Eulogy for Mother Nature: The Classical Ecology Behind Racism

Once again, the style of this post is a bit different from my previous ones. Instead of doing short, blurb-ish myth retelling like the ones I did over the summer, I'm going to try to shift the content of my blog into research. The following is a slightly modified version of a research paper I completed over the past two months, complete with Thesis and Bibliography. The following is my original research. Enjoy!

Introduction 

Since its conception, race has always been in conversation with Nature. In my study, I approach whiteness and blackness as two distinct ‘genres’ of the human. Whiteness and blackness are socially constructed identities—meaning, they are not biologically instated—yet, in the mere 200 years in which they were officially conceived, these two subjective identities have sculpted the American ego. Colonial settlers used race to justify enslavement, claiming that those with black skin were more adapted to the tropical climates of the American South. Enlightenment philosophers and naturalists revived Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being, a hierarchical image which pinned white Europeans with angels, situated at the pinnacle of humankind, and colored people with animal beasts. Despite all this proof, little attention has been given to the ecological influence behind racism. In my paper, I will use an ecological framework to both explain and critique the construction of race as a classical means of imposing social hierarchy. 

Literature Review

The first part of my timeline focuses on two renowned Roman naturalists of the mid-classical period (1st century BCE - 1st century CE): Lucretius and Pliny.

In the mid-1st century BCE, Rome engaged in a series of civil wars. The war between Caesar and Pompey was one example. As In the flurry of political campaigns and pro-Caesarian propaganda spread amongst the Roman public in the 1st century BCE, Lucretius wrote De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), an Epicurean poem about humanity’s origins. Post-Caesar, the Roman Republic fell and became the Roman Empire. Under Augustus, Rome continued to construct provinces. Imperialism continued to expand in Asia Minor and Africa in the late 1st century CE. Between 77-79 CE, Pliny the Elder published Historia Naturalis, the world’s first recorded encyclopedia documenting the known history of humankind up until the current reign of Emperor Vespasian (9-79 CE). The two texts, documenting an apolitical and naturalist perspective on the relation of humankind to its surroundings, counter the widespread imperialist values embedded into Roman society. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius argued that all natural phenomena, ranging from the formation of the Earth to childbirth, were not guided by Supreme Beings, as classical religion suggests, but through atoms and simple laws of physics. In other words, he hints that the gods held no legitimate authority over humanity. By framing nature as a mode of ethics, Lucretius suggests that humanity must realize its inclination to detach from the natural world. A century later, Lucretius’s argument was corroborated by Pliny the Elder.

In Historia Naturalis, Pliny criticized humanity’s domestication of nature and further complicated Lucretius’s critique of humankind’s ecological unawareness by relating it to the Romans’ subjugation of barbaric species. In Lucretius and Pliny’s ideal image of the natural world, the earth was a living jungle of unnamed plants and beasts. Animals were separated into predator and prey, but no infighting occurred amongst any one species. Plants sprouted limitlessly. Nature was harmonious. The arrival of humans disrupted the organic flow of nature through warfare, civilizing missions, and the construction of urban centers. Lucretius and

Pliny’s criticisms reflected a nationalistic and turbulent Roman zeitgeist that was depicted in Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries of the Gallic War, 58-50 BCE). As a piece of propaganda used by Julius Caesar to justify his genocide of the indigenous Celtic tribes in Gaul, Commentarii de Bello Gallico maintained a mental map of the physical world that rested on the heavenly-ordained rights of Rome to the center of the universe. Caesar implied that a species’ degree of civilization depended on their proximity to Rome. By that logic, the further a Gallic tribe resided from Rome, the more natural and savage their appearances and habits were. Therefore, Romans had a moral duty to exert their civilizing influence upon the untamed wilderness. His human-nature binary created a breeding ground for the next step of human classification: race.

