The Origins of the Climate Emergency Narrative

The origins of the Climate Emergency Narrative cannot be grasped or properly analysed if the origins of the climate emergency, or of socio-ecological breakdown, are not clearly understood. To revisit an important point made in the introduction, there is currently disagreement on what began the ongoing and profoundly interrelated social and biospheric crisis. In 2016, atmospheric chemists Will Steffen and Paul J. Crutzen joined American environmental historian John R. McNeill to propose, in the article ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, that the beginning of the Anthropocene was the discovery of fire by Homo Erectus ‘a couple of million years ago’ (2016, p. 614). This is a proposition that makes the current crisis seem like something inevitable, a result of the evolution of the human species. By contrast, and as discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, the Anthropocene Working Group (focusing on the geological stratigraphic record) has suggested that what it terms the Anthropocene should be located ‘historically at the moment of detonation of the Trinity A-bomb at Alamogordo in 1945’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015). This is a proposition that quite shockingly erases the long world-system history that arguably produced WWII and the technology of the atomic bomb (as well as the willingness to use it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

As explained in the introduction, this book joins environmental historians and sociologists such as John Bellamy Foster (1999, 2002), Jason W. Moore (2015), Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017), Macarena Gomez-Barris (2017), Hannah Holleman (2018), and many others that argue that the origins of the biospheric crisis are systemic and capitalogenic rather than evolutionary and species related, and that resist the notion that the drivers of the crisis arrived fully formed in 1945 in the shape of an atomic bomb. Following their work, I locate the beginning of the ongoing biospheric crisis to the beginning of capitalism and colonialism and the emergence of the capitalist world-ecology. The region known as North America played a key role in this development. This space was colonized by several European nation-states in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and treated by them as a commodity periphery. Over the years, these colonies merged and grew to become, first under the auspices of the British Empire, then as a new nation-state, a semiperipheral, but increasingly central, region within a world-system ruled by the British hegemonic core. Importantly, many of the erosive technologies (settler colonialism, chattel slavery, the monocrop planation, the reservation, and the combustion engine) that are central to the world-system today and that have contributed to the present socio-ecological crisis were invented or honed within this region.

This understanding of the origins of the socio-ecological breakdown makes it possible to collate the beginnings of the present crisis with the texts produced by those privileged by this development. This chapter thus traces the genealogy of the American Climate Emergency Narrative back to the time when European actors began to settle and enclose the North American continent, eliminating Indigenous people and establishing the extractive plantation paradigm. This development was often notoriously violent, but as the chapter shows, it was described as a necessary and inevitable response to emergency in texts from the period. It furthermore demonstrates how some early texts registered the fluctuating violence and privileges, and the booms and crises, that accompanied the first stages of America’s transformation from commodity periphery to the seat of a new world-system hegemon. By doing so, the chapter reveals how these early narratives were obsessed with resources (clean water, fertile soil, teeming oceans, various types of human, and mineral energies), and how even texts that registered the violence of colonial capitalism perceived it as inevitable. As the coming chapters demonstrate, such obsessions and such securitization logics are central to the American Climate Emergency Narrative.

Because this book focuses on the dominant core narrative, this chapter discusses texts produced by and for those who helped engineer the early capitalist and colonial project in North America. Thus, the chapter first returns to the beginnings of the world-ecology and settler colonialism, to see how one of the first agents of this emerging development described the encounter between British settlers and the land and the Indigenous people living on it and with it. The chapter then explores texts written by settler authors in antebellum US, who were concerned with the establishment and maintenance of the slave-operated plantation. The chapter shows how these two stages—settlement and the operation of the slave-driven plantation—produced writing profoundly preoccupied with the securitization of extractable land and thus with the commodity frontiers that were established by settlers. As Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2018) have argued, capitalism ‘not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next, transforming socioecological relations, producing more and more kinds of goods and services that circulate through an expanding series of exchanges’ (p. 19, italics in the original). Furthermore, as Moore and Patel also note, the effort to establish and monopolize these frontiers, to seize the land on which they depend, and to secure them against competition from other settlers, typically required violence.Footnote 1 This violence was frequently so extensive that the establishment of many commodity frontiers has been historicized as wars by scholarship. The history of American commodity frontiers has thus been written as a series of range wars (Drago, 1970), sheep wars (Carlson, 1984), tobacco wars (Campbell, 2005), coal wars (Shogan, 2004), railroad wars (Starr, 2012), oil wars (Williams, 2020; Winegard, 2016), and so on. These wars were partly economic, but they were also actual military confrontations. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, the armed conflict between unionizing coal labourers and anti-union (private and state) forces in West Virginia in 1921 was the largest battle fought on US soil since the Civil War (Shogan, 2004).

