Title: Romanticism and nature – Environmental History Resources
Headings: Romanticism and nature
Romanticism and nature
Further reading

Content: These processes, combined with the profit motive, “degraded and despoiled”, as some romantics saw it, the environment (although they would not have used the term). Cities expanded to unprecedented sizes, and grew into into centres of pollution, poverty and deprivation. They began to symbolise the failure of laissez faire liberalism’s philosophy that permitting people to follow their self-interest would lead to a perfect society. Population movement from the land, and rational search for economically efficient production methods (involving division of labour, timekeeping and mechanisation) led, according to the Romantic Movement, to spiritual alienation of the masses from the land and nature. As Marx and Engels perceived it, they became units of production: cogs in an impersonal productive machine. People and nature were objectified, and reduced to commodity status. This was regarded as undesirable and leading to the degradation of the humans. According to the romantics, the solution was “back to nature” because nature was seen as pure and a spiritual source of renewal. It was also a way out of the fumes of the growing industrial centres for the new industrial rich.