The second part of my timeline focuses on the period of the mass cultural shifts that lasted from the late 15th century until the late 18th century, a period historians refer to as the colonial era. In 1493, Christopher Columbus published the first historical account of the West Indies, marking his official ‘discovery’ of the New World. Shortly afterwards, the Transatlantic Slave Trade began in the early 16th century, bringing upwards of ten million African peoples to the Americas. The discovery of the Americas reignited in Europe a classical spirit for conquest, and along with that arose new ecological justifications for conquest.

In Systema Naturae (Systems of Nature, 1758), the Swedish Enlightenment philosopher Carl Linnaeus attempted to establish and rank four genotypes of humanity by the physical and psychological traits that were allegedly determined by their geographical residence and exposure to varying climates. At the top of the pyramid stood the White European. White Europeans were blond, blue-eyed, happy, and fit. Next were the Yellow Asians, who were dark-haired and gloomy, then the Red Americans, who wore tattoos and displayed barbaric manners. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the Black Africans—lazy, unemotional, and fitted for harsh manual labor in tropical climates. In "The History of Natural History and Race: Decolonizing Human Dimensions of Ecology," Historians Maria Miriti, Ariel J. Rawson, and Becky Mansfield elaborate that though Linnaeus never explicitly stated “race,” his scientific ideology consequently produced the color line, marking the formal segregation of whiteness and blackness as distinct social identities. 

Human/Nature Line

Human

—-----------

Nature

Color Line

White

—-----------

Black

Nature = Non-Human = Black

The final part of my timeline takes place in early 19th century America, where I will focus on one of America’s most renowned naturalists: Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s Walden, similar to De Rerum Natura, supplies a critique of America’s “civilized” society and its dissociation from nature.

Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Walking” similarly refutes the human-nature binary, arguing that humans should regard themselves as “a part and parcel of Nature” rather than distinct members of society;, for when Nature was domesticated, it transformed from public to exclusive. In Thoreau’s eyes, whiteness connoted an ideal image of the human body under European aesthetics, a vision of humanity which indexed the human desire to be uprooted from nature rather than remain in it. Swiss American geographer Arnold Guyot’s The Earth and Man echoed much of Thoreau’s statement on westward expansion. Unorganized nature (the wilderness) was a living body capable of transformation. On the other hand, organized nature, i.e. domesticated land, was stifled from reaching its true potential. 

Historian Paul Gilroy identifies race as a product of the conflation of cultural and national identity—a distinctively modern phenomenon. The early 19th century produced a series of crucial social strategies for nation-state building such as “race,” “people,” and “nation.” The term ‘nationalism’ emerged in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and was popularized in the early 19th century alongside the creation of modern nation-states. According to Christian Fuchs, nationalism is an ideology which aims to “distract attention from capitalism, the class conflict, and the societal causes of social problems” to protect its “membership.” Classicist Benjamin Isaac presents another complication. He claims that racism, despite not being formally recognized, has been in practice since the classical period, basing the claim on the continuation of environmental determinism. Nationalism, the early stages of which we can see in Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico, was fundamentally territorial. The physical difference between the cold and temperate European states and the hot and humid lands of Africa and the West Indies was yet another stepping stone for the colonists’ perception of their ability to alter the ownership of the land. 

Thesis Paragraph

Across the three analytical periods, I identified three consistent reasons for the parallelism between ecology and racism.

Rather than posit nature as a beneficiary of humankind as taught by 21st century environmentalists, many classical and pre-modern natural historians place nature—specifically, the wilderness—in animosity with humankind. This innately hostile relationship, thus, instills in humanity an innate fear of the wild and unknown parts of nature, an unpredictable factor that undermines humans’ supreme control over their land.

