NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

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NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT Lecture 1 The
Romance of Nature in the Age of Industry
Dr Chris Pearson
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How did the relationship between humans and
nature change in the modern age?
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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

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Lisbon earthquake, 1755
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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, Alls well,
• And contemplate this ruin of a world

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Nature as a site of relaxation
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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

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Lecture outline

• Nature and the scientific revolution
• Arcadianism
• Romanticism
• The Reaction to Industrialisation

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René Descartes (1596-1650)
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• Reason is the only thing which makes us men
  and distinguishes us from animals.
• René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The
  Meditations

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Carl von Linné (Linnaeus) 1717-1778
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The March of Progress from caveman to factory
worker
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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

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Claude Lorrain Landscape Cephalus and Procis
reunited by Diana (1645)
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origins
of Inequality (1755)
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Gilbert White (1720-1793) A Natural History of
Selbourne (1789)
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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)
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William Blake May God keep us from single
vision and Newtons sleep! To cast off
Bacon, Locke and Newton from Albions covering,
to take off his filthy garments and clothe him
with Imagination.
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• Wordsworth
• to dissect is to murder.

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• 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.

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John Keats I am certain of nothing but the
holiness of the Hearts affections, and the truth
of the Imagination.
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• Wordsworth
• One impulse from the vernal wood
• Will tell you more of man,
• of moral evil and of good,
• Than all the sages can.

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Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840)
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Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains (1807-08)
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Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Mists (1817-18)
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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

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Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons
(1810)
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Turner, Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps
(1812)
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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.

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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.

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Dove cottage, Grasmere
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George Cruikshank, London Going out of Town or,
The March of Bricks and Mortar (1829)
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Without Contraries is no Progression. A
Robin Red breast in a cage Puts all
Heaven in a Rage... The tree which moves some
to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a
green thing that stands in the way.
William Blake
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Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
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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.
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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.