In the fifth letter of Fors Clavigera Ruskin makes the much-cited claim that ‘There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life.  No one “knows how to live” till he has got them.  These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth’. Pure air, pure water, pure earth – these are also all very important values to Ruskin’s disciple William Morris, in both his political articles and lectures and in News from Nowhere itself, which has occasionally been referred to by scholars of utopianism as ‘our first Ecotopia’.  But if we are dealing here with the traditional names of the four elements, then clearly there is one missing in this Ruskinian list.  Air, water, and earth, yes indeed; but where is fire, the fourth of the elements?  So my question in this talk will be: how can we have a fully ecological or ecotopian vision of pure air, pure water and pure earth which does not simply exclude the fourth element of fire?   I shall be understanding ‘fire’ here as a metaphor for a whole cluster of values that we associate with the term ‘modernity’: mobility, dynamism, experiment, innovation, individuality.  It is precisely those values which have led us to the environmental crisis we now face, as we all pursue our own individual patterns of eager consumption regardless of the ecological impacts they have on the world we inhabit.  The fire of our restless modernity is burning up the planet quite literally, in the form of global warming and climate change.  If we extinguish that fire, if we abandon the values of modernity, then yes, perhaps we could indeed return to a more innocent and Ruskinian world of pure air, pure water and pure earth.  But is it possible to have our cake and eat it?  Can we have pure earth, water and air without wholly sacrificing fire, without wholly giving up our energetic modernity?  I am going to explore this question centrally through William Morris’s work, and above all through his Ruskin-inspired utopia News from Nowhere, since it is in the genre of utopia that we carry out thought-experiments which are too difficult for us to realise in the actual world just at present.  But I will also need to set Morris’s late nineteenth-century utopia in dialogue with some of the most powerful utopias or ecotopias of our own time, works such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990).  I shall aim to let these utopias speak to each other, to swap and share narrative energies.  So I shall to some extent, through a focus on Morris, be asking a more general question: to what extent does the Western tradition of utopian writing succeed in imagining an environmentally desirable future which does not just sacrifice those values of modernity – speed, possibility, experiment, multiplicity – which have caused the ecological crisis in the first place?  To what extent can the Western utopia give us Ruskinian pure air, pure water and pure earth, which we are all agreed we so desperately need, but also retain the dangerous element of fire alongside them?