Spurred by this initial fear of the wild and unknown parts of nature, the Western idealization of conquest and colonialism developed in order to achieve the West’s goal to subjugate nature. Next, to maintain its superiority, the West began to practice nationalism or an (ecological) iteration of nationalism, harboring the goal of maintaining a collective, agreed-upon manifesto to control the internal members within a metropole while simultaneously “othering” the external groups to the wilderness. Using geographical bias to determine who was included and who was excluded from a national identity, these internal and external groups of people also became associated with certain degrees of civilization. These exclusionary efforts led into a Western ideal image of whiteness as being disconnected from the natural world, a vision that continued the belief that Europe was the ordained apex of humanity. Whereas whiteness reflected a willful desire to engage with land as nothing but a docile surface, a land that can be taken as a physical resource, blackness continued to inhabit nature. This vision further drove interest to superimpose hierarchy over the "othered" minorities to maintain the ideal order.

Finally, as the lack of ecological diversity in Europe drove capitalism West in the late 15th century, the seemingly unbounded resources of the New World fed into the West’s desire for conquest. Riding on the presupposition that they have control over nature, colonists authorized themselves to impose hierarchies in the indigenous tropics of the Americas. Ultimately, the wilderness was colonized.

Because there already existed a Western hierarchy rooted in the belief that humanity has a duty to exert control over the wilderness, the concept of race was established to support and maintain this ideological justification, imposing a classically influenced framework on other modern social hierarchies.

All Roads Lead to Rome

De Rerum Natura, the tour de force of Lucretius’s career, was a testament to Epicureanism at heart. Epicureanism was an ancient Greek philosophy that encouraged the pursuit of simple living and freedom from pain through satisfying natural and necessary desires. Using physics as a framework for morality, Lucretius suggested that humans should stop fearing artificial gods and instead obey the laws of nature, following the foedera naturae as opposed to the supposed foedera fati. 

In Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics, author Gilles Deleuze elaborates that Epicurus and Lucretius’s Nature “is a Harlequin’s cloak made entirely from colored patches and empty spaces, plenitudes and void, beings and non-being, each one positing itself as unlimited while limiting the other.” Nature cannot exist healthily with humanity without reciprocity. The invasion of a noxious plant, for instance, is controlled by a species of herbivorous animals, which in turn is suppressed by another group of carnivores, whose bodies are recomposed into plants, continuing a seemingly limitless cycle of peaceful growth and rebirth that ensures that no species may grow infinitely more powerful than the rest and disrupt the harmony of the natural order. In book 5 of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius suggested that the relationship between nature and mankind was akin to that of a mother and her son. Her veins produce milk, as do a woman’s breasts, and she uses those to furnish her children, fauna and flora, with food. After she birthed the human species, the Earth was damaged and weakened by humanity’s exploitations of her natural resources, causing her to turn contemptible. Thus, she retaliates with bitter cold and destructive storms. In Ancient Roman tradition, mothers were no more than childbearers. They did not have any political power. They did not take on typical domestic duties and lived in quarters separate from their sons, who were raised by servants and hired teachers. The figure of the mother was isolated from all public affairs, so her child may grow into adulthood with barely enough knowledge of his mother to consider themselves more-than-strangers. From the son’s perspective, he was simply a beneficiary. 

It is also worth noting that Lucretius begins book 1 of De Rerum Natura with a hymn to the erotic goddess Venus (Aenaedum genetrix, “O’ mother of Rome”). For a poem about anti-spiritualism, Lucretius’s invocation to Venus in the first 20 lines of the poem appears to conflict with her role in book 4 and onwards. Bonnie Catto explains that Lucretius’s Venus acts not as a “supreme power of nature but as a metonymy for sex” and the “creative process of natura,” particularly in the domain of living creatures. In 1.1-23, Venus, as a personification of nature, instills pleasure (blandem…amorem) which causes union (concelebras, concipitur) and creation (exoritum, frugiferentis, summittit, frondiferas, propagent). Venus-Nature awakens sweet flowers and makes them bloom (tibi suavis daedala tellus summittit flores) and transforms wild cattle (ferae pecudes) into procreative creatures. In contrast, the artificial influence of humanity disrupts the natural procreative process between animals. In 5.1308-1340, Lucretius depicts a gruesome scene of animal warfare. Animal warfare, he posits, is not natural. Compared to a bucolic sheep whose daily routine consists of peacefully grazing a meadow, a warhorse’s knowledge of violence, defeat, and victory make it closer to man than to animal. It is also because of his superior intellect that the man, who thus takes on the role of the rider and trainer, believes he has the ability to manipulate the natural order. Charles Saylor reasons that this unique segment on animal warfare was designed to illustrate the hypocrisy of humankind in weaponizing the forces of nature to combat their fear of the inevitability of nature’s laws.

