Philippon, Daniel J. “Is Early American Environmental Writing Sustainable? A Response to Timothy Sweet.” Early American Literature. 45.2 (2010): 417-23. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 23 June 2011.
Daniel J. Philippon’s essay addresses the contributions of American literary history to the project of ecocriticism, and the ways in which early American concerns do apply to works from later periods, which should not be dismissed by ecocritics. Philippon identifies the inclusion of the “nonhuman world in literary and cultural criticism” as “an unqualified good on both philosophical and biological grounds” (432). It is important to acknowledge that environmental problems cannot be solved without the cooperation of academics and professionals from fields of science, technology, and humanities. The essay by Timothy Sweet clearly demonstrates the benefits of interdisciplinary study, which ecocritism relies upon, by pursuing both a temporal sense and spatial sense of “the continuities and discontinuities of environmental discourse” (433). While Sweet prefers the eco-economic approach, Philippon broadens the perspective by including the “three pillars” approach or the “triple bottom line” (“social, ecological, and economic” and “people, planet, and profit”) (434). An additional criticism of Sweet’s essay includes too little emphasis on the discontinuities between early and later periods, especially “in terms of the pace and scale of technological change,” such as biotechnology and information technology (435). Lastly, the georgic critical approach ignores texts that “exist outside the purview of the pastoral” as well those that include a “built environment” (436).
