Is Early American Environmental Writing Sustainable?: A Response to Timothy Sweet

Timothy Sweet ends his highly engaging essay on the relevance of early American environmental writing to later periods by defining ecocriticism’s central project, which he says involves “taking human and nonhuman agents into account, to work for a sustainable common good.” Such a critical project is nothing if not ambitious, and with each passing year it becomes all the more necessary, for reasons both heartening and dispiriting. To not address the nonhuman world in literary and cultural criticism is now becoming as unthinkable as failing to attend to race, class, and gender, among other social categories, and that is an unqualified good on both philosophical and biological grounds. Less heartening is the fact that such a project can also be justified for reasons that have less to do with the moral standing of our fellow creatures or our own corporeal contingency than with a single, disturbing fact: the numbers do not look good. In a world of rapid biodiversity loss, mounting toxic threats, and dramatic climate changes, working for a sustainable common good needs little intellectual justification beyond the pragmatic, as the rush of students enrolling in sustainability studies programs around the country serves to demonstrate.

Beginning with the goal of ecocriticism helps us to see the related pair of questions at work in Sweet’s essay more clearly: what does American literary history have to contribute to such a project, and how might early American perspectives, in particular, prove instructive to ecocritics working in later periods? Answering the first question requires a dose of humility and a sense of community, a belief that we share a common purpose not only with our academic colleagues in the social and natural sciences but also with architects, engineers, public officials, activists, and practitioners working in a host of other areas. Despite the recent flurry of articles bemoaning the decline of the humanities, my experience has been that people both within and outside the academy value the contribution the humanities can make to the pursuit of sustainability, including the critical perspective humanists can bring to this pursuit. If environmental problems are caused not only by science and technology but also by human attitudes and behavior, then they will not be solved by science and technology alone. Indeed, technical solutions are often insufficient and sometimes impossible. To give just one example, even Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow’s well-known stabilization wedges, which frame the problem of climate change as fundamentally “scientific, technical, and industrial” (968), rely as much on “reduced use of vehicles” and “reduced deforestation” as they do on carbon capture and storage at power plants (970)—behavioral changes that will require revisioning our values as much as, if not more than, modifying our technologies. Moreover, their entire project, like the enterprise of sustainability generally, participates in the ongoing expansion of the traditional humanistic question, “what does it mean to be human?” to include the more foundational query, “what is a human?” Thus, while we need not overstate the usefulness of the humanities in solving environmental problems, we also need not abandon utilitarian arguments, or allow claims of the humanities’ irrelevance to go unanswered (Fendrich; Fish).

Sweet’s “Projecting Early American Environmental Writing” illustrates what American literary history can contribute to the pursuit of a sustainable common good by exploring the continuities and discontinuities of environmental discourse in both a temporal sense (such as the continuing dominance of the growth paradigm and the shift from anthropocentrism to biocentrism) and a spatial sense (such as the breaks and flows in patterns of globalization since the sixteenth century). In this formulation, ecocriticism shares a great deal with allied disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, such as the attention to functional discourse found in communication studies and the interest in material conditions characteristic of Marxist history. Furthermore, it is clear from both his essay and American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (2002) that Sweet agrees with the historian Richard White in valuing the concept of work as a useful tool for understanding and improving human-nonhuman relations. If, White argues,

environmentalism could...