Welcome to the Anthropocene, in the Eighteenth Century

Scholars have long argued that modern environmentalism begins in various writings, science, artworks, and movements of the nineteenth century, often with an emphasis on British Romanticism and the poet William Wordsworth. Increasingly, though, scholars are pushing this trajectory back to reveal a longer genealogy of environmental writing and ecological thought that begins in the eighteenth century. This results in part from the rise of Environmental Humanities (EH) and the Anthropocene concept over the past two decades: as EH invites more interdisciplinary work at the intersections of scientific, historical, and literary writings, the eighteenth century becomes more important, as the modern divisions of disciplines and fields had not yet been invented. Scholars working in Anthropocene studies—including several contributors to this collection—argue for the advent of the Anthropocene in the eighteenth century, corresponding to the British Industrial Revolution, or even the seventeenth century, corresponding to the 1610 Orbis Spike.1 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's The Shock of the Anthropocene (2015), Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital (2016), Alan Bewell's Natures in Translation (2017), and my own Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain (2020) all locate the origins of the Anthropocene and climate change writings in the eighteenth century, though this is far from the dominant perspective within EH. As Jeremy Chow reveals in his introduction to this collection, the vast majority of academic publications in EH deal with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, effectively ignoring the eighteenth century (only 1.6 percent of EH publications to date focus on the eighteenth century).Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities fills this gap. It is the first collection to look at eighteenth-century studies and EH together, and the eleven essays that make up the collection provide impressive coverage of the myriad authors, texts, and topics one might use in these fields. Chow arranges the chapters into five parts that address different aspects of EH in the eighteenth century: “Climate Change,” “New Materialisms,” “Blue Humanities,” “Indigeneity and Decoloniality,” and “Green Utopias.” Refreshingly, each chapter ends with a pedagogy section that outlines examples, activities, and best practices for teaching the text and topic covered in the chapter, showing the intimate connections between research and teaching. The collection is thus not aimed only at scholars who specialize in eighteenth-century studies or EH; there is also much here to interest generalists, teachers, or scholars who want to learn about EH, and advanced college students studying these topics.In the introduction, Jeremy Chow establishes three main goals of the collection: To identify and further develop how the environmental humanities, as a series of methodologies and an interdisciplinary genre of scholarship, is germane to eighteenth-century studies.To realize and showcase how eighteenth-century studies enriches the environmental humanities, and vice versa.To magnify the enfolded nature of scholarship and pedagogy, and thus demonstrate now eighteenth-century environmental humanities develops from the co-constitutions of research and teaching. (1)As Chow explains, these are big goals, and the eleven essays in the book are only a “starting point” for continued research and teaching. In addition to chapter summaries, Chow also provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of EH and why it matters for eighteenth-century studies.The collection rests on the intersection of these two fields grounded in four axioms: The environmental humanities is not a monolith. It goes by many names and feels.The environmental humanities approaches crisis; it is not exclusively tasked with remedying crisis.The environmental humanities requires and inspires collaboration.The environmental humanities is anamorphic. (2–8)The individual chapters do an excellent job of illustrating these axioms and EH at work on eighteenth-century texts and contexts.Part 1, “Climate Change,” contains three essays that showcase eighteenth-century authors engaging with early climate-change discourses. In chapter 1, “Toward a Genealogy of Geoengineering: Erasmus Darwin and the Little Ice Age,” Elliot Patsoura considers Darwin's famous “iceberg scheme” from The Botanic Garden (1791), where the poet-scientist proposes moving icebergs from northern arctic climes to the south as a way to warm up places like England and cool down tropical zones. The proposal stems from growing interest in the eighteenth century to chart and graph weather, and, with the Industrial Revolution, from the growing belief that humans may be able to control and shape the weather with new technologies. Through a series of masterful close readings, Patsoura explains how Darwin's flawed theory of wind informs his iceberg scheme, but Darwin knows it—he never commits fully to the plan, as he realizes it will likely fail. Darwin thus continually undercuts his faith in techno-scientific progress, as the iceberg scheme reveals “a desire to register the very impossibility of ever fully domesticating the weather” (32). Patsoura places Darwin in the early history of geoengineering, which develops into twenty-first-century proposals to use carbon capture and stratospheric aerosol injections to combat global warming.Chapters 2 and 3 turn from geoengineering to the aesthetics of storms. In “Storm Apostrophe,” Annette Hulbert develops a fantastic reading of J. M. W. Turner's famous painting The Slave Ship (1840), which depicts the intentional drowning of enslaved Africans aboard the Zong during the infamous 1781 voyage. These murders resulted in a court case and catalyzed the abolition movement in England. As Hulbert writes, the “storm-tossed sea” in the painting “becomes intertwined with the violent legacy of slavery in the eighteenth century, forming a literary climatic history that Turner unspools in his painting” (39). Hulbert traces this history back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, who often associate the social violence of slavery with the natural violence of storms. Hulbert surveys a constellation of texts on the intersections of storms and slavery, which converge into what might be considered a unique genre. In Wheatley's poetry, for example, the storm “registers transatlantic trauma even as it produces a site of resistance” (45). As Hulbert concludes, “Eighteenth-century Black-authored texts initiate the tradition Turner continues into the nineteenth century” (50).Chapter 3, “ ‘When Storm Winds Happen’: Divine Providence, Climate Change Discourse, and the Cause of Weather Disasters,” one of strongest chapters in the collection, directly addresses the book's goal of providing an accessible application of EH to eighteenth-century studies for both research and teaching. Adam W. Sweeting analyzes Puritan readings of extreme meteorological events as signs (and often punishments) from God, demonstrating how those readings connect to and influence modern climatologists’ readings of extreme events as signs of anthropogenic climate change. In both readings, humans are to blame for weather disasters; these weather events are “signs [that] need to be read” and interpreted by humans to find meaning (54). To illustrate his approach, Sweeting juxtaposes responses to the Great Snow of 1717 (in New England) with the responses to the 2015 snowstorm in Boston. Sweeting uses the Bayesian model to ask different kinds of questions about these storms from a humanities perspective—not “Did climate change cause xyz?,” but “How have climate disruptions influenced the trajectory of xyz?” In the pedagogy section, Sweeting offers specific pairings and activities for students in a literature class vs. an environmental studies or climate-change class, showing instructors how to link discussions and readings to students’ local climates to tell the story of climate change and how it has affected their lives.Two essays make up Part 2 of the collection, “New Materialisms.” In Chapter 4, “Phyllis Wheatley Peters's Niobean Soundscapes,” Shelby Johnson rereads Wheatley's “Niobe in Distress” from an EH approach centered on race and colonialism. In her version of this story from Greek mythology, Wheatley “aligns Niobe with Black experiences of loss by altering the myth's conclusion” (71); instead of ending when Niobe turns to stone, as in the original myth and in most translations, Wheatley ends with Niobe imploring the gods to leave just one of her children alive. Editors would later add a final stanza about Niobe turning to stone, but this was not Wheatley's intention. According to Johnson, Wheatley “refuses the reduction of blackness and Black creative reproduction to thingness within colonial extractive economics” (72). Black people are not absorbed into the landscape in Wheatley's poem—they retain their humanness.In Chapter 5, “Syphilis and Natural History: The Ethical Limits of Human Mastery,” Mariah Crilley analyzes Hans Sloane's writings on the 1707 syphilis outbreak, in which he gives agency to the disease: Sloan writes of syphilis as “possessing” people and acting on its own, much as Anthony Fauci and others wrote and spoke of COVID-19 as “making decisions for humans” during the height of the pandemic. In both instances, the grammar of disease illustrates the “dangerous agency of nonhumans” and of “pandemic illness” (89). Crilley uses syphilis as a case study to understand this grammar, as the disease was confusing and relatively unknown in the eighteenth century, and still is “unknowable” in many ways today (91). Crilley looks at stylistic conventions of the Royal Society's journal Transactions, which established a literary, scientific method for transmitting and producing knowledge as directly as possible: simple language, author-centered writing to establish authority, and first-person narrator (94). Sloane cannot follow these guidelines when writing about syphilis, because its “origin and evolution remain unclear” (96), but also because Sloane grants agency to syphilis instead of himself as author and natural historian. This grammar of disease informs centuries of medical discourses on diseases and pandemics.Part 3, “Blue Humanities,” contains two essays on oceans and waterways. In Chapter 6, “Shore/Lines: Drawing Environmental Change on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island,” Claire Campbell uses the palimpsest as metaphor for reading the landscape—many layers, written and built over, but all the layers remain and make up the landscape. Using Prince Edward Island as the representative example, Campbell reads a series of historical maps biographically, which is called “cartographic biography” (106)—and, in doing so, reveals the effects of climate change over time through images of retreating shorelines, widening waterways, and lost land, cities, and ports. Campbell's analysis and overlaying of the various maps of Prince Edward Island is both fascinating and entertaining, offering an environmental history of the island focused on geographical literature of the eighteenth century, which reflects shifting geopolitical and ecological relationships to water and land on the island. Campbell also makes a strong case for teaching archival maps and developing cartographic literacy in the classroom: older maps “are simultaneously art and text,” and “they offer endless insights into humanity's relationship with the natural world” (130).In Chapter 7, “Of Water, Winds, and Storms: The Elemental Regimes of the Buccaneer Journal,” Jason M. Payton rethinks piracy narratives and buccaneer journals as environmental texts. While studies of piracy are dominated by political concerns, Payton turns our attention to narrative and environment, particularly in Alexander Exquemelin's Bucaniers of America (1684) and William Dampier's Voyages and Descriptions (1700). These journals offer popular and important renderings of the Americas that greatly influenced how England understood the Americas in the eighteenth century; in these journals, the elements—waters, winds, and storms—become agents of their own that interact with humans and drive the narrative. Payton's