By focusing on the centrality of the commodity frontier and the settler capitalist transformation of land into what Moore (2015) calls Cheap Nature,Footnote 2 the chapter provides the American Climate Emergency Narrative with a genealogy that demonstrates how the origins of this narrative are closely intertwined with the transformation of the US into the hegemon of the world-system. Because the chapter engages with a very long material, economic, military, and cultural history, it is by necessity cursory. It thus references and combines, rather than contributes to, previous scholarship by economic, environmental, and literary historians. What it adds to this work is a perspective through which it becomes possible to see how the texts discussed write human and extra-human nature both as repositories of enormous wealth and as entities that must be made secure even when such securitization involves the application of massive violence. This way of narrating ecology, the chapter shows, characterizes both writing that depicts the early settler colonial endeavour, and later texts about the slave-operated monocrop plantation. It is present, as the chapter reveals, even in anomalous passages where a certain, politically unconscious awareness of the destructive nature of capitalism surfaces; where human lives and ecologies are described as depleted and violated. From the vantage of the genealogy that the chapter establishes, the twenty-first-century American Climate Emergency Narrative’s relative disinterest in the climate and its preoccupation with substantive violence, ownership, crisis, and (lost) privilege becomes easier to understand. It is also when this narrative is perceived as the most recent incarnation of a tradition that has always been concerned with the need to manage ecological/human crises and emergencies that its peculiar registering of epochal crisis makes the most sense.

The Settler Capitalist Text

Moore locates the formal beginning of what he terms the Capitalocene to the 1450s, as it was at this time that ‘an epochal shift in the scale, speed, and scope of landscape transformation across the geographical expanse of early capitalism occurred’ (2016, p. 96). This epochal shift was energized by the highly fertile soil that existed in America and that provided the settlers with an opportunity to extract nature cheaply. It took a few centuries before the reorganization of ecology in America (and in other parts of the world colonized by Europeans) resulted in the actual warming of the planet, but the arrival of the first European settlers still had a noticeable effect on the climate of the Earth System. The viruses and bacteria that travelled with the first colonists brought on what has been described as the ‘Great Dying’, an event that reduced the Indigenous population by an estimated 90 per cent, from approximately 60 million people to 5 million (Koch et al., 2019). In the wake of this dying, the agriculture and the animal husbandry on which Indigenous people in America had subsided partially collapsed. When fields and farms were abandoned, massive reforestation occurred. This, as several studies have suggested, bound more atmospheric CO2, and contributed to a lowering of the temperature of the entire planet (Kaplan et al., 2011; Koch et al., 2019; Nevle & Bird, 2008). Geoffrey Parker (2013) has argued that this drop in temperature significantly contributed, alongside reduced solar radiation and increasing volcanic activity in other parts of the world, to what has been termed the Little Ice Age which lasted from the early fourteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. In this way, the arrival of European settler capitalism can be said to have affected the Earth System at a very early stage.Footnote 3

