ABSTRACT
Since its beginnings ecology has been strongly characterized by its multiple nature. Its scientifi c insights produce critiques of environmental policy, resource management, and social organization, and for many ecological actors engagement with nature involves a combination of scientifi c, social, aesthetic, and spiritual approaches. Ecological science invites political action, as well as questions about lifestyle choices and social organization. Ecology destabilizes customary disciplinary and cultural boundaries, and inclines towards advocating a holistic attitude to every subject. All of the modern features of ecology refl ect the conditions of its genesis in the mid-nineteenth century, as well, of course, of all that followed. Rather than being merely an offshoot of evolutionary science, early ecology represented the coming together of Darwinism and many other strands of thought, including anatomical science, Romanticism, transcendentalism, human geography, religion, and politics. Ecology is marked by a wider nineteenth-century tendency to draw together often disparate and sometimes confl icting ideas. I will be exploring a particular instance of the nineteenth-century roots of ecology in the work of John Ruskin. Although he ultimately rejected evolutionary theory and the implications of materialist science, his nature writings participated in nascent ecological thinking, and his approach represented many of the contradictions and opportunities that defi ne ecology.
