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December 16, 2008
Power stations, especially coal fired ones, are in the news these days because of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions produced by the power stations. So is Mr 5%. The coal mining companies and coal based energy companies rule.
This photo of a gas-fired power station near Port Adelaide in South Australia is not about climate change. It is more conventional in that it highlights the negative effects on the environment (degradation of the landscape) due to industrialization from the perspective of Romanticism.
In this form of economic growth the environment is often seen as wasteland, if it lacks resources that can be exploited by industry through technology to make a profit. The only value is that of utlity and nature can be laid to waste if profits can be made and the majority benefit through jobs and increased GDP. Romanticism protests this market utilitarianism and the effects of industrialization on the environment.
The conventional view of Romanticism is this:
Romanticism introduced a new outlook on life that embraced emotion before rationality ..... Romanticism was a reactionary period of history when its seeds became planted in poetry, artwork and literature. The Romantics turned to the poet before the scientist to harbor their convictions (they found that the orderly, mechanistic universe that the Science thrived under was too narrow-minded, systematic and downright heartless in erms of feeling or emotional thought)...since most poets thrived on the emotional and irrational abstract that they were writing about, there was no specific category that this mode of thinking could fall into.
Romanticism, on this account, is seen as standing against the progress of liberal modernity rather than a critique of progress from within modernity. On the latter account the critique is from the perspective of human beings relationship to the natural world at the very time when the natural world was disappearing in Europe. The degradation of the landscape was central to the aesthetic concerns of the era.
Romanticism, on this alternative interpretation, was a response to the growing industrialization of Europe,as well as a reaction against the Neo-Classical style, and a revolt against traditional landed social order. They were critical of "the machine age", the mechanization of all aspects of life in industrial society, the effects of technological development on society and people, and the idea of progress in a liberal-capitalist order. It was held that industrialization separated (alienated) human beings from nature and that art and literature were a mode of expression for the loss of nature (paradise lost) and the yearning for a better relationship to nature than that of naked exploitation.
Romanticism resurfaced in the 1970s with the New Left (self-expressive freedom), the counter culture (return to nature and rejecting urbanization), the philosophical critiques of science (scientism) and technology, the rejection of modernism and environmentalism.
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European Romanticism is seen historically as a reaction to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the French Revolution.
Romanticism has a muted presence in settler Australia because colonial society was premised on the view that industry and technology would bring prosperity to the nation through a national economy. Industrial development and conquering nature was celebrated, with the resistance in the form of the beauty of nature marginalized.
During the nineteenth century Romantic ideas had a presence in the form of the power of the individual genius to shape the surrounding world. The democratic movement extended this idea of the individual genius to the common folk which was coupled to rediscovering God in nature (the church of nature), being at home in the world, and the value of individual experience (and intuition) of self-reliant individuals.
The divergent interpretations of romantic philosophy and mood (eg., conservative, liberal) expressed in19th century Australia derived from the differences in how the emerging colonial economy affected people in different regions and with their different social interests and ways of handling social change.