As this and coming chapters illustrate, the extractive understanding of land was expressed in a number of official and unofficial texts. These texts mediated and operationalized this understanding, and they also remain as testimonies of it. An important early stage in this development was the writing of a series of charters that opened America to British settler colonialism. The first was the Virginia Charter of 1606 which enclosed a portion of land on the American East Coast and leased it to the Virginia Company of London. Empowered by this charter, the company invested in ships, supplies, and manpower and established the Jamestown settlement. In 1628, the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, signed by Charles I, opened the region which is known today as New England to colonization. Like the Virginia Charter, this outlined the geographical borders of the colony and also imagined the commodity frontiers that could be assumed to exist in this land and that the company was instructed to exploit. Thus, the Massachusetts Charter bequeathed the Massachusetts Bay Company the ‘firm lands, soils, grounds, havens, ports, rivers, waters, fishing, mines’ of this territory and asked the company to extract, on behalf of itself and the Crown, ‘minerals, as well royal mines of gold and silver, as other mines and minerals, precious stones, quarries, and all and singular other commodities’ (Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company cited by Anon, 1814, pp. 18–20).

While the desire to create a haven for a particular type of religious practice may have been what encouraged many of the settlers to make the journey to America, it was the hope of discovering such commodities that funded the journey.Footnote 4 The extractive work performed on these new frontiers also paid for the wars that were fought to create, protect, and expand colonial settlements. As postcolonial and world-literature scholarship has demonstrated, the violence used by extractive colonial capitalism to open frontiers up was experienced and registered in drastically different ways by people living in different parts of the emerging world-system. Among Indigenous people in the periphery, this violence was predictably registered as abject, grotesque, and horrific (Acebo, 2021; Brandt, 2017). However, in the emerging core, the same violence was frequently sanitized and narrated as essential to the survival of the early settler colonial/capitalist endeavour.

One of the most striking examples of how human/ecological violence was produced, narrated, and rationalized in America during the early colonial period is Captain John Underhill’s Newes from America; Or, A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England, published in London in 1638. Underhill was one of several officers recruited by the Massachusetts Bay Company to train the colony’s militia and to help keep the new settlement secure. In 1635, epidemics and unusually bad weather appear to have created food shortages that strained the resources of both settlers and Indigenous people (Grandjean, 2011). When tensions between the settlers and the Pequot nation—one of the many Indigenous peoples in the area—erupted into open conflict, Underhill was one of the officers tasked with managing the situation. Newes from America is his account of the event that followed.

The first thing to note is that while Newes from America exists within material and cultural history as a text that reports events in the American periphery, it was written in and for a growing European capitalist society. As Giovanni Arrighi argues in The Long Twentieth Century (1994), the early seventeenth century is a sequence within the capitalist world-system’s second Dutch cycle. However, Britain was already creating the conditions that would allow the nation to replace the Dutch as the hegemon of this system in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It is from this vantage that Newes from America maps New England as a commodity frontier that may yield significant, commodifiable resources. Underhill thus describes ‘Augumeaticus’ (in what is today northern Maine) as ‘a place of good accommodation […] worthy to bee inhabited, a soyle that beares good corne, all sorts of graine, flax, hemp, the Countrey generally will afford’ (p. 17). Similarly, he argues that in ‘Puscataway […] there was growne in the last yeare […] as good English graine as can grow in any part of the world’ (p. 18). In this way, the ‘newes’ that Underhill conveys is that New England is a territory rich in Cheap Nature and that this territory is ripe for enclosure and extraction. The spaces he describes can be turned into commodity frontiers where certain staples and energies can be sourced for the benefit of the colonial/capitalist system he is involved in establishing.

