A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination ed. by Alan C. Braddock, Laura Turner Igoe (review)

In the acknowledgements for A Greene Country Towne, editors Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe thank the usual suspects, including their partners, the volume’s contributors, and their respective institutions. However, they also make a point to single out some surprising players in their daily lives: “the intrepid squirrels, sparrows, and even a red-tailed hawk who alighted on a bird feeder hanging behind Alan’s apartment,” local specimens of “hyacinth, lantana, Mexican hyssop” growing in a nearby garden, “large sinkholes” in front of Igoe’s home, and Braddock’s cats (xi). In bringing in these “nonhuman denizens” whose very existence is rarely noted by the many people who live with them every day, Igoe and Braddock draw attention to the agency of their local plants, animals, and infrastructure and suggest that their community is not simply one of human actors but also includes “nonhuman beings, things, forces, and matter” (2). In doing so, Braddock and Igoe set the tone for what is to come in the chapters ahead: a cultural history of Philadelphia, but one that includes some unusual subjects.

According to the editors, A Greene Country Towne (a title that derives from William Penn’s description of an early but abandoned plan for Philadelphia) “explores the ways in which art and literature have imagined, animated, and embodied the complex ecology of Philadelphia since the seventeenth century” (2). To do this, twelve scholars who work in a variety of disciplines take on a diverse range of subjects centering around the environmental history of Philadelphia. The goal of this volume is to reveal how the “ecology” of the city, by which they mean the natural and artificial “collaboration between human beings and nonhuman things,” was formed and understood (6). The environmental history of Philadelphia is therefore presented in new and surprising ways, not through the history of local parks or rivers, as has been the case in past scholarship, but rather through the complex relationships between spaces, humans, nonhumans, and objects. Organized chronologically and analyzed through the lens of the emerging discourses of “ecocriticism” and “new materialism,” topics covered include a Lenape wampum belt, images by the painter Thomas Eakins of his monkey, Bobby, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro, and a recent piece by Winifred Lutz, in which she retraces a creek’s former course with paint and bungee cords.

All of these short essays are carefully researched, highly engaging, and, though academic in tone, easy to read. Authors do not always fully distinguish between ecocritism and environmental history, but this is a minor point for a collection that is willing to challenge the anthropocentrism that dominates much writing in the humanities. A Greene Country Towne is a fresh look at the forces that shape urban existence and would be a valuable guide for scholars considering the development and history of other cities. Furthermore, many chapters in this volume serve as useful models for art historians and material culture specialists who want to think through the nonhuman elements that impact (or are) our objects of study.