Projecting Early American Environmental Writing

“Nature” has long been an organizing category in American studies, often figured abstractly as wilderness, frontier, or garden. While continuing to engage with such ideologically saturated landscapes, ecocriticism and allied historicist approaches turned in the wake of poststructuralism toward the materiality of “nature,” both human and nonhuman, and toward the referential as well as the constitutive claims of texts. These developments transformed the category of “nature” into “environment” while interrogating the subject/object dualism built into “environment” (that which environs). The resulting paradigm offers three models for projecting the concerns of early American environmental writing into later periods. A contrastive model emphasizes discontinuity, locating the work of Thoreau at a key moment in environmental history to mark a divide between “green” and pre-“green” ideologies. An early American origins model emphasizes continuity by tracing textual and environmental histories from colonial sources. Subject to some of the familiar critiques of origins models of American literary history and culture from Frederick Jackson Turner through Sacvan Bercovitch, an environmentally inflected origins model nevertheless retains heuristic value in diagnosing present concerns, such as Americans’ general preoccupation with economic growth. Finally, however, all environmental writing carries a biogeographical frame that transcends the nationalist organization of both the contrastive and origins models. Biogeography reconciles the national or transnational locations of particular texts with universal concerns such as place-consciousness, literary form, and the organization of the nature-culture collective, while revealing the nostalgia inherent in any appeal to a pure state of nature untouched by humankind.

1. Discontinuities

With the consolidation of ecocriticism in the 1990s, Thoreau emerged as the progenitor of the modern “environmental imagination,” as the title of Lawrence Buell’s influential study phrases it. Of course there were precursors such as William Bartram, but Thoreau effectively invented the personal nature essay, a genre both introspective and objectively grounded in close observation of the natural world, devoted at once to seeking self-awareness and to extending human empathy to nonhuman life.¹ Observing the environmental degradation wrought by technological development and economic growth, Thoreau called for a revaluation of the natural world as having intrinsic worth. Thoreau thus functions as a marker both for key episodes in environmental history (the coming of the railroad; deforestation in New England) and for changes in environmental attitudes, such as a new valuation of wilderness (Oelschlaeger 133–71; Howarth 526–32). Mapping this ideological shift from anthropocentrism to biocentrism onto a modal shift from instrumental to aesthetic approaches to nature, ecocriticism relegated numerous early American environmental genres—exploration report, promotional tract, sermon, prose or poetic meditation, almanac, scientific paper, travel account, history, natural history, agricultural treatise, immigrants’ guide—to a preenvironmentalist or antienvironmentalist past.² Ecofeminist American studies marks the divide at roughly the same moment, although with greater emphasis on investigating the shape of the nature-culture boundary. Ecofeminists have focused alternatively on the desire to transform wilderness into domestic space, from the colonial era on (Kolodny), or on the “search for an undomesticated space in nature,” beginning in the historical fiction of the 1820s (Alaimo 16).

Chronologically later dividing lines have been drawn from the claim that environmental transformations wrought by technology have effectively eradicated the boundary between nature and culture, though not in the positive ways imagined by ecofeminism (McKibben, End). In the topos of toxicity, for example, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) occupies the originating position of Thoreau’s Walden (Buell, Writing 30–54). The current manifestations of the toxicity topos in “risk society” and environmental justice paradigms mark a reinvestment in the early American anthropocentric view of the environment from which Thoreau was supposed to have redirected us.³ Discourses of environmental hazard have a long literary history, dating at least from the livestock-plague episode of Virgil’s third Georgic. American accounts range from early concerns with the European body’s adaptability to strange climates; responses to diseases such as yellow fever or the “ague”; nineteenth-century urban reform campaigns; turn-of-the-century investigations of industrial hazard; accounts of agricultural crisis; through more recent accounts of toxicity, nuclear threat, and disease. Concerns of mobility and place...