At the same time, the book is a candid and often disturbing description of the war fought between Puritan settlers and the Indigenous Pequot. This was a long-lasting conflict that involved several battles before culminating in what has been described as an almost complete genocide of the Pequot nation (Cave 1996). The final confrontation between the Pequot (already reduced by decades of illness) and the settlers was the massacre at the fortified Pequot city Mystic where, as Underhill writes ‘foure hundred […] men, women, and children’ (p. 35) were murdered. For the small number of Pequot that survived, exile, ‘[c]aptivity, slavery, and death’ (Grandjean 2011, p. 99) followed.Footnote 5

Notably, the war that Underhill waged was aimed not only at Indigenous people but also at the very land that the Pequot lived on. Underhill thus repeatedly describes how he and his men ‘burnt and spoyled both houses and corne in great abundance […] burnt their houses, cut downe their corne, destroyed some of their dogges in stead of men’ (p. 6). When Underhill cannot find Pequots to kill, he will spend ‘the day burning and spoyling the Countrey’ (p. 14). In this way, the destruction of Indigenous land is also, in this text, a way of managing the land. To make the land safe for extraction, and to harness its potential as a settler capitalist utopia, it must first be transformed through extensive, military violence.

Underhill is aware that the violence he and his men perform on both people and land is excessive. He even inserts a question that he apparently has been asked, and that some of his readers may also be posing, into his narrative: ‘Why should you be so furious (as some have said) should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?’ (p. 35). Underhill’s explanation is that this violence is a response to an emergency, and to the acute dearth of security this emergency is producing. He explains that ‘our people were so farre disturbed, and affrighted with their [the Pequot’s] boldnesse that they scarce durst rest in their beds: threatning persons and cattell to take them, as indeed they did’ (p. 20). The (genocidal) violence that he and his men perform is thus cast as the necessary response to this threat; a way to make the settlement safe. The need to secure life and property, the order enforced by the enclosure, thus takes priority over the Christian norm of compassion. It is thanks to this violence that the fertile soil and bountiful geography he travels through has ‘fallen into the hands of the English’ (p. 2). This is also part of the ‘newes’ that Underhill spreads: America is a territory being primed for enclosure and extraction, and to acquire it, it is necessary to kill Indigenous people and to do violence on the land that belongs to them. This is how you secure the land for extraction.

If the American Climate Emergency Narrative is understood as a body of texts that promotes securitization regimes and military violence as a resolution to social and ecological crisis, as this book argues, Newes from America marks one important instance where this narrative emerges. In Newes from America, the environment appears as both a repository of abundant Cheap Nature and as a potentially hostile, insurgent space. To take advantage of its potential for early capitalism, to make it ‘fit’ for ‘New Plantations’ (Underhill p. 1, italics in the original), the land must be violently cleansed before being reorganized. The killing and destruction of both people and land that Underhill’s militia engages in, is imagined as the first and necessary step towards such reorganization.

Richards Slotkin has influentially argued that in the American novel, ‘the wilderness must be destroyed so that it can be made safe for the white women and the civilisation she represents’ (1973, p. 554). More recently, Kate Holterhoff (2019) has considered the same issue in a study that reveals how a great deal of English and American popular fiction from the nineteenth century narrated the historical change caused by European expansion via ‘the genocidal extermination of native populations’ (p. 279). As Holterhoff observes, this genocidal violence is often displaced so that the destruction of Indigenous people is told via the killing of charismatic megafauna such as whales, mammoths, or cave-bears who inhabit, or once inhabited, the wilderness. Written before the need to ‘regenerate’ America was perceived, Newes from America can be read as a precursor to this type of narrative. In Underhill’s text, Indigenous people and the land they inhabit are destroyed to make way not simply for white settlers, but for a new relationship to the planet. Indeed, what is destroyed in Newes from America is not (obviously) ecology as such, but a certain kind of understanding of the relationship between nature and human society. Thus, the ‘newes’ that Newes from America ultimately conveys is that unenclosed ecologies are unruly and dangerous, that they host subversive entities such as Indigenous people who, by resisting settlement, oppose the very tenets that inform early settler capitalist society: the right to enclose and privatize the land, to extract commodifiable energies from this land, and to accumulate the surplus that results from this process.

