Sam Cahill, Nanyang Technological University

1. “Villainous Arts”: Systems Thinking, Stewardship, and (Un)Sustainable Consumption in Humphry Clinker (1771) Sam Cahill, Nanyang Technological University

2. Gillen D’Arcy Wood on Interdisciplinary Systems Thinking • “Complexity science has abandoned simple causal models and conventional disciplinary specializations for an integrated understanding of the natural world as an open, dynamic system subject to nonlinear transformations, feedback loops, and multiscalar interactions beyond the power of traditional scientific instruments to describe or predict. The ecological iteration of complexity science—called biocomplexity or sustainability science—is explicitly focused on the dynamic and tightly coupled relations between human and natural systems, recognizing the historical power of human communities as biological agents, and even, in the late industrial era of climate change, as geological agents. The irony here is clear: the new complexity science begins from the same point as the ecocritics … Sustainability, for both, necessitates a humble acknowledgement of the limits of human knowledge” (“What is Sustainability Studies?” 3).

3. Greg Garrard on “Postequilibrium Ecology” • “At the root of pastoral is the idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human society. … This metaphor of nature as a harmonious and stable machine remained at the heart of the new science of ecology as it emerged in the early twentieth century, and shaped the rhetoric of later environmental movements even as scientific ecologists became increasingly sceptical of the ‘balance of nature’” (Ecocriticism 63) • “Clearly, not all changes are desirable, but … postequilibrium ecology looks to human values to discriminate between them, rather than appealing to the illusory objectivity of a supposedly authentic or pristine state of nature” (65) • One of the main goals of contemporary ecocriticism should be to develop “constructive relations between the green humanities and the environmental sciences … [This] is especially urgent and problematic in the light of developments in ecology that expose the rhetoric of balance and harmony as, in effect, versions of pastoral.” (203)

4. Great Chain of Being

5. Map of Great Britain

6. Tobias Smollett, c. 1770

7. Eighteenth-Century London and the Thames River

8. Fleet River, LondonThe river was converted into a canal following the Great Fire of London (1666). It became famously polluted.

9. Fleet Ditch - Celebrated by Alexander Pope in “The Dunciad”: “Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams / Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames, / The King of Dykes! Than whom, no sluice of mud / With deeper sable blots the silver flood” (Satirical image by Hogarth, 1728)

10. London Produce • “It must be owned, the Covent-garden affords some good fruit, which, however, is always so engrossed by a few individuals of overgrown fortune, at an exorbitant price; so that little else than the refuse of the market falls to the share of the community; and that is distributed by such filthy hands, as I cannot look at without loathing. It was but yesterday that I saw a dirty barrow-bunter in the street, cleaning her dusty fruit with her own spittle; and, who knows but some fine lady of St James’s parish might admit into her delicate mouth those very cherries, which had been rolled and moistened between the filthy, and perhaps, ulcerated chops of a St Giles’s huckster” (Humphry Clinker 137).

11. An Approximate Representation of a Rural Welsh Estate

12. Bramble’s Vision: The New ReGen Village outside of Amsterdam – a “fully closed-loop settlement”