About the Eighteenth-Century Ecologies Network

While the study of the environment and of environmental history as a whole is indispensable for approaching the climate crisis today, we believe that the long eighteenth century’s traditionally privileged position within the ecological humanities remains justified: a period of remarkable change in all spheres of life, it represented a true turning point in the relationship between humanity and the environment.

     We might point to well known material and natural changes through the century: the enclosure movement continued to condense ownership of land and intensify its agricultural exploitation, partially by intensifying control over labour. As Andreas Malm has influentially shown, this intensified control continued into the early nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution, turning employers away from partially independent ‘flow’ energy and towards the controllable, disciplinary ‘stock’ of coal – a turn of which climate change is ‘the unintended by-product par excellence.’ At the same time, a consciousness of climate and its mutability developed in Britain and elsewhere, in response to a variety of events and ideas: in part, as the work of David Higgins and others has shown, to the drastic environmental ramifications of volcanic eruptions such as that of Tambora; partially to a newfound concern for weather, as examined by Jan Golinski and Vladimir Jankovic; in part to the emergent ‘ecology’ of adventurers and thinkers such as Alexander von Humboldt; and in part to developments in environmental medicine occasioned by increased proximity in cities and factories, brilliantly addressed by Kevis Goodman.

     We might also, however, point to the cultural changes which accompanied these changes and events – the development, for instance, of new aesthetics which mediated the representation of nature: the picturesque, that great ally of the country gentry and the ‘improving’ class, and the sublime, the Romantic acknowledgement of something greater and wilder in nature. As Scott Hess and others have shown, like the carbon emissions of the Industrial Revolution, the aesthetic ideology of eighteenth-century and Romantic nature poetry has echoed through the centuries to inform much contemporary ecological thought, from the conservation movement which traces its roots to Wordsworth’s great ‘national property’ in the Lake District, to the ‘deep ecology’ of Arne Naess and others.

     The latter lay at the root of the first wave of eighteenth-century and Romantic ecocriticism, in the work of Karl Kroeber, James McKusick, Kate Rigby, and particularly Jonathan Bate in The Song of the Earth (2000): a wave which sought to develop an environmental ethics of 'dwelling' based on Romantic models. In recent years, however, the eighteenth-century environmental humanities has witnessed several critical turns, including but not limited to work on the nonhuman, in the blue humanities, in new materialism, and particularly in the turn to affect, and perhaps more broadly the elemental turn. (To discover some of the most influential scholarship in these fields, check out our recommended reading page, The Commons.) These various approaches have demonstrated in their scope and power the capaciousness that ecological thinking today, in the midst of an ever-intensifying climate crisis, inspires and demands. In order to comprehend and respond to the challenges of our present, a diverse and collaborative engagement with our past is required. This is the purpose of the Eighteenth-Century Ecologies Network: we aim to bring the many important strands which have developed within eighteenth-century environmental humanities together, and to allow scholars to find echoes and sympathies within distant approaches that they may not otherwise have encountered.

     The climate crisis is a vast, slow, and multifarious phenomenon, so vast that no one scholar can approach it as a whole. To understand it in its entirety requires, then, just the kind of engagement and collaboration we wish to foster here.