Scholars have long rejected as vague or mystical the notion that an idea suddenly gains general support because it’s “in the air.”¹ A better explanation is that it offers resolution (at least in theory) to an acute social contradiction. But in the case of “ecology” — the domain of biology concerned with the totality of relations between organisms within a distinct environment — it was literally true that the idea gained modern currency because it was in the air. An increase in photochemical air pollution (the product of automobile and industrial emissions combined with sunlight) in major U.S. cities in the 1950s and 60s caused a significant rise in pulmonary and cardiac disease, and other morbid symptoms, precipitating public protest. By 1970, concern about air pollution and ecological degradation was sufficiently developed that the first Earth Day was celebrated that Spring, and a few months later, a federal Environmental Protection Agency was created.² In 1990, Earth Day became an international event, commemorated in over a hundred countries, emphasizing global, grass roots activism. From the perspective of Fall 2020, however, neither Earth Day nor the broader ecology movement have been notably successful in slowing the release into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and methane, the chief byproducts of fossil fuel extraction and combustion and the most important agents of global warming. Only the pandemic has succeeded, albeit temporarily.

About 150 years ago, there occurred in England a remarkable anticipation of current environmental consciousness — ecology was “in the air” even before the word was coined. Charles Dickens, Karl Marx (living in London), John Ruskin, and William Morris all wrote about the threats to health and the integrity of nature posed by smoke from the burning of coal and coke, and the forging of iron. They did so in books and essays published from the 1840s to 1890s, culminating in Ruskin’s prophetic lecture “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884) and Morris’s book of essays, Signs of Change (1888) and utopian romance, News from Nowhere (1890). Ruskin and Morris also made artworks that addressed their emerging concerns.

By the late eighteenth-century, the existence of ecology — what was then called the “economy of nature” — was widely held across Enlightenment Europe and the Americas. Associated with the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus and the French naturalist G.L. Buffon, the idea was that there existed a divinely ordered, organic and inorganic totality made up of minerals, water, air, and soil, no part of which could be disrupted except at the expense of the integrity of the whole. During the Romantic period, when what Andreas Malm calls “fossil capital” first arose in England, a number of artists and writers became concerned about threats to that natural economy, particularly from steam engines fired by the burning of coal.³ Initially, their representations of the emerging, industrial order suggested astonishment more than anxiety. Later, industry and the pollution it created was depicted as a nightmare.

George Robertson’s 1782 An Ironworks for the Crafting of Cannon (Figure 1) shows the limekilns, iron forges, and smokestacks of a new factory complex on the River Severn in Shropshire. A pair of men in the foreground gesture with astonishment at the sight. Two decades later, Philip James de Loutherbourg represented a nearby ironworks in his 1801 Coalbrookdale by Night (Figure 2). His goal was evidently twofold. First, to show the sublimity of the Madeley Wood ironworks in Coalbrookdale; smoke and flames from the coke-fired blast furnace invoked the Burkean sublime — that sense of astonishment and delighted horror created by confrontation with power beyond human comprehension. But the picture was also a warning about pollution and the destruction of nature. The fires and smoke, combined with the broken iron pipes at the lower left and cast-off steam engine cylinder at lower right, suggest the destruction and ruins of empire.

The Coalbrookdale ironworks, also known as Bedlam Furnace (named after the notorious hospital for the mentally ill, St. Bartholomew’s in London), had for decades been a subject of admiration and alarm. The noted agriculturalist Arthur Young combined both perceptions when he visited the area in 1776:

These iron works are in a very flourishing situation. … Coalbrook Dale itself is a very romantic spot, it is a winding glen between two immense hills which break into vaporous forms, and all thickly covered with wood, forming the most beautiful sheets of hanging wood. Indeed too beautiful to be much in unison with that variety of horrors art has spread to the bottom. The noise of the forges, mills, etc., with all their vast machinery, the flames bursting from the furnaces with the burning of the coal and the smoke of the lime kilns, are altogether sublime. ⁴

