The Aesthetic Evolution of Eco Theater

HowlRound: Eco theater’s modern aesthetic began not in theater, but with the conservationist and naturalist writers of the nineteenth century. It can be argued that Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and their contemporaries radically redefined our conceptual relationship to the natural world. They sought to achieve not merely a balance with nature, but a reverence and subjugation to it. These writers and other conservationist and naturalist authors, artists, and politicians led in large part to the formation of our national parks and first environmental legislation. Later theorists and artists in theater and literature have come to call this early writing and the later work inspired by it, ecocriticism.