The Plantation Text

The material and epistemological violence practised and rehearsed by the early settler community in America made it possible to establish the new ecological system that Underhill calls ‘Plantation’. This can be described as a regime through which ‘labor power’ and ‘extra human nature’ (Moore 2015, p. 105) were put to work to exploit various agrarian commodity frontiers—tobacco, rice, indigo, sugar cane, cotton—as cheaply as possible. In this way, the plantation needs to be understood not primarily as a farm where food for the local community was grown (although such farms certainly existed), but as an institution that serviced the world-system with cash crops that could be refined and sold on the world market. In this way, the plantation introduced what Lisa Tilley has termed ‘a strange industrial order’ (2020) in America, strange because of its ‘rationalized order, its technologized form, the way it materializes mastery over nature, and, ultimately, the way it destroys ecologies in the name of ‘improvement’’ (p. 67). In other words, beginning with the first sugar plantations, the plantation introduced a new type of industrialized agrarian paradigm, where specific energies were effectively sourced for a growing world market.

As Tilley argues, the initial strangeness of the plantation has been elided in late capitalist modernity so that it is now ‘a thoroughly normalized landscape form’ (p. 67). Indeed, the monocrop plantation and the cattle or poultry farm where rice, wheat, soy, pine, palm oil, and meat are sourced for a world economy, have long been the dominant form of agriculture. In an effort to recognize how the plantation has shaped the planet and, by doing so, contributed to biospheric breakdown, Donna Haraway (2015, 2016) has offered the concept of the Plantationocene as an alternative or complementary denominator to the Capitalocene. In Haraway’s definition, the Plantationocene names the ‘devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor’ (2015, p. 162, n. 5). Natalie Aikens et al. (2019), Janae Davis et al. (2019), Katherine Yusoff (2018), and Wendy Wolford (2021) have similarly focused on the plantation as an extractive, violent, and fundamentally racialized system that has turned much of the Global South into land sourced for the commodities requested in the Global North. As Hanna Hollman has observed in Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism (2018), the need to source these commodities as cheaply as possible is exhausting the soil to such an extent that farmland in many parts of the planet is turning into arid dust.

Just like the elimination of Indigenous people demanded a certain kind of violence, the establishment and maintenance of the plantation required a particular set of violent strategies. The pacification of enslaved people on the plantation, and the trans-Atlantic and internal slave trade that serviced the plantation, were inherently violent, and just like the genocide of Indigenous people, this violence was cast as a security measure vital to the plantation system itself. In fact, it can be argued that the plantation introduced a perpetual state of exception as defined by Giorgio Agamben (2005). Understood as such, the plantation can be considered a permanent response to the emergency that Indigenous people, Indigenous land, and enslaved people were seen to constitute by settlers. In the words of David Lloyd (2012), ‘the state of exception and the excluded inside have been constitutive elements of colonialism, and in particular of settler colonial formations, from the Indian reservations […] to slave plantations and their precociously modern architectures’ (p. 72).Footnote 6 In this way, and to summarize the points made above, the plantation was central to the organization, extraction, and depletion of both human labour and extra-human nature. At the same time, the plantation was a configuration designed to manage the internal pressures of the world-system: the imperative to feed commodities to the market and to manage the cyclical crises that are, as argued by Arrighi (1978) and Moore (2011), endemic to capitalism.

These perceived insecurities, and the violence employed by military or paramilitary agents on behalf of the capitalist, colonial endeavour, were narrated and mediated by fiction written by people located within the fiercely stratified US semiperiphery as it existed during much of the nineteenth century. As Wendy Wolford (2021) has argued, the plantation not only ‘propelled colonial exploration, sustained an elite, perpetuated a core–periphery dualism within and between countries’, but it also ‘shaped both the cultures we consume and the cultural norms we inhabit and perform’ (1623). In this way, as proposed by Aikens et al. (2019), ‘the plantation is as much a narrative construction as it is a literal place, one that always underlies political debates about national belonging, borders, labor, resources, ethnicity, and race’ (np).