But a few artists of the time — and one in particular, William Blake — were unambiguous in their horror at the environmental and human destruction wrought by coal-powered industry. In his preface to the long, prophetic poem Milton, he condemned England’s “dark Satanic Mills” which he contrasted with a long-lost “green & pleasant Land” called Jerusalem.⁵ Modern, increasingly industrialized England was personified by Blake in the figure of Molech (derived from the monstrous Moloch of John Milton’s Paradise Lost), the embodiment of vengeance, industrial violence, and alienated labor. In one of his illustrations for Milton’s Morning of Christ’s Nativity (Figure 3) — he did versions in 1809 and 1815 — Blake shows a dark gray statue of Moloch engulfed in smoke, crowned in iron, and seated on a fiery furnace-throne. In his Milton, a Poem, Blake writes: “In Ammon, Molech, loud his Furnaces rage among the Wheels / Of Og, & pealing loud the cries of the Victims of Fire!”⁶ The fiery creature threatens to consume the assembled children. In Blake’s last prophetic book, Jerusalem (c. 1804 -1820), the poet described a world desecrated by “flaming fires,” “dismal steel,” “cruel Works,” “cogs tyrannic,” and everywhere smoke fouling the air: “rolling smoke,” “pillars of smoke,” and “smoke of the furnace shaking the rocks.”⁷ This industrial hellscape can only be redeemed, according to Blake, by the building of Golgonooza, a peaceful and loving “city of art” and an ecological utopia.

A generation later, understanding of the vulnerability of nature’s economy was more widespread. Journalists and travel writers in England’s industrial Midlands described “masses of smoke… which look like fleeces of black wool or clouds of sublimated ink.⁸ In Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), we see the protagonists, Nell Trent and her grandfather, travel as beggars from London to the Midlands to discover towns and cities degraded by iron foundries, the burning of coal and coke, and air and water pollution. On the outskirts of a “great manufacturing town” (based upon Birmingham), the two wanderers confront smoke, filth and menace:

The paths of coal-ash and huts of staring brick marked the vicinity of some great manufacturing town; while scattered streets and houses, and smoke from distant furnaces, indicated that they were already in the outskirts. Now, the clustered roofs, and piles of buildings, trembling with the working of engines, and dimly resounding with their shrieks and throbbings; the tall chimneys vomiting forth a black vapour, which hung in a dense ill-favoured cloud above the housetops and filled the air with gloom.⁹

A few pages later, Dickens expanded his account of industrial despoliation, casting his gaze both far and near, settling on a few ragged, desperate inhabitants and dark clouds of pollution:

On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. … Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses… and still, before, behind, and to the right and left, was the same interminable perspective of brick towers, never ceasing in their black vomit, blasting all things living or inanimate, shutting out the face of day, and closing in on all these horrors with a dense dark cloud.¹⁰

Pollution not only produced ugliness and filth, but bound men and women like chattels to the insatiable furnaces they fed night and day. The illustration by George Cattermole for Chapter 44 of The Old Curiosity Shop (Figure 4) shows the stranger, “miserably clad and begrimed with smoke,” who led Nell and her grandfather out of a fierce rain into a foundry furnished with “a bed of warm ashes.” He stares at the fire he must constantly tend, its glow extending out in rays to illuminate his “hollow cheeks, sharp features and sunken eyes,” as well as Nell’s pale but still unlined face.

