To the thousandth generation: timelessness, Jeffersonian republicanism and environmentalism

Abstract

Conceptions of developmental change and stability, and their spatial implications, are investigated in Jeffersonian republicanism and Thoreauvian environmentalism. Both Jefferson and Thoreau associated capitalist development with corruption and sought a stable, virtuous, materially frugal society in the face of modernisation. The Jeffersonian programme of agrarian, republican virtue rested on westward expansion and wilderness conquest. This approach was self-defeating: it exhausted the land base for agrarianism and promoted a commercial ethos inimical to republican virtue. Thoreau tried to address this contradiction by seeking stability and virtue through wilderness preservation. Yet both Jefferson and Thoreau problematically tried to displace developmental change away from a privileged locale and create an ahistorical, timeless preserve for virtue, whether agrarian republic or protected wilderness. A green republicanism drawing on aspects of Jefferson and Thoreau can offer an important critical standpoint on social and ecological change under capitalism. However, such a perspective must replace the Jeffersonian/Thoreauvian spatial dichotomisation of change and stability with a regionalism embracing a spectrum of interrelated locales experiencing different degrees of dynamism and permanence.