This book sets out to make the literature of the Age of Revolutions into a useful tool for the global environmental justice movement. It answers a call issued by Kathleen Dean Moore and Scott Slovic, who urge us to âfeel the heatâ of âthe emergency of global warmingâ and to âdo the work of the moment.â While many previous studies have shown how mainstream ways of writing about nature during the Transatlantic Romantic era helped justify colonialism and imperialism, few have examined the periodâs alternative currents of environmental literature, which often posed radical critiques of modernity and even argued that another world is possible. A few specialists have begun to study unique ways of writing about nature in early literature by African American, Native American, working-class, and women writers. But until a decade ago, most of the relevant texts were locked up in research libraries, so conversations about them were restricted to professional literary historians. Now, they are readily available to all readers in online collections like Google Books, the Internet Archive, and HathiTrust. This book showcases materials from these archives in order to demonstrate their continuing value. It addresses not only literary scholars, but also environmental justice activists and others who seek inspiration in literature. It maps a literary heritageâa usable pastâthat can inform and inspire the work of our moment.1 Transatlantic Romantic environmental literature can awaken us not only to the intricate connections between human and natural systems, but also to the complexity of the threats they face and to the character of the response that we must mount. The ways that Romantic writers moved their readers to work for change can help us imagine ways to move people to do the same now.2
Literature and Environmental Justice
As capitalism has spread around the globe during the last three centuries, there have been steep increases in human environmental impacts, such as depletion and pollution of soil and water, deforestation and desertification, and the rapid accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Throughout this period, literature has played a crucial role in the movements that have emerged to protect nature. First, environmental literature has helped us learn to see places that deserve our appreciation and protection. For instance, Thomas Westâs A Guide to the Lakes (1778) focused initial public awareness on the previously little-known mountains of northwest England.3 The poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey stimulated further interest. In his Guide through the District of the Lake s (1810), Wordsworth wrote that the region should be regarded as a âsort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.â4 Eventually, sustained literary attention transformed the damp and difficult mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire into a landscape of superlative natural beauty with a new and much grander identity, the Lake District. As a result, tourists began to rival sheep as a source of profit, especially after the arrival of the railroad in 1847 made the area easily accessible. Conservation efforts began soon after it was clear that intensive visitation was impacting the regionâs scenic character. After a century of mostly informal management, the Lake District National Park was established in 1951 in order to âconserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritageâ of what had now become a treasured landscape, a symbol of the English nation whose cultural and economic value depended, at least in part, on the health of its carefully administered natural systems.5
At times, the role of environmental literature in preservation efforts has been less direct. For instance, Henry David Thoreau wrote lovingly about the natural community around Concord, Massachusetts in the 1850s and even made some early statements in favor of public land management and the preservation of wilderness for recreation and study. But his books sold poorly and his ideas were mainly ignored during his lifetime. Then, in the 1870s, John Muir became an enthusiastic reader of Thoreau when he lived in the Yosemite Valley. Muir experimented with nature writing as a tool for protecting wilderness from mining, logging, and grazing. His essays and newspaper articles helped secure the conversion of President Abraham Lincolnâs Yosemite Grant into a national park in 1890. When Muir founded the Sierra Club two years later, he famously took its motto, âIn wildness is the preservation of the world,â from Thoreauâs essay âWalking .â6 Later, the Sierra Club, under the leadership of David Brower, published coffee-table books that combined Thoreauvian nature writing with landscape photography by figures like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. These books proved to be powerful tools for mustering public support during the campaigns against dams at Echo Park, Marble Canyon, and Bridge Canyon.
In addition to helping to protect particular wild places, environmental literature has changed public attitudes toward whole regions. For instance, the Desert Southwest in the United States was transformed from a national sacrifice zone into a signature landscape by writers like Mary Austin, John C. Van Dyke, and Joseph Wood Krutch. On an even larger scale, environmental literature has changed our most basic ways of thinking about the nonhuman world as a whole and our place in it. For instance, Aldo Leopoldâs Sand County Almanac proposed a land ethic that âenlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals.â Our membership in this expanded community implies that we all carry âindividual responsibility for the health of land.â7 Leopoldâs ideas became widely influential during the second half of the twentieth century and provided the philosophical underpinning for much of the environmental movementâs work during that crucial period of grand legislation and large-scale preservation.
Environmental literature has also helped us recognize new environmental threats. For example, Rachel Carsonâs celebrated exposĂ©, Silent Spring , with its haunting description of a town where birds have been poisoned into silence, alerted the world to the dangers of the toxic chemical DDT. In addition to informing its readers of this new threat, Silent Spring motivated them to take action. Carson is widely credited with moving hundreds of thousands of people to participate in the wave of environmental organizing that culminated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. That watershed event was partly responsible for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in December of the same year and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the next year. In 1972, Congress sent the Clean Water Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act to President Richard Nixon. A year later, the Endangered Species Act arrived in his office. The proverbially conservative Nixon signed each of these progressive bills into law because, at a time when millions of people were rallying to save the Earth, the political costs of refusing to approve them would have been far too high.
New threats sometimes require new responses, and environmental literature has inspired some readers to adopt more militant stances and to employ more forceful tactics in defense of nature. Not long after Nixon resigned, Edward Abbeyâs novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) , with its unabashed celebration of direct action to stop the destruction of wilderness by industrial development, inspired a generation to engage in solitary acts of ânight workâ or eco-sabotage. Many of the same activists participated in daylight campaigns of direct action, such as the long-running defense of Californiaâs old-growth redwoods in which activists used their own bodies to block logging roads and to protect individual trees from chainsaws. More recently, in January 2013, Michael Brune, the Sierra Clubâs executive director, explained that his organization had decided to adopt more radical political tactics than ever before in response to the oil industryâs refusal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions:
The issue that finally motivated the Sierra Club to align itself with Thoreauvian militancy was the Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to connect tar sands production facilities in Alberta to refineries and ports in the United States. Since Bill McKibben focused international attention on this formerly obscure oil infrastructure project, it has been an cause cĂ©lĂšbre for climate activists who hope to escalate the fight against global warming. They recognize that reducing modern societyâs carbon emissions will require radical changes in the way that extremely powerful energy and manufacturing corporations do business. Not surprisingly, those companies have invested heavily in campaigns of scientific disinformation and political lobbying to protect their interests. As a result, the federal government has been slow and timid in its response to an emergent problem that the scientific community has clearly understood and publicized for at least two decade...If you could do it nonstop, it would take you six days to walk from Henry David Thoreauâs Walden Pond to President Barack Obamaâs White House. For the Sierra Club, that journey has taken much longer. For 120 years, we have remained committed to using every âlawful meansâ to achieve our objectives. Now, for the first time in our history, we are prepared to go further. ⊠Next month, the Sierra Club will officially participate in an act of peaceful civil resistance. Weâll be following in the hallowed footsteps of Thoreau, who first articulated the principles of civil disobedience 44 years before John Muir founded the Sierra Club.8