Chapter 30 - The Environment

Summary

This essay traces Daniel Defoe’s understanding of a word that he probably never wrote: environment. Where we today conceive of environments ecologically as organic totalities or natural habitats, Defoe and his contemporaries employed the verb environ to signify the more general process by which something encircles, surrounds, or occupies something else. Through brief close readings of Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, The Storm, and other works, I show how Defoe uses environ to signify an array of situations, or circumstances, in which multiple objects and actors interact. Far from suggesting his uninterest in ecological matters, I claim that Defoe’s inscription of environment as a grammatical predicate indifferent to the content it arranges anticipates later eco-critical ideas, such as Lawrence Buell’s understanding of nature as ’a process rather than as a constant’.