Pastoral Utopia – Millennium Group

The Industrial Revolution brought very soon, in the second half of the 19th century, criticism from English and American intellectuals, who saw the dramatic environmental deterioration caused by the use of charcoal to power steam engines. Air and water pollution, overcrowding in the working-class neighborhoods of the cities, dirt and misery generated reactions contrary to industrialization from its early stages.

William Morris was one of the first representatives of a cultural movement that tried to focus on the problems of industrial progress, calling for a return to life in the countryside, to agriculture and livestock, to recover artisanal trades opposed to industrial design. . This tendency toward a “pastoral utopia” was shared by other English reformers such as Ebenezer Howard, who wrote in 1898 Garden cities of tomorrowa book that had a great influence on the development of cities during the 20th century.

The ideas of both were taken to more radical extremes in the United States, in 1867, Henry David Thoreau wrote Waldenan account of the period in which the author, a born rebel, spent away from civilization, living in a cabin far from the cities and providing his own support without the help of industrially manufactured products. Some writers such as Edgar Allan Poe exalted the aesthetic benefits of nature in their books, which describe places that can be enjoyed without any human intervention, isolated and solitary environments where you can contemplate nature.

It is possible that such thoughts soon after encouraged New York City planners, in particular Frederick Law Olmsted, to propose Central Park, which is a large rectangle of apparent nature, placed in the secular heart of Manhattan in 1858, in the most densely urbanized metropolis of the 20th century. Nowadays we must reconsider the importance of ecological balance and the need to plan cities in a different way than the current one, which irrationally assumes that resources and planetary space are infinite.

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