Recycling Fantasies: Whitman, Clifton, and the Dream of Compost

Chapter one takes up the paradigm of recycling in Walt Whitman’s first two editions of Leaves of Grass (1855 and 1856). While scarcity of materials meant scavenging and reuse were common practices in the nineteenth century, organic material recycling first emerged as a scientific principle during the antebellum period. Whitman’s documented journalistic and poetic interest in “compost” has led scholars to elevate the once-overlooked Whitman into the ecopoetic pantheon. Chapter one challenges this increasingly standard reading by placing Whitman’s interest in compost and organic recycling alongside his even more famous poetic investment in an indiscriminate, “omnivorous” consumption. Compost emerges as the twin of appetite in Whitman’s poetic environment, which reveals how recycling authorizes consumption without limits and yields a fundamentally static, and therefore nonegalitarian and anti-ecological vision of community. The last part of the chapter explores resistance to this paradigm in the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a twentieth-century African American poet self-consciously rewriting Whitman’s vision of democratic and environmental community. Ultimately, chapter one suggests that while Clifton resists the dream of cyclical, effortless material recycling and consequence-free consumption, it is nineteenth-century Whitman’s fantasy of the earth endlessly recycling and renewing human waste that remains more characteristic of contemporary U.S. life.

The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Against Sustainability argues for a transformation of our environmental ethics and our environmental imagination. The introduction demonstrates that the manifest difficulties of centering transformative environmental ethics in mainstream U.S. environmentalism are compounded by the hegemony of the sustainability paradigm. Sustainability captures a well-meaning impulse to ensure the stable persistence of human societies over time, yet its reassuring emphasis on stability comes with a high cost: sustainability prizes continuity with pasts the Anthropcene reveals as environmentally and ethically problematic. The introduction illustrates the limits of future-oriented paradigms dominated by pastoral thinking by reading contemporary critics of the U.S. food system against their nineteenth-century counterparts. An archival approach to industrial farming and animal agriculture proves that many of their hallmark practices originate in the antebellum period or earlier. The introduction ultimately argues that an honest reckoning with the history of U.S. environmental ideas and practices compels us to recognize the imbrication of many of our most cherished environmental ideals with the systems that produced the problems to which they apparently respond: capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. If we want something different—for ourselves and for the planet—we will have to imagine it, and we will have to build it.

Embracing Green Temporalities: Indigenous Sustainabilities, Anglo-American Utopias

Against Sustainability concludes with a coda that contrasts Anglo-American and certain Indigenous American approaches to “zero waste.” Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) illustrates the limitations of a manufacturing-focused ethic. By contrast, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) links a zero-waste ethic to a decolonized relationship to the land. Achieving this version of zero waste requires transforming not simply U.S. manufacturing and disposal processes, but its culture. Using these examples, the coda suggests that there are contexts in which sustainability works as a paradigm. It makes sense to “sustain” Indigenous environmental cultures that resist rather than perpetuate the systems responsible for our environmental degradation. By contrast, Anglo-American sustainability maintains continuity with capitalism’s profit and growth imperatives, with settler colonial resource extraction, and other values and practices inimical to just biotic community. Radical action will only come from transformative environmental ethics that help Americans confront our past truthfully and then imagine and act for a more ecological present. Replacing sustainability with an orientation toward functional utopianism, and remaining committed to strategic, provisional ethics—such as joyful frugality and radical pet keeping—might help bridge the gap between our deadly present and a more livable future.

The Problem with Preservation: Aesthetics and Sanctuary in Catlin, Parkman, Erdrich, Melville, and Byatt

Chapter three traces preservation’s antebellum theorization and long-lasting repercussions. The first parts of this chapter delineate the flawed aesthetic logic of preservation, beginning with the earliest proposal for a “Nation’s Park” in painter and writer George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1844). Preservation emerges as an environmental ethic because indigenous, “wild” natural spectacles are imagined to benefit an expanding, increasingly “civilized” white U.S. population. While Catlin calls for preservation of the beauty he sees in the Plains peoples, bison, and their threatened landscape, Francis Parkman Jr.’s The Oregon Trail (1849) writes of an ugliness in need of violent eradication. Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) illustrates the pernicious persistence of such aesthetic violence. The final portion of the chapter illuminates preservation’s flawed spatial logic. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) rejects the possibility of whale extinction by insisting that whales have ocean sanctuaries to which they can retreat. A. S. Byatt’s plastic pollution tale, “Sea Story” (2013), plays out the destructive twenty-first-century consequences of Moby-Dick’s romantic ideas about nature. Altogether, the chapter suggests that preservation is an environmental ethic imbricated in settler colonialism, incapable of fostering meaningful human or interspecies community, and whose meagre benefits only continue to diminish as anthropogenic climate crisis intensifies.

Radical Pet Keeping: Crafts, Wilson, and Living with Others in the Anthropocene

Chapter four explores radical pet keeping, an unlikely environmentalism keyed to the strengths and the weaknesses of the Anthropocene proposal. The first part of the chapter examines how figures of the animal, beast, pet, and pet keeping typically feature in antislavery literature by authors ranging from David Walker to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The next section explores Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative (c. 1853–1861), which develops a disturbing vignette of pet and enslaved pet keeper murder that undermines the naturalness of oppression based upon racial and species difference. The last part of the chapter treats Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), which depicts an interspecies friendship between Frado and Frado’s pet dog, Fido. Frado’s transgressive sympathy allows her to imagine familial relationships between not only Blacks and whites, or servants and masters, but humans and animals, as well. The chapter argues the radical pet keeping imagined in these two novels rests upon an ethic of care that fosters interracial and interspecies solidarity not dependent on sameness. Radical pet keeping, like Black feminism, foregrounds interdependence across differences, making it a useful environmental paradigm in the Anthropocene, as climate change increasingly forces all life on Earth to live in the world Anthros has built.

Joyful Frugality: Thoreau, Dickinson, and the Pleasures of Not Consuming

Chapter two counters the ethic of recycling with an anti-consumerist, joyful frugality theorized in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It begins by evoking Lydia Maria Child, Sylvester Graham, and a popular culture of antebellum frugality advice literature, demonstrating that such advice literature linked refusing to consume with personal happiness and vibrant democratic citizenship. In this nineteenth-century context, Thoreau’s experiments in frugal living at Walden Pond emerge as central to the book’s political and artistic projects. Thoreau’s radical minimalism in Walden is designed to promote both individual happiness and collective social justice as it challenges the consumerist status quo. The last part of the chapter explores Emily Dickinson’s 1860s and 1870s poetry of desire, possession, and consumption. Against readings that have consistently pathologized Dickinson’s approach to these topics, chapter two suggests that Dickinson is a complex theorist of consumer desire whose emphasis on the pleasures of anticipation and the disappointments of consumption have much to teach us in the Capitalocene. This chapter ultimately suggests that Thoreau and Dickinson together theorize a joyful frugality that shifts the site of pleasure away from consumption, making anti-consumerist lifeways seem not only possible, but—more importantly—richly appealing.