Ecological Apocalypse: Privation, Alterity, and Catastrophe in the Work of Arthur Young and Thomas Robert Malthus

Abstract

In the final decade of the twentiedi century, ecologists, social scientists and literary critics called our attention to the alarmist rhetoric of recent environmental writing. In his influential study of environmental perception in American culture, The Environmental Imagination (1995), Lawrence Buell argued that global pollution, genetic engineering, and the technologies of nuclear destruction have fostered a new millenarianism. Works such as Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Jonathan Schell s The Fate of the Earth (1982), and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), among many others, imagined the devastating consequences of human actions on the fragile environment and deployed a “rhetoric of apocalypticism” to press the urgency of their common message, that “the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis.”¹ While the apocalyptic scenarios of contemporary environmental works vary, almost all of them rest on the fear of scarcity—the spectacle of an imminent shortage of energy, air, water, and food.² Thus, while revitalized by the threat of nuclear war and environmental degradation, contemporary environmental apocalypticism conjures up a dismal prospect of life lived perilously close to the bone in an atmosphere of fierce competition. This foreboding prospect, of course, issues from an earlier era of apocalyptic thinking, when in 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus presented the sublime specter of scarcity as a simple, but immutable, law of nature.