Four years later, inspired in part by Dickens, Friedrich Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).¹¹ In it, he described a physical and mental health crisis caused by industry and urbanization:

The centralization of population in great cities exercises of itself an unfavorable influence; the atmosphere of London can never be so pure, so rich in oxygen, as the air of the country; two and a half million pairs of lungs, two hundred and fifty thousand fires, crowded upon an area three to four square miles. … The lungs of the inhabitants fail to receive the due supply of oxygen, and the consequence is mental and physical lassitude and low vitality.¹²

At about the same time, Karl Marx, who also admired Dickens, argued too that exploited industrial workers in England, crowded into urban tenements, were denied essential fresh air:

Even the need for fresh air ceases for the worker. Man returns to a cave dwelling… contaminated with the pestilential breath of civilization. … Light, air, etc. — the simplest animal cleanliness, ceases to be a need for man. Filth, this stagnation and putrefaction of man — the sewage of civilization (speaking quite literally) — comes to be the element of life for him. Utter, unnatural depravation, putrefied nature, comes to be his life-element. None of his senses exist any longer, and (each has ceased to function) not only in its human fashion, but in an inhuman fashion, so that it does not exist even in an animal fashion.¹³

Marx returned frequently to the theme of the despoliation of nature under capitalism. In Capital, volume I (1867) he discussed disruption of the “metabolic interaction” — what we’d call the ecological balance — between human and nature:

Capitalist production… disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to lasting fertility of the soil… [A]ll progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction.¹⁴

By failing to restore to soil the nutrients expended in the production of farm animals and crops, capitalist civilization, Marx argued, was sealing its own fate. Cities would soon find food more expensive or in short supply, while farmers would become as impoverished as their soils. In fact, the importation of vast quantities of fertilizers, chiefly bone from the killing fields of the Napoleonic wars and guano (bird feces) imported from a few islands off Peru, kept the fatal consequences of the capitalist exploitation at bay, at least temporarily. Today, the run-off from chemical fertilizers has contaminated rivers and bays and created vast, oceanic dead zones.

Marx’s conception of a “metabolic interaction” within nature, and between humans and nature had a complex foundation that included the ancient Greek Epicurus and Roman Lucretius. But proximate sources include Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin. The first described in Cosmos (1858) “a chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments.”¹⁵ Charles Darwin observed in The Origin of Species (1859) that there existed a coadaptation between organic beings, comprising an overall “polity of nature” or “economy of nature.”¹⁶ The same year as Darwin’s key publication, the German soil scientist Justus von Liebig wrote about the “law of compensation,” whereby anything taken from the soil must be replaced if fertility was to be maintained. That reciprocity, he said, was one expression of the basic metabolism that existed between organic and inorganic nature.¹⁷ In 1864, the American George P. Marsh wrote Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, in which he sought “to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world.”¹⁸ He disputed the notion that humans, directed by divine providence, were ever directing the world toward betterment, and argued instead, as Marx did, that humans were daily re-making the world, often for the worse.¹⁹ In this, he anticipated by 150 years the idea of the Anthropocene.

Finally, in 1868, Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology” in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation). Haeckel was the chief European proponent of Darwinian evolutionism, and his book recapitulated in accessible vocabulary many of the arguments in The Origin of Species, including those concerning “the economy of nature.” Among the laws governing biological development, Haeckel wrote, is:

The oecology of organisms, the knowledge of the sum of the relations of organisms to the surrounding outer world, to organic and inorganic conditions of existence; the so-called “economy of nature,” the correlations between all organisms living together in one and the same locality, their adaptations to their surroundings, their modifications in the struggle for existence.²⁰

There is irony in the fact that John Ruskin, now considered a leading ecological thinker, renounced both Darwin and Haeckel, and the idea — found in Marx and Marsh — that humans, not God, were directing the fate of the earth. For Ruskin, the natural world was testament to God’s genius, and humans could no more guide its future than determine its form. Like the generation of natural theologists that preceded him, Ruskin rejected materialism or functionalism in favor of eternal (non-evolving) type-forms. Rather than being selected by nature for fitness, species were designed by the Creator as expressions of art and morality. Flowers for Ruskin were not the consequence of evolutionary forces driven by sexual selection; they were ends in themselves. “The flower is the end of the seed,” he wrote in Proserpina, “not the seed the flower.”²¹ This reticence before science and materialism may help explain some of the incongruities in his remarkable and prescient lecture, “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” (1884).

