TY - BOOK ID - 136699253 TI - Green Victorians AU - Albritton, Vicky AU - Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton PY - 2016 SN - 022634004X 9780226340043 9780226339986 PB - Chicago DB - UniCat KW - Sustainable living KW - Alternative lifestyles KW - Cottage industries KW - Consumption (Economics) KW - History KW - Moral and ethical aspects KW - Ruskin, John, KW - Knowledge KW - Sustainable living. KW - Homes and haunts KW - Lake District (England) KW - Social life and customs KW - ruskin, environment, landscape, lake district, sufficiency, simplicity, community, consumerism, commune, hand spinning, woodworking, gardening, archaeology, pedagogy, racism, paternalism, technophobia, ethical consumption, utopia, sustainable living, england, victorian, alternative lifestyles, 19th century, cottage industries, knowledge, epistemology, ethics, virtue, wealth, industrial revolution, anthropocene. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136699253 AB - From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have long sought to demonstrate how a sufficient life-one without constant, environmentally damaging growth-might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sufficiency has been largely forgotten. Green Victorians tells the story of a circle of men and women in the English Lake District who attempted to create a new kind of economy, turning their backs on Victorian consumer society in order to live a life dependent not on material abundance and social prestige but on artful simplicity and the bonds of community. At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin's followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin's community as well-racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin's utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now. ER -