Because they must be conquered, the trainers’ situation resembles man’s position in the face of death, the inevitable victor of nature. By their scheme, the trainers only hasten to embrace death from their very fear of death, the moral overtly stated in the passage on civil war and symbolically again in the plague... the inept thinking of the trainers here, their unnatural and self-destructive scheme beginning with their reshaping of the animal’s body, is the same psychic state of man that leads him to slaughter an innocent calf in superstitious fear, to mutilate himself in terrifying worship of an Earth Mother harmless in herself, or to suffer a ‘hidden wound’ from kindly Venus.

Ultimately, the domesticated animal retaliates against the man, finalizing his cycle of self-destruction. Mother Earth simultaneously provided for the creation of humanity and its greatest antithesis. Lucretius’s segment on animal warfare reveals a crucial argument of classical ecology: that humans have an innate fear of Nature’s evitable curse of death. Because of this irrational fear, we attempt to dominate and subjugate Nature—Earth Mother—and, by extension, delay our fear of death from coming true. This paints nature in our minds as a hostile entity. Our pride, however, would not allow us to be subordinate to the wilderness. Thus, we overcome our subconscious fear of the wilderness through a forceful subjugation of it. The reshaping of the animal’s body can be interpreted as a metaphor for technology, as both require the stripping of an object’s natural or humane qualities in exchange for something efficient but artificial. Lucretius’s final critique for humanity is in the lasting consequence of their actions: a brutal mutilation of the human ego.

In Historia Naturalis, Pliny similarly showcases a distaste for the artificiality of Roman society. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill remarks that, contrary to its purpose of being a natural encyclopedia, Pliny crams Historia Naturalis with what appears to be “irrelevant, if informative, excursuses on Roman life and manners, and the objective reporting of the scientist is overlaid with chauvinistic moralizing.” Like De Rerum Natura, Historia Naturalis formally opens in book 2 with a declaration of its subject’s divinity, but Pliny goes on to refute the conventional Roman pantheon as the creation of the frail human mind. As though it were of the same status as a monotheistic God, the greatness of Pliny’s Nature cannot be measured. Pliny both performs an act of worship and of gratitude in attempting to rectify his fellow Romans’ ingratitude towards the Earth (signified by their ignorance towards its animal nature, as Lucretius would call it). Later in book 2, Pliny venerates the Earth (Terra), for “she alone is beneficial to Man, and nothing that she generates, not even poison, is noxious to Man (poison is provided for painless suicide) and it is only human abuse that turns the gifts of Nature to weapons of destruction.” From the depths of the Earth, Nature’s creative force (pneuma) literally explodes forth, causing basic elements such as water and air to coalesce with each other to coalesce and react in bizarre ways, resulting in the creation of natural springs or breezes. Nature is the great benefactor—the mother—and is therefore “benign, gentle, indulgent, [as] she gives man all he needs.” The motherly rendition of Nature maintains the belief that nature’s creations exist for the sole purpose of serving man, and man only needs to repay its gifts with the same reciprocal gratitude. Yet, men mistake Nature’s thorns, which she made prickly and sharp to ward animals off from the medicinal herbs inside, as threats. Poison, another example, was used for hunting and polluting. These small details in Nature’s design tend to be overlooked or deemed faulty by human greed, which I will later explain.

