Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Germany was a leader in the Romantic Movement, a glorification of nature
and emotion that emerged in reaction to the perceived over-emphasis on
rationality during the Enlightenment of the 18th century. The new move-
ment stressed the individual, as manifested both in popular government
and folk culture. The Romantic Movement was strong in the arts. Paintings
depicted dramatic landscapes and storms at sea. In literature, Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller wrote prose, drama, and
poetry. Goethe wrote of the unity between humans and nature. His ideas
had elements of a pantheist religion. Other authors wrote of how the land-
scape shaped the national soul. In 1789 construction began in Munich on
the Chinese Tower, a pagoda, in a naturalistic garden in the Chinese style,
but styled the “English Garden” because the fashion had been transmit-
ted via England. Romanticism also had a strong element of patriotism in
reaction against Napoleon's conquest that had imposed elements of the
Enlightenment at the point of a bayonet. While Germany was a leader in
Romanticism, the movement extended beyond its borders to affect all of
Europe and America.
The Romantic study of nature tied to emerging science. Ernst Haeckel
was a skilled marine biologist, who saw a religious side to nature, growing
out of his deep aesthetic response to the beauty of the world. He is famous
for coining the word “ecology,” which he defined as the relation of the
animal both to its organic as well as to its inorganic environment. Haeckel
had earned a degree in medicine but switched to biology when a professor
took him on a field trip to the North Sea. He also considered a career as a
landscape painter. Upon reading On the Origin of Species , he became an
enthusiastic Darwinian. He spent his career as a professor of comparative
anatomy at the University of Jena, specializing in radiolarians, sponges,
and segmented worms. Haeckel is famous for originating the biogenic
law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, meaning that the embryonic
development of an animal repeats its evolution. In spiritual terms, he was
a pantheist who believed that all animals, not just humans, contained a
divine spark. In his personal politics, he was a conservative and a German
patriot, shaped at least in part by his experience growing up during the
turmoil of the 1848 revolutions. In one of his most controversial state-
ments, he wrote that politics is applied biology.
In 1852 Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl appealed for “a right to wilderness,” in
opposition to the monotony of capitalist expansion. He praised the tradi-
tional countryside of peasants, woodcutters, and fishermen who engaged
themselves with nature on a daily basis. Riehl's ideal was a politically
Search WWH ::




Custom Search