who have attempted
to persuade us of the superior
advantages of a state of nature.’
Dove cottage, Grasmere
George Cruikshank, ‘London Going out of Town:
or, The March of Bricks and Mortar’ (1829)
‘Without Contraries is no
Progression’.
‘A Robin Red breast in
a cage
Puts all Heaven in
a Rage...’
William Blake
‘The tree which moves some to
tears of joy is
in the eyes of others only a
green thing that stands in the
way’.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
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.’
Thoreau in 1842:
‘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.’