My project explores the cultural history of environmental change amid the Industrial Revolution in Britain, from the 1790s to the 1830s. I study poets, politicians and philosophers of the Romantic period who were also first-hand participants in experimental schemes to change the physical landscape around them. The writers who feature in this project drained marshlands, managed estates, designed industrial villages, or - on a smaller but still significant scale - gardened, farmed or planned utopian communities. Their social and artistic ideals influenced their land reform enterprises. In turn, the successes and failures of those enterprises changed their ideas about society and art. Studying these writers reveals the interactions between nature, politics and imagination during a period that shaped the global environment of the present day. Romantic literature has always been special to environmentalists. It has often been seen as a profound source of ecological values, thanks to figures like Wordsworth ('Come forth into the light of things / Let Nature be your teacher'), Coleridge's albatross-shooting ancient mariner, and Mary Shelley's reckless Victor Frankenstein. Many scholars have traced the origins of green politics to Romantic idealisations of harmonious dwelling amid the natural world. Their research has been important, but it also has its limitations. The coupling of Romanticism and modern environmentalism can make it seem as if all that really matters is the sensitivity with which solitary individuals appreciate nature. In that perspective, important things are lost. This project is different because it stresses the fact that the nonhuman world is always changing. 'Nature' is less a static source of spiritual values than a dynamic product of historical circumstances. Hence my concern with experiments in new kinds of land use. The authors I study were shaped by personal experience of the ground they worked on: its obduracy, its ecological complexity and its potential for new life. I am especially interested in writers who were radical or oppositional in their politics. Through them, I will examine how social status and power relations mediate experiences of the nonhuman world. My project sheds new light on several canonical Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Percy Shelley. It sets them alongside other writers who are far less well remembered, like William Madocks, the radical MP who undertook a vast scheme to embank an estuary from the sea, and Charles Waterton, the naturalist who turned his ancestral estate into what has been called the world's first nature reserve. I will track those reformers through five pivotal decades for Britain's economy and environment. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the 'classic' era of the British Industrial Revolution. Historians have increasingly recognised that the Industrial Revolution involved the reshaping and rethinking of ecosystems. In Britain and its overseas colonies, industrialisation required both radically transformed landscapes and new conceptions of nature itself. For that reason, the main strand of this project will be complemented by a collection of essays, written by economic historians and literary scholars, exploring wider issues of environmental change in the Romantic decades. That essay collection will break new ground in showing what economic and environmental history can add to the study of literature. This project's ultimate aim is to map a new path for environmental studies of British history and culture. Romantic writings about experiments in land and society let us address fundamental questions about the causes and cultures of ecological change. Britain's imperial and industrial transformation shaped the global environmental crisis of the present day. The Romantics' land experiments can help us understand the history of upheavals that now affect everyone, everywhere.