In “Storm-Cloud,” Ruskin described the increase of air pollution across England and the simultaneous transformation of the weather. Where once “the air and the earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man as closely as a schoolboy’s primer is to his labour,” it was now “a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce.”²² He added that thunderstorms were no longer “sublimely lurid,” but instead possessed a “filthiness of lurid” and revealed a “smoke-cloud; dense manufacturing mist.”²³ Ruskin ascribed the source of the smoke nearest his home in Cumbria to the “at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me.” And he correctly noted that the release of smoke from industry and transportation was profoundly transforming the environment of the Lake District and much of the rest of England. It was increasing cloud cover while reducing rainfall.²⁴ And he sometimes depicted the new meteorology in his watercolors, though this is uncertain. The grey washes at the upper right of Ruskin’s watercolor drawing Cloud Effect over Coniston Old Man (6 August 1880) may represent one of those “manufacturing mists” against which he railed (Figure 5) But Ruskin denied in “Storm-Cloud” that he needed to actually record the phenomenon — it was easily visible, he claimed, and could be seen by all. (Many of Ruskin’s contemporaries disagreed — they thought he was mad.)

Writing about a decade before the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius calculated the climate warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Ruskin was unable — even if he was philosophically inclined — to ground his argument in experimental science.²⁵ Instead, he deployed his remarkable powers of observation and description — essential tools for the ecologists — to propose that the plague of black smoke was a national moral disorder: “Mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men’s souls… flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.”²⁶ Ruskin’s “souls” are perhaps workers alienated from their essential being by virtue of the soul-destroying mechanical labor they are forced to perform. Here is Ruskin, thirty years earlier, in “The Nature of Gothic:”

It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which more than any other evil of the times, is leading the masses of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. …Never had the upper class so much sympathy for the lower… yet never were they so much hated by them. … [Now there is] a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is a pestilential air at the bottom of it.²⁷

Drawing upon the theory of miasma — the idea that fetid air caused mental and physical incapacity and disease — Ruskin was already convinced in 1853 that air pollution was a moral evil. By 1884 that pollution — now the result of coal smoke and iron foundries — was even more widespread, infecting his beloved Lake District and spreading across Britain and beyond. But he did not directly ascribe the change in the weather to air pollution. To do so would have meant the final abandonment of the idea of divine providence, beloved of natural theologists. Ruskin’s ecological critique of air pollution was therefore most of all a moral jeremiad, like the one he had launched against alienated labor in “The Nature of Gothic.” He concluded the first part of “Storm-Cloud” with a remembrance and a prophesy:

If, in conclusion, you ask me for any conceivable cause or meaning of these things — I can tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but I can tell you what meaning it would have borne to the men of old time. Remember, for the last twenty years, England, and all foreign nations, either tempting her, or following her, have blasphemed the name of God deliberately and openly; and have done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, "The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their shining."²⁸

Ruskin’s solution to the changing climate was a Christian spiritual revolution. By changing hearts and souls, he argued, nature’s sublimity would be restored. One of Ruskin’s chief disciples, however — the poet, designer, and Socialist William Morris — believed that a political and social revolution would be required to end the widening schism between humans and nature. His utopian novel, News from Nowhere (1890), was the culminating ecological manifesto of nineteenth-century Britain. But Morris’s ruminations on ecology began much earlier.

