In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias-sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises-elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial "improvement" as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population. Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the West Indies, from city tenements to White House kitchen gardens. Exposing the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded environmental traditions, this book compels us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought.
Abby L. Goode is assistant professor of English at Plymouth State University.
Agrotopias is a rich and compelling study of how agrarianism was central to ideas of national and communal 'sustainability' during the long nineteenth century, and how its assumptions and values persist in sustainability rhetoric today."--ALH Review By adding Goode's analysis of sustainability rhetoric, it is possible to get a fuller picture of the ways nineteenth-century Americans made sense of their moment in time in order to make things better in the future. . . . Agrotopias shows readers that like the environmental movement, sustainability has a long history and one that has never been divorced from social problems and power dynamics."-American Historical Review A stellar argument . . . an ambitious, important intervention in sustainability rhetoric over a 300-year period."--ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment A valuable contribution to understanding the history of American environmental thought through its literary output during the 19th and early 20th centuries. . . . Recommended."--CHOICE An important addition to a broader wave of scholarship . . . [that] provide[s] readers with an understanding of how the material, political, and cultural components of American agrarian thought took hold in nineteenth-century society."--H-Environment Compelling and astute. . . . [A] well-written, deftly argued, and much needed reconsideration of the development of nineteenth-century American agricultural and environmental imagination."--New England Quarterly In this important, well-executed study . . . Goode has chosen a fascinating combination of literary works to consider. . . . In her consistently striking readings of these texts, Goode traces the nuanced yet potent ways in which sustainability rhetoric (and its whole conceptual scaffolding) evolved from the Revolutionary Era through the Progressive Era."--Early American Literature Rich and compelling. . . . [A]n essential intervention into the history of US environmental thought, one that insists we reconsider the simple progressive goodness typically accorded to agrarianism and its legacies."--American Literary History
