Table Of ContentLITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
The Literary Heritage
of the Environmental
Justice Movement
Landscapes of Revolution in
Transatlantic Romanticism
Lance Newman
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
Series Editor
Ursula K. Heise
University of California
Department of English
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the
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Lance Newman
The Literary Heritage
of the Environmental
Justice Movement
Landscapes of Revolution in Transatlantic
Romanticism
Lance Newman
Westminster College
Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment
ISBN 978-3-030-14571-2 ISBN 978-3-030-14572-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14572-9
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C
ontents
1 L andscapes of Revolution 1
2 B lack Nature 33
3 T he Native Wilderness 91
4 T he Green City 153
5 T he Commons 189
A fterword 221
I ndex 231
v
CHAPTER 1
Landscapes of Revolution
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 “feel
the heat” of “the emergency of global warming” and to “do the work of
the moment.” 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 period’s alter-
native currents of environmental literature, which often posed radical cri-
tiques 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 heritage—a usable past—that 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
© The Author(s) 2019 1
L. Newman, The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice
Movement, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14572-9_1
2 L. NEWMAN
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 desertifica-
tion, and the rapid accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Throughout this period, literature has played a crucial role in the move-
ments that have emerged to protect nature. First, environmental literature
has helped us learn to see places that deserve our appreciation and protec-
tion. For instance, Thomas West’s 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 Lakes (1810), Wordsworth wrote that the region
should be regarded as a “sort of national property in which every man has
a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.”4
Eventually, sustained literary attention transformed the damp and difficult
mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire into a land-
scape 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 eas-
ily accessible. Conservation efforts began soon after it was clear that inten-
sive visitation was impacting the region’s scenic character. After a century
of mostly informal management, the Lake District National Park was
established in 1951 in order to “conserve and enhance the natural beauty,
wildlife and cultural heritage” of what had now become a treasured land-
scape, a symbol of the English nation whose cultural and economic value
depended, at least in part, on the health of its carefully administered natu-
ral 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
1 LANDSCAPES OF REVOLUTION 3
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
Lincoln’s Yosemite Grant into a national park in 1890. When Muir founded
the Sierra Club two years later, he famously took its motto, “In wildness is
the preservation of the world,” from Thoreau’s essay “Walking.”6 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 cam-
paigns 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, environ-
mental literature has changed our most basic ways of thinking about the
nonhuman world as a whole and our place in it. For instance, Aldo
Leopold’s Sand County Almanac proposed a land ethic that “enlarges the
boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and ani-
mals.” Our membership in this expanded community implies that we all
carry “individual responsibility for the health of land.”7 Leopold’s ideas
became widely influential during the second half of the twentieth century
and provided the philosophical underpinning for much of the environ-
mental movement’s work during that crucial period of grand legislation
and large-scale preservation.
Environmental literature has also helped us recognize new environ-
mental threats. For example, Rachel Carson’s celebrated exposé, 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 chemi-
cal DDT. In addition to informing its readers of this new threat, Silent
Spring motivated them to take action. Carson is widely credited with mov-
ing hundreds of thousands of people to participate in the wave of environ-
mental 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
4 L. NEWMAN
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 lit-
erature 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 Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), with
its unabashed celebration of direct action to stop the destruction of wil-
derness by industrial development, inspired a generation to engage in soli-
tary acts of “night work” or eco-sabotage. Many of the same activists
participated in daylight campaigns of direct action, such as the long-
running defense of California’s 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 Club’s executive director, explained that his organization had
decided to adopt more radical political tactics than ever before in response
to the oil industry’s refusal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions:
If you could do it nonstop, it would take you six days to walk from Henry
David Thoreau’s Walden Pond to President Barack Obama’s White House.
For the Sierra Club, that journey has taken much longer. For 120 years, we
have remained committed to using every “lawful means” to achieve our
objectives. Now, for the first time in our history, we are prepared to go fur-
ther. … Next month, the Sierra Club will officially participate in an act of
peaceful civil resistance. We’ll 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
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
célèbre for climate activists who hope to escalate the fight against global
warming. They recognize that reducing modern society’s carbon emis-
sions 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
