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[Image 1] Frontispiece of News from Nowhere,
Kelmscott Press Edition |
William Morris & the Environment
When
William Guest awakes in the future utopian London envisaged by Morris in News from Nowhere, the ‘smoke-vomiting
chimneys’ are gone, there are salmon nets catching salmon in the Thames, and he
is taken out on the river by a boatman who is utterly confounded by attempts to
pay him for the boat trip, the exchange of labour for money being a completely
alien concept.[1] Evidently society has fundamentally
transformed, and with it the environment.
News from Nowhere is in many ways
Morris’ response to man-made (or specifically capitalist-made) environmental
degradation. This blog post focuses on
Morris’ environmentalism and the insight his utopia offers for twenty-first
century responses to environmental crisis, in particular with regards to a
common concern about the scale on which humans are acting as agents for
environmental change.
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| [Image 2] 1871 Ordnance Survey Map |
Morris
wrote Nowhere in the context of environmental
change that he perceived as crisis, and which was precursor to the environmental
crises we currently face. In the late
nineteenth century London was expanding and industrialising at great pace. As observed by Ruth Levitas in her 2000
Kelmscott Lecture, one need only look at the area surrounding Morris’ London
home Kelmscott House to witness the transformation of farmland and gardens into
city sprawl. The Ordnance Survey map of
1871 shows the house set in relatively open space. This was all built upon by the time the map
was redrawn in 1894.[2] Morris wrote News from Nowhere in 1890, in the midst of this development.
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| [Image 3] 1894 Ordnance Survey Map |
Nowhere is also a
reaction against Edward Bellamy’s 1888 socialist utopia Looking Backward. Bellamy’s
utopia is urban, with goods delivered to the home almost instantaneously by pneumatic
tube, short working lives for citizens and abundant leisure time spent taking
dinner at the dining halls or listening to piped music at home. Nowhere
by contrast is decidedly rural and all about work, which is pleasurable and
connects the inhabitants of Nowhere to their environment.
In
Morris’ utopia, humanity is not the only beneficiary of the demise of
capitalism; non-human nature is also flourishing. Wandering by the Thames in early morning,
William Guest sees ‘the bleak speckling the water under the willow boughs,
whence the tiny flies they fed on were falling in myriads; heard the great
chubs splashing here and there at some belated moth or other’ – a picture of
biodiversity.[3] Given the oppositional nature of News from Nowhere, this suggests that
for Morris, the nineteenth century capitalist construction of place did not
support an environment that was mutually beneficial for both human society and
non-human nature. Elizabeth Miller goes
further and argues that Morris was ‘an early adopter of the position that
capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with Earth’s ecological balance’.
She notes Morris shared the Marxist view that ‘the idea of free exchange
obscured the market’s remainders of profit and surplus value’ and suggests
Morris translates this imbalance in capitalist exchange across to the
environment where he perceives the environmental remainders of capitalist
practice – waste, dirt, filth - accumulating in ‘a vision of steady ecological
destruction under capitalism’.[4]
It
is certainly the case that in the absence of capitalist exchange pollution is
as good as eradicated in Nowhere. However, it is hard to see ecologism as
Morris’s primary motivator for societal reform.
While the environment is an obvious beneficiary of the changes depicted, Nowhere still foregrounds human
experience of, and influence on, place. Morris’
imagined future England is described as ‘a nature bettered and not worsened by
contact with mankind’, which still presumes place is mostly defined by human
interaction.[5]
Morris’s
privileging of the human position within the ecology is problematic to attempts
to define his environmentalism in terms of modern ecological thinking. Florence Boos has sought to align Morris’s
ideals with late-twentieth century environmentalism, suggesting he anticipated what
she calls ‘“spiritual” ecologists, ecofeminists, social ecologists and
advocates of environmental justice’.[6] However, key to these movements is not simply
place-consciousness and love of place, which is present in News from Nowhere, but also flattening the hierarchy between humans
and nature where in Western society humans have historically assumed authority
over the rest of the natural world. In News from Nowhere the human control of
nature is not challenged. When Guest
enquires about the ‘wastes and forests’ he has seen, and why they are kept now
England is ‘a garden’, he receives the response:
“We like these
pieces of wild nature, and can afford them, so we have them; let alone as to
the forests, we need a great deal of timber, and suppose that our sons and
sons’ sons will do the like.”[7]
This
is not an argument for the retention of ‘wild nature’ for its own sake. Rather, these environments have been
conserved for the pleasure and utility of the human population.