The texts that most clearly register the violence done to land and people on the plantation were not written at the core, of course, but are what scholarship has termed slave narratives. The most widely circulated at the time include Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and William Wells Brown Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). Today, partially thanks to the Federal Writer’s Project’s collection Born in Slavery, the corpus of texts narrated by people enslaved on US plantations is enormous.Footnote 7 These voices register how nineteenth-century capitalist society was experienced within the remits of the plantation as a central extractive commodity periphery. They thus testify to how this periphery operated as an engine of horrendous violence and constant personal, social, and material crisis.

As a long tradition of American Studies scholarship has made clear, people at the other end of semiperipheral, early nineteenth-century US society tell this story in a different, although not homogeneous, way. This era saw the publication of abolitionist writing such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) which was critical of slavery, but that still often rehearsed profoundly racist tropes. These texts were challenged by anti-abolitionist, pro-slavery narratives such as Mary Henderson Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin (1852), Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854), and William Gilmore Simms’ The Sword and the Distaff (1852), many of which engaged in direct polemic with Stove’s novel. These texts were fiercely supportive of racialized slavery, they promoted the plantation as the main driver of the US economy and thus described it as a catalyst capable of elevating the US to a position of world hegemony. Many of these novels, disturbed by the enslaved Nat Turner’s 1831 attempt to organize a violent revolution, also insist that the plantation and plantation slavery are necessary to protect white America from the violent urges of (enslaved) black people. In this way, the pro-slavery novel extends Underhill’s thesis that non-white agency needs to be violently contained to safeguard extraction.

While deeply divided on the question of slavery and black agency, and what these mean for white society, both the abolitionist text and the pro-slavery narrative register the ongoing transformation and depletion of land in oddly similar ways. While the settler colonial text is obsessed with the abject nature and enormous potential of unenclosed, Indigenous land, anti- and pro-slavery novels are both mainly concerned with land that has been cultivated by settler communities in the slave-owning South. An example is Tomas B. Thorpe’s The Master’s House: A Tale of Southern Life (1854), a novel that hovers uneasily between the abolitionist and pro-slavery novel. This narrative describes the life of the young, noble, and kind Graham Mildmay as he moves his house and his slaves from North Carolina to the more fertile Louisiana. Thus, a mostly unspoken but obvious premise of The Master’s House is the fact that land can be exhausted by the extractive slave plantation. When first visiting Louisiana in search of the land that has, since the Indian Removal Act of 1832, been cleared of Indigenous people, Mildmay cannot ‘suppress his enthusiasm at the richness of the vegetation he witnessed, and the easy manner with which they were made to produce an abundant crop, compared to the more sterile soil of North Carolina’ (p. 42).

G. P. R. James’ The Old Dominion; or, The Southampton Massacre (1856), an aggressively pro-slavery novel about the Nat Turner rebellion, is even more vocal on this issue:

When we talk of a plantation, we think of a wide tract of country all smoothly laid out in maize, or tobacco, or cotton, or rice, and don’t comprehend that perhaps two thirds of that plantation will be forest, either of the first or second growth. I must remark, too, that a good deal of country, especially on the seaboard, has gone back to forest, the earlier colonists having been like prodigals newly come into a fortune, and exhausted their lands with unvarying crops, principally of tobacco. Thus what was once, we have every reason to believe, very fertile soil, will only now bear pine or other trees of hardy habits. (p. 45)

Even if The Old Dominion does not theorize the relationship between extractivism, capitalism, slavery, and soil erosion, it does register, from a position of white privilege, local ecological breakdown. From the vantage of this privilege, this breakdown is regrettable and inconvenient, but in no way a reason to change direction or to worry about the long-term effects of extractive, slave-dependent agriculture.

Abolitionist writing also shows awareness of such breakdown, and it connects it to the extractive violence that occurs on the plantation more clearly than the pro-slavery, anti-Tom text. A telling example is Harriet Beecher Stove’s novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), written after Beecher Stove had read Frederick Douglass’ fictional short story ‘The Heroic Slave’ (1852), where the escaped protagonist spends five years in a swamp to stay close to his wife. Inspired by Douglass’ story and by the example set by Nat Turner (Turner’s Confessions recorded in jail by the white attorney Thomas R. Gray (1831) are appended to the novel) and other black insurgents, the titular black character is not a docile Uncle Tom, but a rebellious, runaway slave named Dred. From the vantage of the Great Dismal Swamp that stretches across the border that separates Virginia and North Carolina, this character carries on a constant, low-intensity insurrection by rescuing other escaped slaves and by resisting slave society in other ways, all the while planning a revolutionary action of some sort. Thus, and unlike her first novel, Dred is a story about violent black resistance to extractive violence.

