Ruskin and Environment

The authors of this important new study examine a wide variety of environmental issues in the work of the great Victorian polymath, John Ruskin, and argue that his prophetic writings speak to our generation as much as his own. Best known today as an art critic and social theorist, John Ruskin (1819-1900) was also an acute observer and recorder of the natural environment, and of the impact of Victorian industrialisation and urbanisation upon it. He argued passionately against railways and tourism, river pollution and acid rain, and as passionately for the care of ancient buildings and improved sanitation in urban slums. Each of these aspects of the environment is examined in eight specially commissioned essays: from the concept of 'Mappa mundi' to the politics of recycling, from the role of the railways to the National Trust. Whether drawing the Alps or lecturing in his most prophetic mode on 'The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century', Ruskin's insights are as relevant at the end of this century as they ever were in the last.