ABSTRACT
This chapter describes environmental awareness as a consequence of life in several spaces as they encouraged new ways of thinking about one's surroundings, particularly nature's fundamental elements of earth, air and water. The transformation of elemental nature was the means to transcend the finality of death. Anxieties regarding elements and organisms in the domestic sphere, both good and bad, provoked the occupants of Britain's residential districts to situate themselves within the broader landscape of organic existence. For residents of British cities the 'departments of nature' were hardly distinct, while the effects of earth, air and water on living bodies were notably both positive and negative. Anxieties generated by the unknown composition of air, as well as earth and water, their manner of interaction and responses to sensations of dampness, putrefaction and filth came together in response to the threat of disease.