Morris’s book-length poem The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) starts with a description of London as it was, and as it might be. His imagery recalls that of William Blake in the preface to Milton:

Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.²⁹

A decade later, in his essay “The Lesser Arts” (1877), Morris posed the question to which he would frequently return: Whether the prevailing economic order was responsible for destroying the beauty of the earth? “Is money to be gathered?” he asked;

Cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke and worse, and it’s nobody’s business to see to it or mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting-house forgetful of the workshop, will do for us herein.³⁰

In a short text titled “Why Not?” published in 1884 in Justice, the journal of the Social Democratic Federation, Morris returned to the question of the pollution of the countryside: “Why should one third of England be so stifled and poisoned with smoke that over the greater part of Yorkshire (for instance) the general idea must be that sheep are naturally black.”³¹ In his collection of essays titled Signs of Change, published four years later, he attacked an economic system “which won’t take the most ordinary precautions against wrapping a whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers.” ³² And in Lectures on Socialism (1888), he wrote: “[Under] the present gospel of Capital not only is there no hope of bettering it, but … things grow worse year by year, day by day. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die — choked by filth.” ³³

As a designer and entrepreneur, Morris rejected what he considered the vulgarity that passed for luxury: “What brings about luxury but a sickly discontent with the simple joys of the lovely earth? … Shall I tell you what luxury has done for you in modern Europe? It has covered the merry green fields with the hovels of slaves, and blighted the flowers and trees with poisonous gases, and turned the rivers into sewers.”³⁴ His two-dimensional designs were efforts to contrast the environmental disorder he saw around him with a future-oriented vision of natural plenitude. In order to achieve this, he had to create a design language that somehow both suggested the present corruption and celebrated its transcendence. His best wallpaper, chintz, and woven wool patterns mark this dialectic. The printed cottons titled Cray (Figure 6) and Wandle (Figure 7), both from 1884, for example, suggest the pollution as well as the beauty of English rivers. The former pattern is named after the main tributary of the Darent River that runs through southwest London and near Morris’s former Red House in Bexleyheath, designed by Philip Webb in 1859. It is composed of a complex web of branches and tendrils that flow from lower right to upper left. The flowers at once reach up to gather sunlight and are smothered by fast moving grey waters beneath. In Morris’s day, the Cray was heavily polluted, the result of paper processing, a notably dirty industry. Wandle is the name for another English river, the one that supplied the water used at Morris’s workshops at Merton Abbey. By the middle of the nineteenth-century, its health was severely compromised by more than ninety factories and mills along its banks as well as by the raw sewage contributed by London’s southern suburbs.³⁵ Morris’s use of vivid, unnatural colors combined with repeated spirals and eddies hints at the industrial effluvia. And yet at the same time, the diagonal orientation, spatial complexity, and coloristic variety of the repeats conjure riverine dynamism and health.³⁶

In his utopian romance, News from Nowhere, Morris set out to describe what we may call ecological socialism, a system of mutual support, pleasurable labor, and erotic freedom in an environment that is neither country nor city, innocent nor sophisticated, carefree nor careworn. The setting for the novel is London and the Thames River Valley circa 2100, after the revolution of 1950 that overthrew capitalism and ended both commercial competition and human greed. In this new age, to which the narrator (ostensibly Morris himself) has been transported, everything is at once the same and utterly different. Most notably, the air and water pollution that disfigured London in Morris’s day are now absent. The sky and river are as clean, healthy and sensually bracing:

But is this the Thames? … The soap-works with their smoke vomiting chimneys were gone and the engineer’s works gone; and the lead works gone. … Both shores had a line of very pretty houses, low and not large… [and] there was a line of garden in front of them going down to the water’s edge, in which the flowers were now blooming luxuriantly, and sending delicious waves of summer scent over the eddying streams.³⁷

Here is the basis of Morris’s patterns named after the rivers of England: recollection of the air pollution emitted by “soap-works,” “engineer’s works,” “lead works,” and more, and their replacement by “waves of summer scent over eddying streams.” Here is also the basis of his socialism: great piles replaced by modest houses, factory work replaced by craft labor, and the necessary drudge work performed either by a few machines or by the collective efforts of the whole community. Like ecology, socialism was in the air in the early 1890s, and for a brief while, it seemed worthwhile to carefully construct what both of them would look like in the society of the future. That’s a lesson for us now: before our own futures are foreclosed — by fascism, war, or global warming — we’d be advised to look up into the air to find the inspiration needed to construct another future.