Defoe and Ecology

Abstract Daniel Defoe experienced a lifetime of witnessing dramatic weather, occasional dearth, and periods of mass disease. Storms, fevers, freezes, plagues, and human or animal die-offs make their way into his writing, and, in complex ways, are related to concerns that we now identify under the rubric of ecology. Ecology, however, attributes to the non-human environment an autonomous moral value, whereas Defoe follows a broadly Lockean paradigm in asserting that what is good is what can be put to human use. Defoe extends Locke’s assumption that humans can use resources to improve or maintain living standards without ever exhausting them. Whether he is writing about climate, foreign landscapes, or non-human animal populations, Defoe’s emphasis on the infinite exploitability of God-given resources shapes his perception of humankind’s duty to remake the natural world into a vast storehouse of useful goods.