The work of belonging: Agricultural improvement, romantic wilderness, and the rise of restorationism in United States environmental literature (Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold)

Environmental restoration, also called ecological restoration, is a controversial but burgeoning practice, one increasingly aestheticized in environmentalist writing. This dissertation treats the tension between two of environmental restorationism's rhetorical forebears: the agricultural rhetoric of improvement and the Romantic rhetoric of wilderness. Improvement and wilderness have been powerful concepts in U.S. cultural history. Many English colonists in North America, including John Winthrop, justified their colonial project in improvers' terms. Land believed to be in a natural state was traditionally encoded within the conventions of improvement as a worthless "waste" that needed the redeeming effects of labor to enclose it from the commons and convert it into profitable property. Colonial improvers could therefore justify their usurpation of North America by designating it "wilderness," a conceptualization that discounted Native American labor. Improvement ideology was codified most famously in John Locke's labor theory of property, but it also structured husbandry manuals such as Jared Eliot's Essays Upon Field Husbandry in New England (1748--1762). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, "wilderness" began to take on more positive associations, a trend that led to the eventual idealization of wilderness within U.S. Romanticism. Romanticism's revaluation of wilderness gave rise to a sentimentalist critique of improvement, one in which physical labor was figured as producing a "callous" and destructive attitude toward nature. This prejudice against labor and laborers is evident in Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), texts that reveal how the tensions between agricultural improvement and Romantic wilderness helped structure the bias against the working class that scholars such as Richard White have recently noted within U.S. environmentalism. Environmental restorutionism fuses elements from the rhetorics of both the improvers and the Romantics, however, and its literature, including Aldo Leopold's A Sand Country Almanac (1949), reveals a desire to reconcile improving labor with Romantic ideals. This desire seems driven in part by the importance of both pioneering (a version of improving labor) and wilderness to U.S. national identity.