Sustainability

Defined in the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report, often understood as a contemporary and global concept, “sustainability” seems like an unlikely and anachronistic term for C19 Environmental Humanities. Yet the notion emerged... [ view full abstract ]

Defined in the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report, often understood as a contemporary and global concept, “sustainability” seems like an unlikely and anachronistic term for C19 Environmental Humanities.

Yet the notion emerged in large part from a “New World” ideal of population perfection and agricultural plenty, epitomized in the agrarian writing of Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Throughout the nineteenth-century, writers imaginatively adapted and reshaped this “New World” ideal, conceiving of sustainability as the ability to feed and breed a racially homogeneous, American farming population. From Walt Whitman’s poems of crop renewal to Martin Delany’s African agrotopias, nineteenth-century texts portray racial improvement and selective breeding as the solution to demographic crises and the key to agricultural abundance.

This paper examines a particularly illuminating piece of this lesser-known history of sustainability discourse: early population control rhetoric in 1840s agricultural and reform newspapers (such as The New York Farmer and Mechanic and The Albany Freeholder, held at the American Antiquarian Society). By the early 1840s, Anti-Renters, labor radicals, and nativists promoted Jeffersonian agrarianism as an alternative to what they saw as the population’s growing inequality, density, and degeneracy. Agricultural and labor newspapers were central venues for this rhetoric, which contrasts New York’s declining population with a specific demographic agrarian ideal—a sprawling, fertile, American population, evenly dispersed across small plots of abundant farmland. This early sustainability rhetoric exposes the agrarian roots of overpopulation anxieties—anxieties that continue to bolster racist and nativist forms of sustainability discourse today.