The introduction considers ecological conservation movements in relation to modernity as a restless process of exhausting natural resources and human labor. I survey the emerging field of ecocritical modernist studies and situate my intervention as a focus on archival materials that chart the rhetorical development of environmental activists. I outline modernism as a strategic form of regeneration that avoids exhaustion through strategic breaks towards formal innovation. I consider the material and aesthetic basis of restlessness as it affects the artistic and contemplative life. I give the scope of the project and introduce the main authors in the study: D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, and Chinua Achebe. I also look at E. M. Forster’s own environmental activism and Virginia Woolf’s new definitions of modern literature. I draw on aesthetic theories from Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson to show how artistic contemplation may still take place in the chaotic environments of modernity.