Colonization to Climate Change: American Literature and a Planet on Fire

This chapter takes Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire” as a starting point for the elaboration of an ecocritical method that attends to quotidian things and habits of consumption as they have appeared across an array of American literary and cultural productions over the long twentieth century. It focuses in particular on consumable commodities like meat, tobacco, and petroleum, tracing them back to their points of origin—through space to distant sites of industrial production and through time to the longer history of colonization from which American industrialization emerged—as a way of revealing the deep implication of modern American life, from its food culture to its literary forms, in both the histories of colonial expropriation and carbon emission and the present planetary crises that have been their cumulative result.