Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Timothy Sweet, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1103.

SINCE OTHER CONTRIBUTORS to this Forum will probably give general overviews of ecocriticism and environmental literary studies, I'd like briefly to suggest one particular direction for further inquiry in this emerging discipline: studying the ways in which literature shapes and records the interrelation of economy and environment. Such study might begin with early speculations about "the economy of nature"--formalized in Linnaeus's famous essay of that title (1749) but long antedating it--and continue through recent theories of sustainable or steady-state economics, which define the economy as an open subsystem of the ecosystem.

"God sells us all things for our labour," asserted the anonymous author of A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610), while the colonists were starving. It is a long way from early Jamestown to current crises such as the debate over genetically engineered food crops. However, I think we can trace some continuities. The Virginia colonists and their English contemporaries asked, What is the role of human labor in nature's economy? In the case of crop engineering we must ask, What does it say about our relation to nature that, facing the problem of world hunger, we find it easier to alter DNA than to redistribute wealth? Other formulations arise in other contexts, all of them versions of a single question: How do we understand the engagements with the natural environment by means of which we sustain our lives and produce our cultures?

In addressing this question, literary scholars might begin by reassessing the cultural importance of various genres, to recognize the centrality of the less belletristic--natural histories, colonial promotional tracts, and the like--to our engagements with nature. Promotional literature, which--dating at least from the 1570s through the 1910s--has a longer history than the English novel, theorizes the human economy's dependence on the environment for input and output capacities, asking questions that sustainable economics theory is only beginning to answer. Not that more belletristic forms are irrelevant to such concerns. In Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993), Edward Said has demonstrated, for example, how Jane Austen's social world depends on the extraction of wealth from the West Indies. In natural history, however--a genre as old as Pliny's writings and as new as Mike Davis's The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (Metropolitan, 1998)--we find the most substantial record of our economic relation to the environment, not as a mystified cause but as a basic theoretical problem.

Given its economic emphasis, the line of inquiry I'm suggesting may seem inconsistent with the pastoral sensibility that has often characterized ecocriticism and environmental literature. Donald Worster, for example (Nature's Economy, 2nd ed. [Cambridge UP, 1994]), opposes an exploitative tradition of natural history originating with Francis Bacon to an Arcadian tradition exemplified by Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789) or Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac (1949). Yet (as Worster recognizes) White and Leopold had their utilitarian sides as well. The two traditions, emphasizing either human use of or communion with nature, continue to be intermixed--and this intermixing will, I believe, define an important locus for future inquiry and debate in ecocritical and environmental literary studies.

TIMOTHY SWEET
West Virginia University, Morgantown