Chapter 1 - Nature’s Reserves: Rural Exhaustion, Inertia, and Generative Aesthetics

Summary

Founded in 1912 by Charles Rothschild, of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves took a modern approach to preservation through the science of ecology, enlisting “Botanical Bolsheviks” such as Arthur George Tansley in order to protect entire ecosystems. What started as a promising venture quickly ran into impediments with the outbreak of World War I and the requisitioning of land for military purposes under the Defense of the Realm Act. I consider these early environmental activities in light of shifting aesthetic uses of nature occurring concurrently in literature. I contrast Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies to T. E. Hulme’s refutation of Romantic “limitlessness” and turn towards a classical verse that remains “mixed up with earth.” D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow registers of changes to a rural English marsh community during industrialization through a new rhythmic form that foregrounds bodily experience during rapid environmental transformation. I explore Lawrence’s ideas of “positive inertia” that he develops in his Study of Thomas Hardy as a generative form of rest arising from the individual’s connection to material surroundings.