NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Lecture 1: The Romance of Nature in the Age of

Industry

Lecturer: Sarah Hodges

Global Warming:melting ice, rising sea levels, storms

Environmental modernity?

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…

• … 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

Isaac Newton(1642-1727)

and theScientific

Revolution

René Descartes (1596-1650)

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)

Jan Van Gool, Pastoral Scene (1719)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755)

Gilbert White (1720-1793)

A Natural History of Selbourne

(1789)

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.

Caspar David Friedrich

(1774-1840)

Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains (1807-08)

Thomas Gainsborough, ‘Mr. And Mrs. Andrews

(1848-49)

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)

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.’

‘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: