UC Berkeley

In States of Nature, I trace an alternative prehistory to environmental thought in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about revolution. I argue that proponents of revolution understood the state of nature not only as a philosophical abstraction but also through their engagements with science, agriculture, and frontier settlement. By contrast, conservatives claimed that revolution would disrupt the relational networks they imagined as vitally entangling human and nonhuman life. In particular, Edmund Burke describes ideal national communities as intricately interwoven, yet tenuous, social ecologies: evolving networks that bind together past, present, and future generations.

In the opening chapters, I depict Burke not as a reactionary opponent of change but as a practicing agriculturalist who looks to nature to regulate the pace of social transformation. I also consider challenges to Burke: Thomas Paine’s assertion that revolution, rather than tradition, restores nature’s true order; Mary Wollstonecraft’s warning that normative appeals to the nonhuman world naturalize inequality; and Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay’s beliefs that technocratic land transformation would fulfill America’s revolutionary project.

In the middle chapters, I read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels as restaging the Burke/Paine debate in an environmentally and socially precarious frontier setting. I interpret Natty Bumppo not as an embodiment of the state of nature, but as a social being who laments the decline from an intercultural and interspecies Burkean community to a Lockean polity where political belonging is purchased by appropriating natural objects as property. Building upon the temporal turns in queer and critical race studies, I also suggest that Cooper conflates racialized sexuality and environmental determinism, punishing characters he sees as too close to nature by associating their failures to reproduce with the forest’s doomed embrace.

In my final chapter, I argue that writers throughout the age of revolution fixated on compost as a political metaphor capable of synthesizing Burkean gradualism and revolutionary renewal. Articulating what I call a “compostable past,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman maintain that material bodies and political structures are best reinvigorated through regenerative decay. I argue that their re-workings of America’s revolutionary tradition decouple the lapsed possibility of Burkean ecology from the more pernicious strains of Burke’s social conservatism. By contrast, Charles Chesnutt exposes compost’s role in sustaining Southern slave-holding agriculture, thereby anticipating central concerns of modern environmental justice scholarship.