Scholarship in the novel has tended to centre the liminal territory of the swamp as this appears in the narrative. As Kathryn Benjamin Golden (2021) has shown, the Great Dismal Swamp was indeed a refuge for thousands of people who had escaped slavery. Vast, labyrinthine, and difficult for dogs to traverse, the swamp offered protection for a variety of societies: ‘itinerant groups living along the swamp’s peripheries’, as well as ‘intensely populated multigenerational communities, complete with their own methods and practices of self-government and community organization’ (Golden 2021, p. 3). In this way, the swamp appears, in Dred, as an ‘insurgent ecology’ (Golden 2021, p. 8), a space out of which what the radical black minister Denmark Vesey called ‘Natural Rights’ can rise (Black 2022).Footnote 8

However, Dred is equally a story about how slavery and the plantation regime exhaust fertile soil outside the swamp. The novel thus focuses on the slave-owning Gordon family which has, ‘for two or three generations […] lived in opulence’ (p. 44). Following a period of ‘gradual decay’, these days are now over. The reasons why are clearly stated: ‘Slave labor, of all others the most worthless and profitless, had exhausted the first vigor of the soil, and the proprietors gradually degenerated from those habits of energy which were called forth by the necessities of the first settlers’ (p. 44). In this way, and as vaguely registered but not developed in The Master’s House and The Old Dominion, the extractive violence of the plantation is seen as destroying not simply people, but the land itself. Similarly, the increasingly desperate attempts by the novel’s incompetent plantation owners to manage the land and the enslaved people working on it only accelerate the suffering and the deterioration of the land. The violence wielded to bring enslaved people and the land to order is ultimately futile. Instead, the plantation itself is perceived as an engine of violence.

Even so, Dred is not a critique of capitalism as such. The North is described as doggedly and sustainably capitalist in the novel: ‘If a man's field is covered with rock, he'll find some way to sell it, and make money out of it; and if they freeze up all winter, they sell the ice, and make money out of that. They just live by selling their disadvantages!’ (p. 182). The novel’s revolutionary message is also curbed when, at the end of the story, Dred’s decision to attack the white community, and potentially shift society towards the ideals inherent in the insurgent swamp ecology he represents, is curtailed by the pure-hearted and loyal slave Milly. Thus, while the white core of antebellum American capitalist society was politically divided, the image of a successful black insurrection and the obliteration of the extractivist paradigm in favour of a fundamentally different social order was clearly difficult to insert even into an anti-slavery novel.

As the WReC has argued, ‘the unfolding of combined and uneven development produces unevenness throughout the world capitalist system, and not merely across the divide represented by the international division of labour’ (p. 57). Semiperipheries are processual spaces that testify to such unevenness, and that thus ‘function not only hegemonically, transmitting value to core regions, but also counter-hegemonically, circulating new forms of solidarity and international consciousness across the global landscape of combined and uneven development’ (WReC 2016, p. 549). This helps explain how pro-slavery writing, abolitionist texts, and autobiographies by enslaved people registered and narrated slavery in radically different ways, sometimes as a God-given and altruistic engine of white prosperity and black sanctuary, sometimes as an immoral, corrupting, and soil-depleting system, and sometimes as an impossibly violent and extractive machinery.

