Af Jeppe Branner

Denne side er en del af specialeafhandlingen Grønne pionerer? - Protoøkologisk natursyn i amerikansk transcendentalisme og tysk romantik (2011). Det anbefales at læse specialet fra dets begyndelse.

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English summary
The aim of this thesis, "Precursors of the Greens?", is an examination of the view of nature in American Transcendentalism and German Romanticism, regarding its relationship to modern ecological thinking. Following the theoretical school of Ecocriticism, Romanticism (including Transcendentalism) was indeed a green movement. It is, however, my view that such a conclusion requires a wide broadening of the definition of "green", and that ecocritics generally have misinterpreted the romantics as merely naive, nature-loving authors. This critique is elaborated in the first main chapter (2), which also can be seen as a theoretical introduction to Ecocriticism. In order to give a more comprehensive account of the romantic view of nature, I have structured the central part of the thesis into two main chapters, dealing with respectively harmonic "light green" and chaotic "dark green" aspects. In the light green chapter (3) I show how Thoreau's organic nature, with Emerson as an indispensable intermediary, derives from the German idealists' view of nature, and how this view resembles the thoughts of twentieth century deep ecology proponents such as Lovelock and Næss. In the dark green chapter (4) I show how the very same organic nature threatens to reverse into an insanity-provoking force or Schopenhauerian will, which inevitably will be met with "ecophobia". This portraying of the natural world as a power that humans cannot control is in a way more ecocentric, and thereby ecologically and ecocritically relevant, than the light green view, in which humans choose to like nature at will. The fear of unrestrained growth inherent in dark green nature is mirrored in the "anthropophobia" that characterizes a lot of modern day environmentalism. These parallels are dealt with in the next chapter (5), which to an even higher degree puts the discussion into contemporary ecological perspective, thus calling for a rethinking of the concepts of ecocentrism and anthropocentrism in light of the romantic findings. It is my view that all of the preceding discussions are rooted in aesthetics, a field immensely important to the romantics, shaping the way they conceive of central concepts like that of the organism and the man-nature relationship, and therefore also constituting the theme of my last chapter (6), which leads to the final conclusion (7) that Romanticism, despite of all its differences from present day ecology, was a protoecological movement.

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