'This Is the American Earth': The Nineteenth-Century Literary Roots of Malthusian Environmentalism

At first glance, U.S. overpopulation anxieties appear to be a primarily twentieth-century cultural phenomenon, spurred by public concern, particularly in the 1960s, about wilderness preservation and resource scarcity. But to... [ view full abstract ]

At first glance, U.S. overpopulation anxieties appear to be a primarily twentieth-century cultural phenomenon, spurred by public concern, particularly in the 1960s, about wilderness preservation and resource scarcity. But to what extent did nineteenth-century American literature, particularly its romantic valorization of “New World” nature, virgin land, and abundance, provide the imaginative rationale for this U.S. population control discourse? This paper examines This Is The American Earth (1960) as a case study in the lesser-known nineteenth-century literary roots of overpopulation anxieties—and the racist, xenophobic, and eugenic agendas they fueled. 

Originally created to promote U.S. National Parks, this coffee-table book by photographer Ansel Adams and critic Nancy Newhall tracks an epic, American-centered narrative of planetary destruction, from Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New World,” through westward expansion, industrialization, and ecological devastation. Newhall’s poetry makes frequent recourse to an American environmental canon that extends from William Bradford to John Muir, crediting Thoreau and Emerson with inventing “a new esthetic, that wilderness is beautiful” (18). This Is the American Earth demonstrates how nineteenth-century literature strangely prefigured and continues to influence debates about U.S. population control, especially where immigrants and non-whites represent reproductive and environmental threats to demographic stability.