ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
20
morality, or culture that the romantic craves so bitterly. For others the dragon is
identified as 'modernity’ whose technologies, cities, and ‘progressive’ ideas
degrade a past social order that is romanticized as having been morally and
ecologically superior. What purists share in common though,, is a love for
‘simplicity’ and simple ideas: if the cause of social evil is ‘impurity,’ then the
solution is the removal of the offending substance or subject.
Romantic ecologists also have the tautological argument of ‘natural law5
on their side. If nature is pure, then it is lawful and ‘natural’ that such purity
shall pervade. Why should there be population control? To protect the natural
limit of resources of the planet. It is only natural that there should be so many
people on the planet. Ecology is the perfect environment for the cultivation of
a purist critique of ‘modernity’. Its green pastures provide free reign for the
unbridled advance of a theoiy which provides both moral and scientistic
ground for a critique of both modem and post-modem society.11 Within the
green expanses of ecology, the wild imagination of the nature romantic can
run free with the certainty that what was old was not only good, but most
importantly, it was ‘natural.’
The longing for an ecologically pure society reflects the desire to return
to a time and place when society was free from the decadence associated with
urban life. There is a distinctly rural bias within ecological discourse, a
depiction of the rural landscape as a vestige of past golden age of ecological
purity and morality. Since the emergence of capitalism and the arrival of the
urban capitalist center, the gap which opened between a world that had been
largely agrarian and an increasingly urban society provided a space for the
purist’s romantic reverie. Often a bourgeois urbanite and rarely directly
engaged in agricultural work, the nature romantic wrote about the abstract
goodness of a rural life of the past, longing for an end to modernization and
urbanization.
However, the story of the town and country divide is hardly one of good
and evil: while the country has not always constituted a realm of innocence,
the city has not always been such a bad thing. As Raymond Williams points
out in the case of Britain, the real histories of the ‘country way of life’ and ‘city
life’ are astonishingly varied and uneven12 While the rural village is often
associated with ecological well-being and social cohesiveness, there exists a
less liberatory association with the rural village that is not commonly discussed
within contemporary' ecological discussions.13 The parochial tendency of rural
life has often been a source of alienation for the stranger as well for those
viewed as strange within the village itself. Women, gender-benders, those with
a vision that extends beyond the scope of the close knit community, have
often been suppressed by the homogenizing tendency of small village life.
Standing in sharp contrast to the harmonious and wholesome portrayals of