Ruskin, a Victorian with green credentials?

[mybarnconversion]

You can find green thinking in some strange places!

From John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture written in 1849 ...

[quote]“The idea of self-denial for the sake of
posterity, of practising present economy for the sake of
debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our
descendants may live under their shade, or of raising
cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose,
efficiently takes place among publicly recognized motives
of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor
is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the
range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include,
not only the companions, but the successors, of our
pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our life; it
is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are
to come after us, and whose names are already written in
the book of creation, as to us, and we have no right, by
any thing that we do or neglect, to involve them in
unnecessary penalties., or deprive them of benefits which
it was in our power to bequeath.â€

[the.fee.fairy]

Ruskin - a class act!

I studied him a but when i was doing my degree. He amused me.
He married Effie and then got the marriage annulled because it was never consummated. he spent far too much time around the preraphaelite brotherhood and didn't realise the women had pubic hair - hence he'[d never sleep with Effie because she didn't look like the paintings of herself!