Elsewhere,
Morris employs nineteenth century rhetoric of man’s ‘victory over Nature’ to
argue for his ideas of labour reform. In
his lecture ‘Useful Work Versus Useless Toil’ he argues:
Men urged by
their necessities and desires have laboured for many thousands of years at the
task of subjugating the forces of Nature and of making the natural material
useful to them… that struggle with Nature seems nearly over, and the victory of
the human race nearly complete… Surely we ought, one and all of us, to be
wealthy, to be well furnished with the good things which our victory over
Nature has won for us.
He
concludes ‘Nature will not be finally conquered till our work becomes a part of
the pleasure of our lives’.[8] By this measure, the future depicted in News from Nowhere represents the
conquest of nature, an idea that would be deeply troubling to the like of
ecofeminists.
This
is not to say that Morris’s ideas were not progressive, but they necessarily did
not transcend all the ideological assumptions of his time and this makes
attempts to align his position with twentieth century environmentalism
problematic. For Morris, the natural
world is “our” environment, something outside us that we interact with and is
defined by us. This is typical of
nineteenth century environmental thinking, even that of radical thinkers. As Boos points out, ‘Marx was hardly an
ecologist, and tended to accept the dominant economic view of nature and the
environment as resources for human appropriation’.[9]
Morris
likewise does not question the authority of humans in place-making or the idea
that they should be agents for change within the environment. While this is problematic in the context of
twentieth century environmentalism that aims for humanity to relinquish its
control over the rest of the natural world, there is a current movement to
recognise that human activity has altered Earth systems to such a degree to
have irreversibly changed the course of Earth’s geological history. Our growing consciousness of the scale on
which humans are acting as agents for environmental change returns us to the
original nineteenth century crisis: through our human endeavours we have made
place strange, made the natural abnatural,how
do we deal with this?[10]
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[Image 4]
Stone plaque of William Morris by George Jack,
Kelmscott Village, Oxfordshire |
The
‘Morris response’, as Raymond Williams terms it, was to envisage a ‘positive
movement of social change’.[11] Morris’ response to the transformation of London
in the late nineteenth century was not to doubt that humans should have such
agency but to keep alive the possibility of further change. News
from Nowhere suggests there is a reciprocal relationship between the
organisation of society and the condition of the physical environment. It depicts a return to nature, but not in a
retrogressive sense; rather, Morris’ imagined future England is a
post-industrial environment where ecological balance is attained through the
establishment of an equitable society.
Re-reading News from Nowhere in
the context of twenty-first century environmental crises was to me a reminder
that traces of human activity within an environment need not always be signs of
its destruction, depending upon how we organise ourselves.
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Sheryl M. Medlicott has recently completed her Master's degree in Literature, Landscape and Environment at Bath Spa University. Her research interests are in utopian literature and ecocriticism - the branch of literary criticism concerned with the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, particularly in the context of environmental crisis. She is a member of the William Morris Society in the UK and finds great inspiration in Morris's writings.
Image Sources
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Nowhere, scanned from Pamela Todd, Pre-Raphaelites at Home, New York: Watson-Guptill, 2001
[2]
Ruth Levitas, Morris, Hammersmith and Utopia (London: The William Morris Society, 2005), p.54
[3]
Ruth Levitas, Morris, Hammersmith and Utopia (London: The William Morris Society, 2005), p.58
[4]
http://shoffmire.blogspot.com/2013/08/kelmscott-manor-heaven-on-earth.html