In a mannerism strikingly similar to that of Pliny’s attitude towards mirabila (marvels) in Historia Naturalis 7.7-8, Augustine, a later reader of Pliny, writes, “[it] is clear what constitutes the persistent norm of nature in the majority and what by its very rarity constitutes a marvel” (De civ. D. 16.8). Augustine’s statement suggests the existence of two different types of objects in nature: the norm, which constitutes the majority of our human world, and the wonders and oddities, which exist in some distant land on the periphery of our imaginations. The spatial phenomenon of relating oddities to the margins of the Earth occurs several times in Historia Naturalis, “most notably in [Pliny’s] discussion of the monstrous races of men in book 7, the most extensive compilation in extant ancient authors and the source for many later descriptions.” Physically and metaphorically, these “monstrous races” tend to be located on the periphery (of the world, as far as the Romans were aware). Mary Beagon quotes J. L. Allen, who elaborates, “blank spaces are intolerable to the geographical imagination pointed to the role played by preconception in perpetuating such myths once they became established, even in the face of further expansion.” Theoretically, an expansion of the empire could accommodate a more accepting geographical conceptualizing of its oddities and margins, as is seen in the tale of the traveller who, driven by the excitement of these miraculous novelties, runs back to his hometown to spread the happy news of his discovery to his anticipating audience. In a less positive light, the strangeness of mirabila exemplifies a crucial characteristic of the ‘other,’ a “device by which Greeks and Romans were enabled to articulate more clearly their own sense of identity, as well as contextualizing their place in the wider and widening world.”

The existence of a ‘blank space’ disturbs the Roman environmental imagination. The Roman self-proclaimed environmentalist prides himself on his knowledge of the little pieces of the natural world that have been seized from their roots and brought inside the walls of Rome. The ambiguity of nature’s spatial construction in relation to the city’s firm borders injects the Roman identity with a perceptible chaotic force. If one buys into Lucretius’s argument, then one would know that this unknown force is not actually chaotic, for it can be easily explained through physics and atomology. But for Pliny, who imagines nature as though it were an outwardly expanding bacteria colony, whose center is concentrated in Rome, psychologically distancing oneself from anything ‘alien’ translates into both a literal and conceptual spatial remoteness. Sure, they can drive up walls around their city and nominate the people within the enclosed space as pure-blooded Romans. They can deem themselves the apex of civilization, the domineer of nature, the center of the world, but the itching knowledge that there still exists a tract of land or river that they have not yet seen erodes their walls. Thus, they fight a pointless war against the margins, hoping to leave a permanent footstep, however deep or bloody, on those uncharted ‘blank spaces.’ 

Pliny’s message in book 2 corroborated the ancient theory, epitomized by Caesar in Commentarii de Bello Gallico, which linked climate with racial characteristics. The physiques of the people in the northernmost borders, the Gauls and Germans, who were the furthest removed from the temperate metropole, were “ungoverned and ungovernable.” Pliny also brings up the example of the nomadic city Palmyra, an independent empire located between Rome and Parthia separated from the rest of human civilization by a fertile oasis. Mary Beagon believes that Pliny envisions nature as wearing out or turning ragged at the edges. The harmonious elements, such as water and fire, which are traditionally conducive towards growth, fall out of balance:

“The cultural chaos of the edges is matched by chaos in nature itself. As Pliny says in 2.190, the solitary, uncivilized nature of the marginal races is directly attributable to the savagery of nature in those regions. The harmonious blending of earth, air, fire and water in the central regions of nature ensures temperate climate and good fertility. The humans inhabiting such areas mirror microcosmically nature’s ideal state physically and mentally.”

