Title: Romanticism, Nature, Ecology | Romantic Circles
Headings: Romanticism, Nature, Ecology
Romanticism, Nature, Ecology
Gary Harrison, University of New Mexico
Notes
Works Cited
Romanticism, Ecology and Pedagogy

Content: that is, a search for holistic or integrated perception, an emphasis on interdependence and relatedness in nature, and an intense desire to restore man to a place of intimate intercourse with the vast organism that constitutes the earth" (82). More recently, in his introduction to "Romanticism and Ecology," a special issue of The Wordsworth Circle, Jim McKusick pointedly and rightly, I think, claims that "much Romantic writing emerges from a desperate sense of alienation from the natural world and expresses an anxious endeavor to re-establish a vital, sustainable relationship between mankind and the fragile planet on which [we] dwell" (123). These statements point to a position that many recent writers have defended, albeit from divergent and importantly nuanced perspectives: Romantic literature is a germinal site for the rise of ecological consciousness and practices. The affiliation between Romanticism and ecology nonetheless remains problematic. On the one hand, Romantic nature philosophy has been linked, as in Luc Ferry's The New Ecological Order, with oppressive and totalitarian political dispositions. On the other hand, Romanticism has been reduced to a simplistic nostalgia for a lost unity with nature, or worse, as a rhapsodic celebration of beautiful scenery. In reply to such critics as Ferry, Val Plumwood in Environmental Culture reminds us that "While it is important to note the role of those forms of Romanticism corrupted by the desire for unity and other oppressive forces, any analysis which puts all its stress on this factor ignores the diversity and liberatory aspects of some forms of Romanticism. . . . " ( 208). In response to the reductive view of Romanticism as nature worship, William Cronon and Paul Fry, among others, remind us that Romantic representations of nature reflect not so much actual places and encounters as virtual landscapes and experiences that mirror their writers' projected desires and culturally mediated values.