Sweet, Timothy. “Projecting Early American Environmental Writing.” Early American Literature. 45.2 (2010): 403-16. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 23 June 2011.
In order to successfully connect the concerns of early American environmental writing with the issues of later periods, Timothy Sweet proposes three different models: the contrastive model, the early American origins model, and the environmentally inflected origins model. The essay addresses the concept of ecological-economics theory as a filter for these three models. Eco-economic theory takes into account the differences of human-made capital and natural capital, unlike neoclassical economic theory. Additionally, eco-economics makes a distinction between pastoral and georgic: pastoral is based on human alienation from nature and requires a “movement of retreat and return,” whereas georgic denies this movement because it claims we never left nature. Sweet states “place-connectedness, regional identity, and the moral value of ‘nature’” can be located within the early American pastoral’s literary legacy (423). Nostalgia can be revealed through a biogeographical approach because it takes into account a global context, including America’s legacy of European colonization and its relationship to our growth narrative of “land of abundance” (425). Sweet concludes with the necessity of aaplying the biogeographical frame to the field of natural history because American colonists utilized the genre. The genre of natural history has since evolved to accommodate paradigm shifts in the ensuing centuries, including the shifting boundary between literary and nonliterary/subliterary.
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