How We Might Live

Abstract

This essay argues that a proliferation of utopias focusing on a return to nature beginning around 1870—represented here by William Morris’ s News from Nowhere (1890) and Samuel Butler’ s Erewhon (1872)—are significant less because they voiced opposition to ongoing processes of industrialization and colonialism than for their capacity to explore and often undermine a dualism of nature and society. Reading Morris and Butler together counters a usual interpretation of Morris’ s utopia as “pastoral”: like Erewhon, which Morris admired, News from Nowhere is largely skeptical of the idea of “pure” or “nonhuman” nature. More generally, this essay proposes that utopianism is significant for past and present ecological thought not because of the content of its wish, but as a formal structure capable of investigating interactions between human and nonhuman systems at multiple scales.