Narratives of Depletion

Abstract

Narratives of Depletion Chris Otter (bio) In 1849, Henry Cole rhapsodized about the avalanche of global resources to be displayed in the forthcoming 1851 Great Exhibition: With respect to raw materials, we shall most likely have, from all quarters of the globe, specimens of animal and vegetable life, as well as of minerals,—samples of what is in the earth and what is produced on the earth. In the class of animal substances, we shall probably have enormous elephants' tusks from Africa and Asia; leather from Morocco and Russia; Beaver from Baffin's Bay; the wools of Australia, of Yorkshire, and of Thibet; silk from Asia and from Europe; and furs from the Esquimaux. As the evidence of what we may expect from the suggested exposition, I may state that the Court of Directors of the East India Company intend to exhibit the best of everything that India can produce; and we shall therefore probably obtain, by this means, the best practical notion of the value of our East Indian possessions. (55) The Great Exhibition celebrated Britain's command of global materials, mineral and organic. Such unabashed cornucopianism was a leitmotif of Victorian thought, as Fredrik Jonsson has shown. In 1882, for example, Frederic Harrison argued that unprecedented material abundance had launched Britain on a spectacular trajectory of improvement: "we have hardly yet got so far as to recognise that the sudden acquisition of vast material resources is not only a great boon to humanity, but also a tremendous moral, social, and even physical and intellectual experiment" (426). This "experiment" could easily produce insouciant profligacy: "The truth is, we have coal to spare and to waste!" announced the sanitary engineer William Eassie in his 1872 Healthy Houses (181). [End Page 425] Such cornucopianism, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller argues, never went unchallenged. In Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021), she traces a more anxious, pessimistic strain of thought, which feared that the rage for extraction would lead to ruinous collapse and the exhaustion of material resources. This discourse formed what she calls "the exhaustive imaginary of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (198). Moreover, she argues that these discursive frameworks recur, in multiple permutations, throughout nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century novels. This serves as a gentle critique of Amitav Ghosh, who suggests in The Great Derangement (2016) that the novelistic form has struggled to represent large-scale but slow environmental transformation, particularly climate change.1 Miller, by contrast, suggests that nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century literature routinely imagined the present and future devastation wrought by industrialization and extraction. Indeed, she notes, "There may be very few prose works published from the 1830s to the 1930s without some overt thematic interest in extraction, not to mention structuring principles rooted in extractivism" (15). Miller is surely correct: almost every resource vital to the perceived progress of Britain's industrial development generated profound fears of exhaustion. For example, rising meat consumption was routinely regarded as an index of progress, but increasing consumption of a finite resource created concerns of meat shortages generated by rising population and the failure of domestic production to keep up with demand. In 1866, Joseph Fisher published a book with the anxious title Where Shall We Get Meat?. The answer was the mass outsourcing of meat production, which merely transposed a national problem onto the entire globe. In Supplying Britain's Meat (1923), George Putnam observed that by the early twentieth century, concerns about a global meat famine were growing.2 Today, rising meat consumption, along with consumption of other resources such as wheat and guano, has become a major driving force of climate change, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.3 By using the entire planet as a resource for food, as well as many other materials (minerals, fertilizer, timber), Britain adopted what I have called the "large-planet philosophy" (Otter 5). Miller's book finds this philosophy, and its critique, to be a recurrent motif in the Victorian novel. The lust for extraction had, and has, very real consequences for our planetary present. As Miller notes, "carbon dioxide from coal burned during the Industrial Revolution still floats in our atmosphere, but it is the broader complex...