Journal Article Landscapes of the Wasteocene: DuPont’s Two Delawares Get access Heidi Scott Heidi Scott scotthm@umd.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, isad029, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isad029 Published: 06 July 2023 Article history Received: 25 January 2023 Revision received: 22 March 2023 Editorial decision: 28 May 2023 Accepted: 09 June 2023 Published: 06 July 2023

Simon Orpana's graphic novel Gasoline Dreams is a clarion alarm to wake anyone who uses gasoline and its machines, and we all do. It enhances the growing field of popular, satirical approaches to climate change, such as the choose-your-own-adventure e-narrative Survive the Century (survivethecentury.net). Those already literate in petroculture theory will gain a graphic dimension to how our evolved nature/culture ontologies have been hijacked by the fossil fuel regime, and how it has seeped from derricks and refineries into the ways we relate to time and space, each other, consumerism, and the natural world—over which we gain despotic power with our petrochemical wands. For those new to the field, including undergraduates, the book will be a critical bootstrap to petroculture framed by Orpana's dystopian and mythological illustrations. He leads us through critical theory by Imre Szeman, Timothy Mitchell, Patricia Yaeger, and Fredric Jameson, which deepens the bivalence of petrocultural mastery and subjection. The book may indeed result in some dejection for new readers, as the evidence is steep and compelling, and Orpana is more invested in the spectacle of petro-horror than in providing actionable alternatives. A leitmotif is his rendering of alarm clocks and pump gauges as indices of rising CO2 through time; the book's initial alarm clocks 400 PPM; its final readout is the infinity symbol.

Many who teach environmental literature will be interested in this diverse collection of readings from the energy humanities, a booming field of inquiry that has become a crucial unit within eco-lit courses, if not a course in its own right. Energy in its many valences permeates our lives, from the historical roots of industrialism in fossil fuels, which gave rise to mass consumerism, globalization, and climate change, to the subtler and more philosophical aspects of how human ontology relies upon fuel sourcing, how energy forms become fertile metaphors, and how we navigate our emotions in a time of environmental crisis using the modes of elegy, jeremiad, and comedy. Since we teach energy in literature, it is time to have an anthology that selects from the bewildering diversity of germane writing a set of suggestive texts, and this is the first one available. The book should be subtitled “Explorations in the 20-21st-Century American Literature of Energy,” since it includes only that limited geo-historical range, with one double exception: a few paragraphs of George Eliot’s nineteenth-century The Mill on the Floss (hydropower). This choice strongly affects the reader’s impression of what literary energy is: it concentrates on contemporary problems with using it, whether we are focusing on fossil, nuclear, or renewable sources. By delimiting a 100-year span, readers have no sense of how energy flowed for 99% of our history in pre-industrial societies: through the muscle power of animals fed on renewable biomass, fires of timber and charcoal, and ambient sources like wind and hydropower captured by mills, so we lose context on how human society and ontology have rapidly changed in the past 200 years, and we fail to envision the future low-energy societies that are likely to succeed our own hyper-driven fossil fuel world.

This article uses literary sources to draw ontological distinctions among three distinct energy sources: wind power, biomass, and fossil fuels. The primary aim is to demonstrate how radically our fossil fuel regime has changed human ontology in the last two centuries during which we have entered the Anthropocene. Because this radical transformation contains myriad elements, this article will focus on transportation: the speed, quality, and quantity of travel permitted by successive energy sources. To consider the comparative literatures of energy as they relate to transportation, we will begin with wind, then consider muscle-driven biomass giving way to coal locomotion, and conclude with the highest octane fuel, petroleum. The central interest is in how the fuel depicted in literature illuminates historical moments in which the interfaces between self, society, and nature are configured by specific energy regimes. By using literature as a source text, we may arrive at an emotionally and philosophically more robust synthesis of energy history than the social and natural sciences, relying upon objective accounts and statistics, are able to provide. By re-reading literature through the lens of the Anthropocene, we gain perspective on how earlier insights into the relationship between energy and experience can inform our explorations of today’s ontological reality. Energy literature instructs us out of the fossil fuel mindset of world domination and back to a physical realm in which we are small actors in a world guided by capricious forces. Such a reality requires hard muscular work and emotional immersion to restore an ethic of care and sustainability.

