Enviromanticism: The Poetry of Nature as Political Force

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

So rejoiced William Wordsworth in 1795, walking from the city of Bristol into the countryside and the nature that sustained him. Three years later he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, a slim volume embodying an emotional reaction to the formalistic strictures of Enlightenment classicism and a milestone in the triumph of Romantic thought and feeling in the West.

Two centuries later, in the midst of another fin-de-siecle and on the threshold of the next millennium -- a double psychic witching hour -- humankind feels the rustlings of a resurgent Romanticism. At the very moment when classical economics has rested its case, when gnomish central bankers and wonkish high-techers claim suzerainty, a new mode of thought and feeling -- yet mixed with the implacable hard science of environmentalism -- confronts the worldview of the backers of the unfettered market and limited government. Call it Enviromanticism.

Adam Smith's thesis may find its antithesis not in the doggedly optimistic tomes of Karl Marx but in the ecologically pessimistic writings of Edward O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich, and David Quammen. These thinkers' environmental ideas pose the only significant challenge to the regnant paradigm of market economics. For every Wall Street Journal editorialist affirming cost/benefit analysis, there is an environmentalist preaching the opposite. Indeed, environmentalism may be the refutation of both capitalism and communism, each of which has aimed primarily at maximizing economic growth.

Only in this century has economic expansion provoked -- or permitted -- the rise of an earth-first politics. Many people have become aware that unbounded cultivation, extraction, and construction have disastrously degraded the ecosystem of the planet. In becoming estranged from nature, Wordsworth declared, "we have given our hearts away." Looking beyond the grind and hum of technology, today's neo-Wordsworthian human spirit searches for both rootedness and transcendence in a new Gaiac vision of the earth.