Introduction

As a matter of fact, it is to the renowned art critic and historian of British art that the birth of militant environmentalism in the second half of the nineteenth century is often traced. In Self (Marc Quinn, 1991–present), Sweet Girl (Zuzanna Janin, 2001), Red on Green (Anya Gallaccio, 1992), and Midsummer Snowballs (Andy Goldsworthy, 2000), time is both an explicit subject matter and an element of each work’s form. By allying the modern body and the land, they also offer a longer, more expansive view on British art’s relation to its natural environment, even building bridges between the national Land Art tradition and what Malcolm Miles calls the “shifts of consciousness” ecoart strives to accomplish. In this chapter, Thomas Hughes shows Ruskin’s main contribution to proto-ecological discourse – disregarding the fact that his intuitions on industrial pollution have since been recognised as valid – to have been aesthetic rather than scientific.