Romantic Ecology, Germaine de Staël, and the Modern Recognition of “Environment”

This essay considers three terms for the interactions that constitute natural surroundings—“environment,” “ecology,” and “ecosystem”—as distinct generic concepts. It shows that the terms gained initial purchase as strategies for applying distinct print genres—Romantic travel writing and aesthetic criticism, political economy and domestic management, and knowledge systems—to the challenge of explaining the interactions that compose living spaces. As developed in writings by Germaine de Staël, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and Arthur G. Tansley, the terms “environment,” “ecology,” and “ecosystem” roughly trace the distinction that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have drawn between “truth-to-nature,” “mechanical objectivity,” and “trained judgment” as modes of objectivity distinctive to the Romantic, Victorian, and modern sciences, with distinctive aesthetic, imperial, and positivist connotations.