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The British poet Robert Southey (1774-1843), the very incarnation of what E. P. Thompson called “traditionalist social radicalism” and a contemporary of the first Industrial revolution, is an important and lucid witness to the new relationship that then establishes itself with nature because of the hubris of industrialists using fossil fuels in order to overcome material limits. This new environmental subjectivity is opposed by another, just as new, which privileges an aesthetic dimension in the way it looks at nature: through Robert Southey’s writings, in particular Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, published in 1829, reveal the Earth as organism wounded by the mechanisation of the body – whether social, working or environmental – as willed into being by industrial society.