Wordsworth and the Environmental Humanities: Reimagining Nature as Teacher in the Age of Climate Change and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This article reconsiders William Wordsworth’s poetry through the interdisciplinary lens of the Environmental Humanities, asking how his conception of nature as a formative teacher might speak to an age marked by climate change and artificial intelligence. It argues that Wordsworth’s natural world is neither a passive backdrop nor merely an object of aesthetic contemplation; it is an active presence that educates perception, cultivates emotional awareness, and deepens ethical responsibility. Through close textual analysis of Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Tables Turned, The World Is Too Much with Us, and selected passages from The Prelude, the study examines how observation, memory, affect, and embodied encounter generate an ecological mode of knowing. The article addresses a gap in scholarship by bringing Wordsworth’s pedagogical understanding of nature into sustained dialogue with contemporary debates on technological mediation, climate consciousness, and more-than-human ethics. It further considers the implications of this Romantic ecological imagination for environmental education and sustainable futures. Ultimately, the study suggests that Wordsworth offers not a nostalgic retreat from technology but a critical resource for rethinking human–nature relations in an increasingly AI-mediated world.