ABSTRACT
The name William Wordsworth is almost synonymous with 'nature poet'; paradoxically, Wordsworth is also the 'poet of self'. Donald Worster writes, 'The Romantic approach to nature was fundamentally ecological; that is, it was concerned with relation, interdependence and holism'. For Wordsworth, these three concepts are as much psychological as ecological, a key correspondence in Wordsworth's most significant contribution to environmental thought: his anticipation of phenomenological perspective underlying English-born, twentieth-century anthropologist Gregory Bateson's 'steps to an ecology of mind'. In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads. This book instituted a Copernican-like shift in poetry and in how people think about the relationship of their inner nature to outer nature. In any case, Wordsworth's notion of a 'national property' and 'a perfect equality, community' makes for a useful bridge to a discussion of range of 'social ecologies' available today, from the conception of a sustainable 'community' as a political artefact to the conception of sustainable community as an ecological 'fact'.
