SOURCE: Pite, Ralph. “‘Founded on the Affections’: A Romantic Ecology.” In The Environmental Tradition in English Literature, edited by John Parham, pp. 144‐55. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002.

In the following essay, Pite argues that British Romantic writers, far from being concerned only with solitary experiences, were social writers whose affinity for nature established links between humanity and the environment.

It is hard to give a single, satisfactory definition of Romanticism and equally difficult to say what unites all the different accounts of ecology. Viewed as a science, ecology is a recognized and established discipline; as a politics or a system of values, it is highly contested. Environmentalists, conservationists, ecologists, and green activists all differ, often passionately, about what should be done and why it should be done—about how people should treat the world they live in and how they should conceive of their place within it. Similarly...