Chaos and Cosmos raises the stakes on ecocriticism’s claim that literature generates essential knowledge about nature complementary to our scientific views. I contend that literature in the early decades of industrialism achieved a unique narrative perspective on the transformation of landscapes, and that poets began to model natural systems as empirical entities contained within the natural parameters of prosody. This perspective is continuous with scientific ecological methods generated over the course of the twentieth century. Ecocritical perspectives often oppose literary thought (and its catalysts, inspiration and imagination) to scientific method (design and repetition); this outworn creed ignores the affinities of investigation based on intimate knowledge of ecosystems. Both writers and ecologists are close readers of natural systems, and both use imagination to rework cryptic natural processes into coherent theories that elucidate patterns—even chaotic patterns.
Moreover, the British nineteenth century provided a unique nexus of cultural, historical, and disciplinary crossings that allow us to look back on a cohort of writers not only as poets sympathetic to natural forms, but as investigators of a changing landscape. For example, Dorothy Wordsworth is at once a poet, diarist, natural historian, and social ecologist during a time of war and revolution. In addition to being an empiricist, Charles Darwin is a storyteller who crafted the most important narrative of the nineteenth century out of a wealth of disparate case studies. Richard Jefferies’s immersive writing on the rural nature of Wiltshire was colored by his mid-nineteenth-century context, which imposed industrial transformation and the despoilment of the British countryside on his otherwise idyllic close readings.
Environmentalist ideals are often woven in with ecological paradigms, but this book is focused on the ways in which we know nature (ecological epistemology) more than on the ways in which we ought to act within it (environmental ethics). Of course, literature of the environment is laced with ethical convictions, and scientific ecology inevitably is, too, so this division between epistemology and ethics is permeable. Ecologically minded people are not only scientists but are also nature writers, dumpster divers, environmental justice advocates, urban gardeners, and annotators of almanacs. We are people living within acculturated nature—which includes wilderness areas, farms, suburbs, exurbs, and cities. Nonetheless, there is an important distinction between “ecologist”—one who studies the interactions between organisms and their environment—and “environmentalist,” one who advocates an ethics-based set of human behaviors within nature. Chaos and Cosmos circles around literary and scientific ecologists.
Ecocriticism often wrangles with its own limits of authority, questioning whether literary critics are in a position to comment on scientific epistemology outside the conventional bounds of metaphor, trope, rhetoric, theory, and history. Greg Garrard’s influential primer on the field recognizes ecocriticism’s close relationship with the science of ecology, but his stance is one of subordination when it comes to elucidating “problems in ecology”: “Ecocritics remain suspicious of the idea of science as wholly objective and value-free, but they are in the unusual position as cultural critics of having to defer, in the last analysis, to a scientific understanding of the world” (10). Certainly, the general point Garrard is making is valid: ecocritics are in the tricky position of supporting scientific findings (like climate change) while maintaining a strategic distance that allows for critical perspectives on in-herent subjectivity and gender, sex, race, and species biases in the practice of science. Literary studies, even those based on ecology, have a reputation for being antiscientific: a dangerous rap that we must openly disavow. One of the challenges to ecocriticism that Garrard outlines is that the field needs to “develop constructive relations between the green humanities and the environmental sciences” (178). In particular, ecocritics need to address the inconsistency between literary pastoral or Gaia-inspired views of nature in harmonious balance and postmodern ecology’s view of nature as inherently dynamic and unpredictable (178). I propose that ecocriticism can do better than play the role of duplicitous sibling to ecological science. Ecocriticism can theorize how the scientific understanding of nature has literary origins. Literature begat methods of narrative and modeling in ecological science via seamy collaborations with philosophy, natural history, and the established natural sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology. When this interdisciplinary argument is accepted, literature is promoted to progenitor of our scientific understanding of the natural world. As an ancestor, literature shares responsibility for the very biases that humanities scholars hasten to expose in their analyses of science.
In recent years ecocritics have followed many intriguing links between nature and literature that go beyond the classic vision of first, or primary, Nature—the austere wilderness ideal of nature “out there,” which Kate Soper has also called “metaphysical nature” (155–56). Replacing the mythos of the wilderness is the contemporary vision of second nature—an environment entangled with human uses, which in our time involves disturbance, degradation, and chaotic change. Primary Nature is a proper noun—a construct of the entirely extrahuman. It is a wilderness that no longer exists. Second nature is the set of environments that we actually dwell in, cultivate, enrich, and despoil—what Soper has dubbed “lay nature.” Between metaphysical Nature and lay nature is the material system that is the natural sciences’ object of study, what Soper calls “realist nature.” Literary ecocritics in particular should be interested in claiming this realist nature as an object of investigation for literature as well as the sciences.
Ecocritics cut their teeth on metaphysical Nature in the latter part of the twentieth century, with special concentration on German, British, and American Romanticism. In the past decade or so, lay nature has succeeded as the most important locus for the attention of ecocriticism, especially as the field has turned toward lived-in environments built around postcolonial, socioeconomic, queer, and industrial-era revisions of pure Nature. Even ecocritics with British Romantic concentrations, such as Jonathan Bate, Alan Bewell, Timothy Morton, and James McKusick, have in recent years written extensively on disturbed environments rather than pristine ones. Bate’s Song of the Earth is the shiniest green among the four, but his book includes an important reading of disturbance surrounding the 1815 Tambora eruption extending to Keats in 1819 (104–5). Bewell’s book on colonial disease transmission has important implications for the spread of ecological calamity in a global economy. Morton’s adoption of “dark ecology” expounds on the obsolescence of Gaia and harmony in preference for a mournful intimacy with ecological sickness. The work of these four ecocritics (as well as many others working in American and non-Western literatures) highlights the kinship between environmental literature and close reading, historical concurrence, and literary theory. James McKusick’s Green Writing is an important contribution to transatlantic Romantic theory that details the ways in which American nature writers inherited the ideas of their British forerunners. McKusick comes the closest to my interest in the dual characterization of nature as balanced and chaotic, and, like Jonathan Bate, he occasionally uses scientific discourse to elucidate literary texts. For example, he asks the reader to imagine Romantic literary society as an ecosystem, “a vibrant community in which competition and synergy, exchange of ideas and flow of information, predators and prey, hosts and parasites, all coexist in the turbulent vortex of a shared environment” (18). The analogy of societies as ecosystems seeking synergy and troubled by chaos is a mainstay of human ecology. However, these literary studies do not pursue a specific claim about the literary origins of ecological science. As a fully interdisciplinary study, Chaos and Cosmos pays more attention to ecological studies than is conventional in literary criticism, and conducts more readings of novels and poems than any scientific work would do. It traces the ancestry of ecological science to find lurking literary forebears.
Poems and novels can elucidate the material processes, species relationships, and tempo of change ongoing in the physical world. We generally ex-pect science to conduct this investigative work. Instead, I would argue that literature provides insightful systemic readings of physical nature that often predate scientific attention. The aim of this book is to establish how literature was involved in formal explorations of realist nature before scientific ecology existed. The nineteenth century of industrialism and colonialism undid the capitalization of Nature as an austere proper noun. This semantic change to “nature” demonstrates how some literature of this period challenged the classical paradigm of economic balance before ecological science had