Chapter 18 - Ecological Points of View

Summary

The years 1900–20 saw dramatic changes to the biological sciences and literary engagements with nature. In opposition to the lifeless collections of Victorian botanists, Arthur George Tansley and a small group of ‘botanical bolsheviks’ defined the modern field of Ecology as the study of vital, living plant interactions. The struggle between species that animated the new ecologists took on a stark reality during a war that blighted human life and landscape indiscriminately. Emerging from war, the literary modernism of Woolf, Joyce, and others presented a reassessment of life itself through an exploration of the mind in relation to its environmental surroundings. This chapter draws on Tansley’s lecture on ecology given at the Hampstead Scientific Society on 1 May 1914 in which he outlines ecology as a new ‘point of view’ on living ecosystems. It argues that the new ecology held more in common with energetic modernist manifestos such as BLAST (published two months later), which railed against ‘wild nature cranks’, than the descriptive views of beautiful nature found in Georgian poetry.