{"id":32529,"date":"2023-01-08T02:04:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-08T02:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=32529"},"modified":"2023-01-09T08:51:22","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T08:51:22","slug":"william-wordsworth-and-the-romantics-anticipated-todays-idea-of-a-nature-positive-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/william-wordsworth-and-the-romantics-anticipated-todays-idea-of-a-nature-positive-life\/","title":{"rendered":"William Wordsworth and the Romantics anticipated today\u2019s idea of a nature-positive life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jonathan Bate<\/a>, Arizona State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musical performances usually happen in concert halls or clubs, but famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma is exploring a new venue: U.S. national parks. In a project called Our Common Nature<\/a>, Ma is performing in settings such as the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. By making music and bringing people together in scenic places, Ma aims to help humans understand where they fit in the natural world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat if there\u2019s a way that we can end up thinking and feeling and knowing that we are coming from nature, that we\u2019re a part of nature, instead of just thinking: What can we use it for?\u201d Ma mused in a recent New York Times article<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a buzzword for this outlook: nature-positive. And it\u2019s cropping up at high-level meetings, including the 2021 G-7 summit in Cornwall, England<\/a> and the COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal that adopted an ambitious framework for protecting nature<\/a> in December 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a group of environmental leaders wrote in 2021<\/a>: \u201cA nature positive approach enriches biodiversity, stores carbon, purifies water and reduces pandemic risk. In short, a nature positive approach enhances the resilience of our planet and our societies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a dramatic shift from the mentality that has driven industrialization and global economic growth over the past 250 years. But it\u2019s not new. As a researcher in the humanities and author of \u201cRadical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World<\/a>,\u201d I see nature positivity as a welcome revival of an outlook that English poet William Wordsworth and other Romantics proposed in the late 1700s. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cEavsIoMxn8?wmode=transparent&start=0 Cellist Yo-Yo Ma plays \u2018In the Gale,\u2019 an original piece for The Birdsong Project, a collaboration to support bird conservation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The birth of the sublime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the preindustrial era, when life was dominated by hard manual labor, wild nature wasn\u2019t viewed as a terribly attractive place. In the 1720s, writer Daniel Defoe, touring across the island of Great Britain<\/a>, denounced the mountains and lakes of northwest England as \u201cthe wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mountains were horrible to look at, impossible to pass over and, worst of all, had \u201cno lead mines and veins of rich ore, no Coal Pits,\u201d Defoe wrote. They were \u201call barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to Man or Beast.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attitudes began to change a generation later, with the expansion of a middle class that had the leisure and resources to enjoy a spot of tourism. Early guidebooks gave directions to viewpoints, or \u201cstations,\u201d that opened onto spectacularly beautiful vistas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philosophers and poets began to view natural phenomena such as ocean waves, lightning flashes over a mountain or the darkness of old-growth forests with awestruck pleasure rather than fear. They called these sights the \u201csublime,\u201d a word that we still reach for when contemplating, say, the vastness of the Arctic or the Amazon. As Barry Lopez<\/a>, author of \u201cArctic Dreams<\/a>,\u201d once wrote, the \u201csublime encounter\u201d with such places offers us a profound \u201cresonance with a system of unmanaged, nonhuman-centered relationships\u201d. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cyUGplrq4eY?wmode=transparent&start=0 The aurora borealis, or northern lights, have become a modern tourist draw that attracts people to remote northern locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Romanticism emerged as the steam engine and the spinning jenny<\/a> were driving mass urbanization. As workers flocked from farms to grimy cities in search of manufacturing jobs, a reaction set in: yearning for a return to nature. This became the hallmark of the Romantic movement<\/a> that flourished across Europe through the mid-1800s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018A sort of national property\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Many writers, thinkers and artists contributed to this outpouring of nature-positivity. Beethoven\u2019s Pastoral Symphony<\/a> and the paintings of J. M. W. Turner<\/a> are examples. But in the English-speaking world, none were more influential than Wordsworth<\/a> (1770-1850).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born and raised in England\u2019s Lake District, Wordsworth felt alienated from fellow students at Cambridge. As an aspiring journalist in London, he was stunned to discover that many people did not know their next door neighbor\u2019s name. Only when Wordsworth returned to nature \u2013 first in the English west country and then when he went home to the Lakes \u2013 did he become his true self and write his greatest poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In verse and prose, Wordsworth made a series of revolutionary claims. In the preface to his 1800 collection of poems, \u201cLyrical Ballads<\/a>,\u201d he argued that men and women who live indigenously within a natural environment are uniquely in tune with \u201cthe essential passions of the heart\u201d because their very humanity is \u201cincorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Portrait<\/a>
\u2018Wordsworth on Helvellyn,\u2019 a mountain in the Lake District (1842), by Benjamin Robert Haydon. Wikipedia<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In his \u201cGuide to the Lakes<\/a>,\u201d Wordsworth warned against such innovations as planting non-native conifers that spoiled the beauty and eroded the soil of his native region. Instead, he proposed preserving places of outstanding natural beauty like the Lake District as \u201ca sort of national property.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This idea later would help to inspire the U.S. national park system<\/a> and England\u2019s National Trust<\/a>. Today the concepts of conservation zones and protected areas<\/a> are central to the goal of a nature-positive world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by Wordsworth\u2019s idea that the health of human society depends on a healthy relationship with the environment, the great Victorian social thinker John Ruskin<\/a> turned economic theory on its head. In polemical pamphlets and public lectures, Ruskin argued that the basis of what was then known as \u201cpolitical economy\u201d should be not labor and capital, production and consumption, but \u201cPure Air, Water, and Earth<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Almost exactly 150 years later, on July 28, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution<\/a> recognizing a universal human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colonial conservation?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Wordsworth\u2019s influence on the conservation movement wasn\u2019t entirely benign. Late in life, he lamented that his very advocacy of the beauty of the Lake District had brought in a mass tourist industry that had the potential to destroy the very beauty he sought to preserve<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, protecting wild places risks displacing indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with the land for centuries. Creating conservation zones and protected areas in the rain forests of Central America and the Amazon basin has sometimes shut out local tribes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizations such as the Sierra Club<\/a> and the U.S. National Park Service<\/a> are now striving to transcend this long history of \u201ccolonial conservation<\/a>.\u201d The importance of working together with indigenous peoples and learning from their time-honored values and conservation practices received new attention at major conferences on climate change and biodiversity in 2022, although some observers argued that the resulting commitments fell short<\/a> of what was needed<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my view, Wordsworth knew that the truly nature-positive are those whose livelihoods and senses of self and community are wholly bound to their native places. As he wrote in \u201cMichael<\/a>,\u201d the great pastoral poem at the climax of \u201cLyrical Ballads\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  And grossly that man errs, who should suppose\n  That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,\n  Were things indifferent to the Shepherd\u2019s thoughts.\n  ... these fields, these hills\n  Which were his living Being even more\n  Than his own blood\u2014what could they less? had laid\n  Strong hold on his affections, were to him\n  A pleasurable feeling of blind love,\n  The pleasure which there is in life itself.\n<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Jonathan Bate<\/a>, Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities, Arizona State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jonathan Bate, Arizona State University Musical performances usually happen in concert halls or clubs, but famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma is exploring a new venue: U.S. national parks. In a project called Our Common Nature, Ma is performing in settings such as the Great Smoky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. By making music and bringing people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":32530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1862],"tags":[563,752,204,2603,2034,2041,3066,1051,13285,171,2033,13286,13287,492,4590,13288],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32529"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32529"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32532,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32529\/revisions\/32532"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}