The period from 1851 to 1877 is a critical transitional moment when ecology as a scientific field of study did not yet exist but was emerging. American scientists tended to rely on a Romantic science that prioritized nature’s organicism, but their criteria for empirical observation would lead to detailed and differentiated views that would help shape a modern ecology less insistent on holistic ideals and more open to incomplete and mutable forms in nature. For many writers, naturalists, and scientists, their approaches to nature were explicitly tied to considerations of the relationship between matter and spirit, and to the study of nature as a legible “book” whose material language, or littera, was inscribed everywhere as the environment and as forms of life.1 Scientific and cultural knowledge in this era shared an understanding that one could observe, that is, “read” nature. “Metaphor,” “type,” “translation,” and even “leaves” were objects of both biological and literary study. Through the sciences of this period, we can see how scientists interpreted nature as a literary text; and through the literature, how nature was read and written as a living thing.

This chapter on Henry David Thoreau puts in relief the ecological commons and historiography of nature that issue from the environmental relations illustrated by the sketch. Connecting Thoreau’s Cape Cod to his “Dispersion of Seeds,” the chapter describes these relations in terms of the dispersal that follows from waves rising and receding upon the shore and tossing up weeds, corpses, and all kinds of salvage materials left from shipwrecks. The sketch’s seeing—and enacting—of relation as a littoral erosion and disintegration presents an alternate sense of how one lives with, pressed up against, familiarly or strangely, other species and races. If a romantic ecology might envision relations in the form of an interconnected cobweb, Thoreau’s late manuscripts release those slight silky threads to the air and lets them fly apart and ray out prismatically. This chapter follows how Thoreau’s sketches embody the ways in which text becomes a natural history of casualty, attending to species and race, and engaging with them by way of an environmental optics. The tenuous lines of sight draw a partial ecology that stretches and cleaves the liminalities between “nature” and Thoreau’s “I,” even as it disperses those very entities.

This chapter takes Dickinson as its first case study to examine how figures such as a robin or a pine can map out partial ecological relations that allow for survival. As her poetic and scientific engagement shows, understanding species as figures reveals both their material and speculative potential—what is termed their disjunct specificity since a literary figure can be understood to have both a material or literal ground and a metaphorical meaning. As figures, species are partially empirical matter (as the successive biological reproduction of individuals) and partially subjective concepts (as idealized or defined “types”). The chapter first examines the scientific problem that disjunct species presented, where similar species appeared in widely disparate geographical regions, prompting investigations by scientists such as Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz about whether or how these species could be biologically and spatially related. Moving from their observations to Dickinson’s poetic-empirical observations, the partiality of her gaze reveals a sense of species engaged with current discussions of biological species, but also significantly more diminutive. This “species” reveals ecological relation to be figural and partial, based upon a certain slippage between some material that holds while the earth, sky, and even body shifts, departs, disperses.

Beginning with Emily Dickinson’s circumscribed view of her environment, the book introduces readers to the sciences, technologies, and aesthetics of vision that inform a natural history of casualty. The nineteenth century’s declensionist narratives of species, race, and nature corresponds to narratives of a Euro-American expansion of civilization across the American continent. Dickinson’s techniques of seeing comprise what is theorized as a “sketch.” Through a feminist lens influenced by the new materialist turn in ecocriticism, the sketch is defined as an optical-textual apparatus that materially engages with the environment and that apprehends the fragile tenuousness of ecological relation. The chapter positions the sketch as a minor and partial view of nature against the dominant wide-sweeping historical romance of exploration, empire, and nation. Using Harriet Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat” as an example, the chapter lays out the ecological and epistemological stakes of critical sketches whose engagement with the discourse of declining natures nevertheless opens out to a view of their survival based upon precarious environmental relations. Reflecting the sketch’s partiality back onto literary critical methodologies, “partial reading” is proposed as a method that situates its own epistemological limits as an apprehension of the casualties produced by historicizing gestures.

Chapter 1 explores how American settler colonialism in the nineteenth century utilized “nature” and the synonymous “native” in contradictory ways: celebrating the wilderness and then cutting it down, mourning lost “natives” (both people and species) while also seeing the succession of new Euro-American settlers as an expression of the natural order. The chapter traces the countervailing themes of “native” species in three sketch writers: John James Audubon, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Simon Pokagon. Each one exposes an emergent sense of ecological relation that comes from their perception of being close to nature. Contextualizing these sketches within the American picturesque tradition as well as other popular visual technologies of the time, the chapter examines how what is called their “species of seeing” hews to both Enlightenment traditions of objectivity while also skewing toward more aesthetic senses of mediation between the “native” artist-scientist and wild “other.” In their writings, it becomes possible for the sketch to become an apparatus for constituting “species” as more mutable entities. Various species, whether the swallow, the passenger pigeon, or even the Native American, become figures through which biological life becomes understood as dispersed into its geographical migrations.

The Afterword begins by reflecting on the form of ecological relation that has been sketched out in the preceding chapters through animating figures of species like the passenger pigeon, coral, or seaweed. These relations are based on a material and metaphorical transport from one to another that joins but also keeps apart. Taking up this conjunctive and disjunctive as a figure of partial relations, the afterword moves on to consider how this defines how things come to matter or mean to one another, whether at the close-reading scale of linguistic significance, at the scale of relations between the fields of literature and science, or at the scale of interspecies figuration. Ending with a reminder of contemporary anthropogenic environmental change, the book concludes by observing the tensions of romantic holism and partial ecology that continue to beset strategies for the survival of species like coral.

The debate over the definition and dispersal of species was intertwined with how the nineteenth century was grappling with the definition of racial difference. This chapter focuses on how the African American physician James McCune Smith reinterpreted racial uplift through the scientific discourses of biogeography and ethnology. Crucially, for McCune Smith, African and Pacific Islander diasporas overlap in the figure of the coral insect, the tiny sea zoophyte that slowly and tenaciously builds the reefs and islands improbably dotting the oceans. The chapter explores how he links the coral insect to African and Pacific Islander experiences of encounter with Euro-American settler cultures and its narratives of racial tutelage and reform. Placing this bizarre cross-species kinship in the context of the nineteenth century’s cultural and scientific imagination, the chapter discusses how McCune Smith’s sketches “Heads of the Colored People” perform the coral insect’s creative biological and geological agency and microscopically figure and transfigure the human-to-nature order. His diasporic view was informed by Charles Lyell’s and Charles Darwin’s biogeographical theories of coral reef formation, as well as the corpus of research on corals by American scientist James Dwight Dana from his time on the Wilkes Expedition.