Consequently, in 6.187, Pliny explains that the outermost regions of Ethiopia, which is smothered by overwhelming heat, produce human and animal monstrosities. Without the sufficient presence of other elements, the heat molds their bodies. Pliny characterizes the Ocean, the most expansive border of Nature, as both fertile and unyielding, with its unstable fertility producing monstrosities in regions that would normally be considered infertile. He describes the oceans that lie beyond the “pillars of Hercules”—the boundaries of the Roman empire—as elemental soup of mud and water. For all intents and purposes, the world was Rome’s, whose role as the “second sun” (27.3), the “mind of nature” (2.12-3), makes her people automatically the most “exalted manifestation of the mind able to embrace the whole of nature, which was attributed to the central races in 2.190.” In Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Caesar alleges that the druids, who were religious leaders of the Gallic tribes, drew out their powers from the nature which they inhabited. Their savage behavior, likewise, were conditioned by the harsh climates of the North. 

Mirabila epitomizes the crux of Roman nationalism: a desire to take possession of nature’s oddities. Luxuria, luxury, is the consequence of mirabila. Pliny uses the term luxuria alone in over 60 passages to demonstrate the moral decline of humanity. Luxuria carries the connotation of artificial and unnatural. Luxurious items of great value (a superficial determination of worth, Pliny says) such as coveted jewels, oysters, and purple dyes can only be procured by an inversion of the natural order in which Nature reigns dominant. Instead, men probe around her insides and seize for their own mistaken desire for ownership what does not belong to them Everything about materialistic luxury is unnatural, for the closer that a part of nature is brought to commodification, the more exclusive it becomes. Once a part of nature transforms into a superficial and wasteful item with no other medicinal or beneficial purpose than to signify one’s social status, the natural order crumbles, and man gets to reign supreme in his delusion, believing that he has bested his fear of the wild and unfamiliar.

For this reason, the cliché of nationalism—that nearly everything tends to ‘gravitate’ towards the city—roots itself in Roman fears and Roman ideals. Aelius Aristides summarizes: “Those who wish to view the world’s products must either journey through the whole world - or stay in the city.” The treasures looted from Rome’s wars of conquest were brought in from the outer world into the city walls, and henceforth symbolized the glory and grandeur of the high-ranking Roman officials they were given to. Augustus owned a collection of Indian wonders; Claudius a phoenix, a transgender slave, and a hippocentaur; Nero samples of ridiculously fertile African wheat, a child with many limbs; and Constantine a satyr. These objects, regardless of whether or not they were living creatures, would be displayed to satiate the public’s curiosities. Simultaneously, they also served to quell their anxieties about the uncertain blank spaces lying behind their walls, for it becomes clear to the Roman nationalist that everything lying beyond their imagination, by proxy, is valued the same as the booty looted from their yearly conquests. 

The Stand-Your-Ground Subjectivity of Whiteness

Classical ecologists historically focused their natural studies on the examination of gross aspects of external structures, documenting their observations with poetic, often moralistic comments and a bit of analysis. During the Renaissance and especially during the Age of the Herbalists (1470-1670), ecologists shifted their attention to developing detailed anatomical descriptions and sketches of the living world. The next step, naturally, was the ordering of these organisms. Drawing on the classical Eurocentric influences of authors such as Pliny and Lucretius, early 19th century European naturalists aimed to impose a sense of order over the natural world. If humans believe that nature can be classified, then they can also infer that race, which they believe was a product of nature, can also be classified. Therefore, ecology was fundamentally a civilizing mission, with the apex of the Chain of Being—the Europeans—being the expansive, civilizing force of the uncharted natural world. 

The foundation for 19th century racial classification methods was developed by Carl Linnaeus, who created a taxonomic biological hierarchy based solely on the criterion of skin color. Using the criterion of certain “moral and intellectual peculiarities,” Linnaeus divided up the human race into four distinct families, describing “the Homo Americanius as obstinate, contented, free; Homo Europaeus as fickle, keen, and inventive; Homo Asiaticus as grave, dignified, avaricious; and Homo Afer as cunning, lazy, and careless.” A few decades later, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach delineated five variations of mankind in his treatise, On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1781). From the start, he assumed an unequal zoological importance among his five racial varieties—the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian being his three principal races. The Caucasian, a term which he coined, was “not only the most beautiful of the varieties” but the “primitive color of mankind” from which all other races degenerated. Blumenbach primarily based his studies on the skull shape of the races, combining them with Linnaeus’s skin color.

