Morris held to a materialist appreciation of the connection between human productive activity and the ruination of the environment. In a lecture The Dawn of a New Epoch, first delivered on 6 June 1886, he expressed the matter succinctly: “Like all other systems of society, it [capitalism] is founded on the necessity of man conquering his subsistence from Nature by labour.”
He continued to make general statements about the link between modern society and environmental degradation. For example in an article, Unattractive Labour, published in Commonweal, May 1885 he argued: “It is no exaggeration to say that our civilisation has destroyed the attractiveness of labour, and that by more means than one: by lengthening the hours of labour: by intensifying the labour during its continuance; by the forcing of the workmen into noisy, dirty, crowded factories; by the aggregation of the population into cities and manufacturing districts, and the consequent destruction of all beauty and decency of surroundings. (Salmon 1994 pp.89-90)
And he made the link between the conspicuous consumption of the rich and the destruction of nature. In Society of the Future (13 November 1887) he argued: “What brings about luxury but a sickly discontent with the simple joys of the lovely earth?… Shall I tell you what luxury has done for you in modern Europe? It has covered the merry green fields with the hovels of slaves, and blighted the flowers and trees with poisonous gases, and turned the rivers into sewers, till over many parts of Britain the common people have forgotten what a field or a flower is like, and their idea of beauty is a gas-poisoned gin palace or a tawdry theatre.” (Morton 1973 p.193)
However more significantly, Morris explicitly connected ecological destruction with the political economy of capitalism. On the most superficial level, he identified the pursuit of profit as the principal cause of this damage.
In an early article in the Justice newspaper, Why Not?, published on 12 April 1884, he wrote: “Why are men huddled together in unmanageable crowds in the sweltering hells we call big towns? For profit's sake; so that a reserve army of labour may always be ready to hand for reduction of wages under the iron law, and to supply the sudden demand of the capitalist gamblers, falsely called "organisers of labour… Why should any house, or group of lodgings, arranged in flats or otherwise, be without a pleasant and ample garden, and a good play-ground? Because profit and competition rents forbid it. Why should one third of England be so stifled and poisoned with smoke that over the greater part of Yorkshire (for instance) the general idea must be that sheep are naturally black? and why must Yorkshire and Lancashire rivers run mere filth and dye? Profit will have it so: no one any longer pretends that it would not be easy to prevent such crimes against decent life: but the 'organisers of labour,' who might better be called 'organisers of filth,' know that it wouldn't pay.” (Salmon 1994 p.25-26)
Later in that year, he expressed the same sentiment in the lecture, How We Live and How We Might Live (30 November 1884): “And once for all, there is nothing in our circumstances save the hunting of profit that drives us into it. It is profit which draws men into enormous unmanageable aggregations called towns, for instance; profit which crowds them up when they are there into quarters without gardens or open spaces; profit which won't take the most ordinary precautions against wrapping a whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers, which condemns all but the rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and confined at the best, and at the worst in houses for whose wretchedness there is no name.” (Morton 1973 p.153-54)
As well as this general point about profit, Morris also explained how the drive to accumulate infects all aspects of life, including the pursuit of knowledge. Morris argued that the ruling class “allows learned men to seek out the secrets of nature and to subdue her forces because those matters can be turned to the advantage of the profit market” (Art and the People, 12 June 1883) and that “science is allowed to live because profit can be made out of her”. (The Worker’s Share of Art, April 1885 in Salmon 1994 p.86)
Morris also pointed to concrete examples where profiteering led to both environmental degradation and to the loss of human life. For example, on 31 May 1889 in Johnstown, a steel company town in Pennsylvania was devastated by the worst flood in US history. Over 2,200 were killed, with many more made homeless. Morris wrote an angry account in Commonweal (15 June 1889): “The dam above what was once Johnstown in Pennsylvania turns out to have been the crowning triumph of what we call in England jerry-building i.e. building not for the use of the public but for the profit of the speculator. The crowd of unfortunate people who were lost in that stupendous tragedy have in fact been sacrificed to the demon of profit-mongering to which hundreds and thousands of the disinherited classes are sacrificed every day… To the demon of profit they were sacrificed, and also to the demon of waste: for it seems that huge mass of water, held temporarily in check by its jerry built dam, was in fact a pleasure lake, the property of a fishing club.” (Salmon 1996 p.584)
Morris made a further step forward in Commonweal by explicitly identifying the bourgeois class as the agent of environmental ruin. In The Worker’s Share of Art (April 1885) he wrote that “the advance of the industrial army under its ‘captains of industry’ (save the mark!) is traced, like the advance of other armies, in the ruin of the peace and loveliness of [the] earth’s surface, and nature, who will have us live at any cost, compels us to get used to our degradation at the expense of losing our manhood, and producing children doomed to live less like men than ourselves. Later in his Notes on News column (28 December 1889), he accused the middle class of making “the beautiful garden-like countryside of England into a mere hell of barrenness for the people who feed you! A hell from which the country people flee to that other hell of the city slums…” (Salmon 1994 p.85, 1996 p.642)
Therefore Morris developed a rudimentary appreciation that it was capitalism that was the cause of ecological degradation. This was the first step in developing a socialist response; a necessary step but only a start. What else was needed was a societal alternative and a social agent for carrying out the transformation.
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