Research Abstract: Early American Environmental Writing

[Blake's Abstract #4]

Sweet, Timothy. “Projecting Early American Environmental Writing.” American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 419-31. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 July 2011.

Timothy Sweet makes a case for how studying early American environmental writing can contribute to the current ecocritical cause. 

Sweet identifies the contrastive model of early American environmental studies, which examines discontinuities in beliefs about the environment.  Thoreau is considered the inventor of the nature essay, which signals the official shift from anthropocentric thinking to a concern for nature and the impact of technological advancements on undeveloped nature.  Early American environmental genres identified in the pre-Thoreau period include promotional, travel, scientific, historical, and even religious documents.  Early American ecofeminists also acknowledge a shift to more eco-conscious writing around the same time; however, they generally concentrate on fiction, beginning in colonial America that attempts to domesticate nature or pursue a nondomestic space in nature.    

In contrast with the discontinuity model, the American origins model of studying environmental writing is primarily concerned with studying continuity in attitudes about the environment and identifying the beginnings of the attitudes in colonial texts.  An example is the denial that our eco-economy is based on limited natural resources; the origin of this belief can be tracked from the separation of scientific texts from common literature; to the specialization of economics, which denied the existence of an environmental foundation; and ultimately to the pastoralization of nature, which only considers non-economic environments “nature.” Therefore, because the American ecological economy is still viewed with a colonial attitude, studying the colonial origins of this eco-economic paradigm will help Americans acknowledge that an eco-economy based on imagining inexhaustible production capabilities is impossible and unethical.  A georgic perspective denies the human/nature separation and urges humans to acknowledge that we do not live outside nature—nature is not separate from economic environments.  In contrast, the pastoral glorifies the escape from urban life to non-economic nature and acknowledges human alienation from nature because of our development. 

A biogeographical approach examines both discontinuities and continuities in American environmental thought but it contextualizes these beliefs with a global perspective.  A biogeographical approach also studies the effect people have on human and nonhumans in regional ecosystems as they move throughout the globe.  From this paradigm, the concept of American wilderness is invalid and American nature was never “pure” because before European colonization because it was occupied by Native Americans who hunted and farmed the land.  

Sweet calls for an expansion of the American nature writing canon to include nonliterary genres because environmental writing often took these forms in early America.  He also proposes that a survey class of colonial nature writing can be used to expose a concern with environmental issues, which disappears in later American writings. Sweet concludes that early American nature writing holds much potential for the contemporary ecocritical cause in examining sustainability can be achieved with consideration for humans and nonhumans.