The world-literature model also assists in explaining how both abolition and pro-slavery writing register the ecological devastation that the plantation produces, but avoids indicting extractive capitalism as the engine of this devastation. Both types of text emerge out of white centres of relative power; the slave-owning but agrarian South and the urban and increasingly industrialized North. These represent two complementary, yet at the same time different and competing, evolutions of the US semiperiphery. The question that plays out in these two different narratives is not simply if slavery should be allowed to persist, but if it is at the agrarian commodity frontier, or within the wage-labour-driven, industrialized, and urban region, that capital should be primarily accumulated. This charts two different paths forward for capitalism in the US, but neither narrative imagines an alternative to extractive capitalism as such.Footnote 9

Emergency in Settler Capitalist Writing and the Plantation Text

The texts discussed in this chapter emerge out of different stages of the economic and social history of America, yet they speak in strangely similar ways about capitalism, ecology, security, and violence. Underhill’s Newes from America registers settler capitalism via the violence performed on Indigenous people and the land they inhabit and cultivate, but it simultaneously claims that this violence is both justified and necessary. Thus, Newes from America insists that the emergency is located not in the killing of Indigenous people or the destruction of the land they inhabit, but in the possibility that these people and the land they live by may prevent extraction. To symbolically ‘spoil’ and ruin the land is thus to make it secure for extraction. In this way, the text registers the ecological and human destruction that settler capitalism produces but envisions this as a necessary response to the emergency that Indigenous people and land create for the early settler capitalist enterprise.

The plantation text written by white authors from different sections of the privileged semiperiphery also registers the ecological and human violence that the plantation produces. In this way, the plantation text contributes both to the bourgeoning sense that extractive capitalism is endemically troubled by an emergency of its own making, and to the assumption that the solution to this emergency is the establishment of the security regime that a permanent state of exception enables. If extractive capitalism has engendered ecological and social erosion, the solution is not, in the pro-slavery text, the dismantling of the system as such, but the production of regimes capable of containing the constant eruption of crises. When this crisis is ecological, the solution is to move the location of the frontier; to find new land to extract. When the crisis is human and social, the solution is to build more effective systems to contain or eliminate rebellious elements. What must be secured is capitalism understood as the right to property, the enclosure, and the extractive processes that occur there. Even the anti-slavery texts that circulate an awareness of the social and ecological destruction produced by the plantation, and that gesture, like Dred does, to other types of sociality, fall short of promoting alternative relationships between (white) American society and the planet. In this way, both the pro-slavery and the abolitionist narratives promote an expansive capitalism as the only viable way forward for the burgeoning US nation-state. Thus, they fertilize the emergence of what Vandana Shiva (1993) has termed ‘monocultures of the mind’ (p. 5). As Shiva observes, such intellectual monocultures aid in the production of what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’. As described in the introduction, this realism generates a storyworld in which there is no alternative to capitalism even when this system is perceived to cause tremendous ruin and suffering. I will return to this concept in future chapters.

It should also be noted that the settler capitalist text and the plantation novel both register crises of sorts. Returning to Patel and Moore’s observation that capitalism ‘not only has frontiers; it exists only through frontiers, expanding from one place to the next’ (19, italics in the original), it can be argued that capitalist crises typically occur in between the closing of one frontier and the opening of another. To simplify this process, the collapse of a particular frontier causes a dearth in the flow of resources from the frontier, while at the same time producing unemployment and a shortage of capital both among wage labourers and those accumulating the fruits of labour. This makes it necessary for capitalism to move on to new frontiers, to leave exhausted land behind and to find new fertile soil (Cheap Nature) where important cash crops can again be cultivated, or to find ways of reinventing a depleted frontier so that it can yield a new kind of commodity. Settler capitalist writing and the Plantation text both narrate this precise movement: how extractive capitalism must constantly move on to new frontiers as a response to the crisis caused by the exhaustion of the land. As I will argue in what follows, the American Climate Emergency Narrative is locked into the same logic, but comes out of a moment in time when the opportunity to relocate the frontier to keep sourcing nature cheaply is limited. Thus, this new narrative form gives voice and shape not simply to the imperative to extract and accumulate, but to the paralysing prospect that such accumulation may not be possible in the near future.