On this page, please find my written MA thesis that accompanies this digital project:
Adams in the Garden: The Environmental Thought of John Adams
ABSTRACT:
“Adams in the Garden” seeks to demonstrate that John Adams (b. 1735) was one of Early America’s deepest and most complex environmental thinkers. Previous scholarship has tended to concentrate only on Adams as a political and social thinker, but this thesis argues that Adams was also a committed environmental thinker. John Adams’s environmental thought was infused with Enlightenment utilitarianism, but he was also influenced by Romantic ideas about the natural world. Adams’s view of nature synthesized complex transatlantic late Enlightenment and proto-Romantic intellectual trends within a specific American context. As such, Adams’s idea of nature is microcosmic of a general shift in American environmental thought during the transition between Enlightenment practicality and Romantic idealism.
Adams viewed nature in two interconnected senses: the humanistic and the environmental. For him, nature was the unchangeable order of material reality and became known to humanity through sensory empiricism and reason. Adams took an anthropocentric approach in framing a vision of nature that incorporated both humanity and the natural environment. For Adams, humanity was part of nature, but also stood as something above nature in its dignity, worth, and value. In an environmental sense, Adams viewed the natural world from both practical and aesthetic, or Enlightenment and Romantic, perspectives. While humanity could use and commodify the natural world, it also had the obligation to appreciate its aesthetic and divine aspects. In sum, this thesis argues that Adams had complex ideas of nature and thus warrants recognition as one of the Early Republic’s deepest environmental thinkers.