Classicist Benjamin Isaac introduces a form of classical proto-racism founded on environmental determinism, inheritance of acquired characteristics, and a combination of the two. Isaac broadly defines race as “an attitude towards individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and mental qualities,” qualities that were shaped by external factors and therefore unalterable by human will. The significance of Linnaeus and Blumenbach's natural hierarchies during a surging European fascination in ecology was perhaps what influenced race to become directly associated with biological function. The fact that Linnaeus’s theory of racial categorization aligned with the general European public’s preconceptions about human-nature superiority and the duty of mankind to analyze and subdue the unknown makes it all the more appealing. 

What I describe as the modern unknown pertains to two geographical regions: sub-Saharan Africa and the West Indies—or, in other words, the New World. European colonists viewed the New World, so to speak, as a virtually limitless treasure chest, full of economic and geographic resources. However, they were unfamiliar and unaccustomed to these unknown lands. As Maria Miriti, Ariel J. Rawson, and Becky Mansfield argue, the ecological knowledge of native African and Indigenous people, who were thought to be pre-acclimated to the tropics, were exploited by colonists to extract those very plants and resources from their natural habitats. While the colonists seem to have no trouble dispersing such groups of people in foreign lands for manual labor, they themselves strengthened their national identity in setting up colonies and naming the taken land under their original nations.

America’s Environmental Imagination

Henry David Thoreau, the father of the American environmental consciousness, one said: “nature is a crucial ingredient for the American ego.” Europe’s lack of ecological diversity made it so that their limited land, by the late 15th century, was no longer enough to satisfy its nationalistic ideals. Nations competed with each other for the glory of claiming the New World—the Americas—for themselves, romanticizing these unclaimed, pastoral lands. When Spanish explorers first discovered the West Indies, they did not know what to do about the unfamiliar tropical climates. They could not apply their temperate methods of toiling soil to the tropics (they had tried and failed miserably). Thus, they turned to human labour. Europe entered Africa—not for colonial resources this time but for its people—and uprooted its inhabitants, bringing them across the vast expanse of the unexplored Atlantic Ocean to a foreign land, hoping that their knowledge of the African tropics can translate to the New World. The European environmental consciousness remained shallow, and it would remain this way for the next centuries. The practice of slavery continued and racism festered at the core of American nationalism.

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the city at the heart of American intellectualism. Thoreau, as the forefather of the American environmental imagination, published Walden in 1854 at the epitome of his career. At this time, the American abolitionist movement was moving in force. As an avid abolitionist, he felt disgusted by the decaying morals of American society, a dissatisfaction reflected in the pastoral ideology of Walden. Lawrence Buell writes in The Environmental Imagination, “‘pastoral’ has become almost synonymous with the idea of (re)turn to a less urbanized, more ‘natural’ state of existence.” 

Starting in the 17th century, pastoralism became substantialized in depictions of European colonies as “pastoral abodes, first by promoters and explorers, later by the settlers themselves as an article of cultural nationalism. The tendency to identify nation with countryside promoted by the English squirearchy became, in time, accentuated in England’s colonies.” Thoreau critiques the settler’s hypocrisy in romanticizing the Wild while simultaneously justifying the uprooting and exploitation of its anthropologic and botanic inhabitants, writing in “Walking,”

The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx, and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.

He believes that the Old World has reached a capacity for progress. The New World, in the Old World’s imagination, is a possibility for forgetting—forgetting the Old World and its archaic institutions. The question of private ownership, a key tenet of Western capitalism, confuses the white settler, who is naturally taught that because of his superior whiteness he is entitled to the unknown land. Thoreau offers another critique:

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness comes the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source.