close readings reveal how piracy narratives are part of a larger network of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts that fuse literary, scientific, and colonial discourses, and that constitute an early history of environmental thought.Part 4, “Indigeneity and Decoloniality,” introduces some indigenous voices of the eighteenth century. In Chapter 8, “ ‘Supporting Sinking Nations’: Indigenous Women and Their Disasters in John Dennis's Liberty Asserted” (1704) Matthew Duquès reads Dennis's play as a prototype of the “ancestral dystopia” genre that continues into the twenty-first century: in the play, Dennis foregrounds indigenous characters living on Mohawk land in southeastern Canada, who share their ancestral wisdom with white European settlers, who, in turn, use that wisdom to save the area from the ecological destruction caused by European settler colonialism—a bit of a white savior plot, as Duquès points out. But the play captures an important historical moment in 1704 when the British had become as important in the colonization of northeastern Mohawk territory as were the French, amidst ongoing wars: the Dennis play staged a kind of nationalist and colonialist notion that the English were the only ones sensitive to the plights of both indigenous peoples and ecological issues in the Americas, reinforcing the superiority of the English as well as their imperial justifications. This chapter has one of the best pedagogy sections in the collection, including a specific activity for annotating the play (no critical annotated version of the play exists), a list of pertinent scholarship instructors (or students) might consult when teaching or reading the play, contemporary texts related to the play we might consult, and several discussion questions and contemporary connections to use in the classroom.In Chapter 9, “Imagining Decolonial Futures in William Gilbert's The Hurricane,” Ami Yoon analyzes a relatively unknown and rather bizarre poem from 1796, illustrating how it is relevant and super interesting, and, by extension, makes the case for incorporating the poem into classrooms alongside more well-known texts. Gilbert's poem imagines dead slaves and indigenous peoples in the Americas conjuring up a hurricane to travel across the Atlantic to Europe, causing destruction along the way, as retribution for hundreds of years of terror and colonization. Yoon writes that The Hurricane presents an “image of a civilization that becomes submerged by its own refuse, as a history of the exploitation and degradation of nonwhite, non-Western lands and populations ends in a watery apocalypse of its own making” (170).The fifth and final part of the collection, “Green Utopias,” contains two chapters. In Chapter 10, “Slavery and Plantation Stewardship: The Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Georgics of James Grainger and Philip Freneau,” Christopher Allan Black examines three georgic poems set in the West Indies that offer different sets of agricultural practices for American plantations. In The Sugar Cane (1764), Grainger instructs plantation owners in sustainable agricultural practices to preserve the land and improve the lives of enslaved peoples, while Freneau, in “The Beauties of Santa Cruz” (1776) and “To Sir Toby” (1791), published over a decade later, critiques Grainger's attempts, claiming that they did nothing to stop the degradation of land and peoples in the West Indies. Black demonstrates how these poems are ripe for an EH approach emphasizing biopolitics, race, and colonialism, as they show the ways that African bodies were literally sacrificed to the land and crops in constructing the economy, infrastructure, and the Enlightenment mindset of our modern world—with those bodies most often erased from the land.In the final chapter, “John Thelwall and L. M. Montgomery Write the Green City,” Kate Scarth offers a surprising pairing: Thelwall's The Peripatetic (1793) and Montgomery's Anne of the Island (1915). Thelwall's focus on urban green spaces and their connection to environmental justice reveals the influence of Romanticism on Montgomery; both writers have “shared concerns with democratic access to urban green spaces, a deep knowledge of and care for place and people, and a resistance to, or rejection of, dominant but inequitable approaches to urban planning, building, and control” (206). They both also critique suburban sprawl, its effects on access to green spaces, and the creation of polluted city slums. Thelwall writes of London, while Montgomery writes of Kingsport (a fictional version of Halifax). In the pedagogy section, Scarth outlines a study abroad course in England focused on walking through urban green spaces (much like Thelwall in The Peripatetic), which is both a fantastic example and a model for courses or activities instructors might develop in their local regions.One drawback to Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities, like many collections, is that it sprawls. Each of the collection's five parts could be books in and of themselves, but that's also kind of the point: the collection is a starting point for work in eighteenth-century environmental humanities. And there's certainly much here to inspire future research and teaching. A second drawback is the unevenness of the collection's emphasis on teaching: some chapters incorporate pedagogy seamlessly as a significant aspect of the chapter, while others have two paragraphs tacked on to the end of a conventional research paper. But this move—to make teaching explicit and central to research and scholarship—is one we academics should consider utilizing more often, as the vast majority of college teachers and readers of academic journals are not researchers at top R1 institutions but rather teacher-scholars at smaller two- and four-year institutions who spend the bulk of their time teaching and doing research for teaching (and not necessarily for publication). I find Chow's call to make pedagogy central to our research one of the most inspiring and exciting aspects of this collection, which will serve as a touchstone for all future work on the eighteenth-century environmental humanities.