The catastrophic worldview, which has been formalized into various scientific theories (punctuated equilibrium, chaos, tipping points), covets disaster as its aesthetic, with entropy and negentropy as vying principles. At the close of the eighteenth century, science centered around the new findings of Geology, and scientists like Cuvier, Lamarck, and Buffon debated the predominance of gradual change through time versus sudden, widespread calamities or ‘punctuations.’ This essay investigates Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), a non-fiction, late eighteenth century natural history chronicle of a single parish through decades of close environmental observation. Its epistolary form conveys an aesthetic of discrete, close readings of nature through time, and the chronicle breaks off with the catastrophic effects of the Laki volcanic eruption of 1783. I suggest ways in which White’s famous work is unusually precocious in ecological methodology, a particularly fruitful angle because my reading goes against the perennial critical reception of Selborne as a tome of Enlightenment balance and economy. Instead, I argue that White’s work is a distinctly modern vision of catastrophic change in nature that foregrounds the contemporary science of Chaos Ecology.

This chapter explores how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations of oil helped to establish the conditions necessary for the rise of a dynamic oil economy. Focusing on promotional accounts of the lighting commodity that held sway before petroleum, it shows how mid-nineteenth-century imaginings of whale oil established a set of cultural frameworks that profoundly influenced the way late-century marketers and consumers understood petroleum. It also considers the emotions and ethics of whale oil culture that foreshadow the more dominant and ubiquitous culture of petroleum and its counterculture of environmentalism today. On the side of exuberance, the marketing of whale and petroleum products has capitalized on the adventure, risk, and acquisitiveness inherent in the American psyche. On the side of catastrophe, a continuum emerges between the ethical arguments against whaling and those against oil drilling based on the desecration of the source: the whale’s body and the drilling landscape. This chapter highlights the symbolic and economic commonalities between whale oil culture and petroleum culture.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: dark ecologyecocriticismecofeminismevolutionary psychologyCharlotte Perkins Gilman

Recent literary ecocriticism has come to appreciate Shakespeare’s intelligent use of nature’s systems as complex metaphors for human situations. Scholars have productively used the ecocritical lens to open new avenues into Shakespeare’s many natures, and this kind of work has both deepened our appreciation of ecology in Shakespeare’s plays and brought his historical work into contemporary relevance to audiences ever more aware of the imperilment of twenty-first century ecosystems.1 We are in a better position now than ever before to feel the pathos of endangered and despoiled parcels of nature, not just lost wildernesses, but also ruined places of cultivation and human nurturing that come as a consequence of greed or mismanagement. The trope of the microcosm in early Modern literature is most often a medical conceit in which the human body recapitulates larger worlds like the earth and cosmos, and political or monarchal variations on the theme abound. In this essay I’ll point out several passages from Shakespeare’s Richard II that clearly demonstrate the ecological microcosm, a trope that subsequent writers and scientists have adopted to model the patterns and structures that constitute our modern understandings of nature. The ecological microcosm enables domestication and relative control over a small, simplified natural system so as to determine exchanges of energy, biotic and abiotic material, and waste. In Richard II, Shakespeare conceives of the castle garden as a microcosm of Richard’s isle; the King’s gardeners, his professional naturalists, become augurs of the end of his reign. Gaunt’s famous conceit of the island in Richard II sets the locus of power conflict on home ground, with no redress to a wider world. Like Adam and Eve, England stands alone and was created self-sufficient, but its isolation only serves to intensify the rivalries within the house of Plantagenet. Gaunt’s wellknown address delimits England’s sovereignty by virtue of its geographical isolation; the island is a study of human behavior in the miniature, and this little world, even with its fortunate protection from the rest, still has need of a strong immune system:

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: botany corruption diet gender Goblin Market inversion Christina Rossetti

Abstract This paper analyzes four popular essays on punctuated equilibrium by the late paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould, who coauthored the evolutionary theory with Niles Eldredge in 1972. It begins with a survey of Gould's disparate reception among scientific amateurs and professionals. Main concerns include the role of accommodated science in the public perception of truth and whether Gould was able to manipulate popular views through his talent for writing vivid prose, the validity of metaphor for constructing our understanding of scientific theory, and the degree to which the disciplines (literature, rhetoric, economics, biology) can usefully interact in the elucidation of scientific ideas.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: Gwedonlyn Brooks modern sonnets war poetry