In Lucretius’s footsteps, Thoreau points out the hypocrisy of civilized nations—Greece, Rome, and England—for thinking themselves superior to nature when in fact it has been nature that has sustained them. The concept of whiteness connotes an ideal image of the human body, a vision of humanity which indexes the human desire to be uprooted from nature rather than remain in it. Those who are still rooted are inhabitants, not members of society. Thoreau’s critique of Western ecology also extends to his critique of race:

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man, —a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields. 

Thoreau did not believe that skin color was not a factory setting. He claims that a tanned man finds strength and vigor in the Wildness, whereas the white man, who chooses to cultivate his dainty sense of self from within his house, his garden, and the walls of his city loses his natural touch and grows frail. In Thoreau’s mind, whiteness reflected a willful desire to engage with land as nothing but a docile surface, a land that can be taken as a physical resource, whereas blackness, a characteristic of the inhabitants of nature, continues to grow within it. America provided new ecosystems and fertile grounds, ideally uninhabited by Linnaeus’s “wild African beasts.” Yet ironically, to tame this land, they displace the people of Africa to the New World, bringing the feared Wild to themselves.  

Swiss American geographer Arnold Guyot’s The Earth and Man echoed much of Thoreau’s statement on westward expansion. Unorganized nature, i.e. the wilderness, was a living body capable of transformation. On the other hand, organized nature, i.e. domesticated land, was stifled from reaching its true potential. Europe was inherently ecologically inferior to the uncharted tropical lands of the Americas. The territories of Europe, Africa, and Asia (the Old World) hung on too tightly to classical influence from back when they themselves were under Roman rule. The people of the Old World created a historical wall closing off its past and its traditional standards of refinement from the future and the possibilities of the New World, a wall which physically manifested itself as the Atlantic Ocean. Yet, when the Old World Man attempted to travel across the unknown Ocean to the New World, he sailed backwards, traveling West while facing East. Using this prolonged metaphor, Guyot showed that colonialism was rooted in a desire to return to the past rather than embrace the unpredictable wildness of the future; as long as American society keeps trying to return to the Old World instead of looking towards the Wild, Thoreau and Guyot claim, they will never realize actual progress. 

Conclusion

Whiteness and blackness are modern products of an ancient ecological framework—the human-nature line. In classical society, it was thought that humans were innately superior to Nature, an irrational belief rooted in civilization’s fear of Nature’s inevitable promise of death. This superstitious fear is the driving force behind colonialism; having gained a motivation for subjugating the source of their fear, humans turn to violence. They uproot wild plants and skin wild beasts, taking their remains back to their cities to be categorized in exotic displays. Everything within the city is civilized by man, and everything outside of it, including the indigenous tribes residing in the periphery of the wild, are barbaric entities. Consequently, the formal separation of the in-group and the out-group is given a name: nationalism. The in-group, characterized by whiteness, believes that the Earth is a docile surface fit for shaping. The out-group, characterized by blackness, continue to reside within the wilderness until they are forcefully displaced by the in-group to an unfamiliar land, where they can never truly regain their footing as before. However, there is one other option: migration. In Tropical Freedom, author Ikuko Asaka describes the migration of ex-fugitive American slaves that fled to Canada to become freedmen in the 19th century. The geographical effort of crossing the American border into Canada, a land where they could legally roam free, was symbolic. These freedmen venture out of the metropole that has unjustly claimed their race for labor and, in further decentralizing themselves, return to the Wild (rural Canada). In this newfound Wild, they attempt to discover in Canada a novel site of belonging. Though Tropical Freedom extends beyond the scope of my current study, I believe that my ecological framework can also be applied to the re-displacement of the former slaves. Perhaps, in returning to the nurturing embrace of the Wilderness, as Thoreau claimed, will allow those who have been uprooted to regain their lost ego. However, this will need to be the seed for a future study.

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