Overview

England's Green explores how environmental concerns have shaped and reflected English national identity since the 1960s. David Matless covers themes including agriculture, nature, leisure, climate change, the Anthropocene, the folkloric, the archaeological and the mystical. He also shows how national environmental affairs connect to the local, the regional, the global and the postcolonial. Moving across a breadth of source material from government policy to popular music, ecological polemic to television comedy, England's Green shows the richness and complexity of English environmental culture. Matless uncovers the genealogies of today's debates over climate and nature, land and culture, showing how twenty-first century concerns and anxieties have been moulded by events over the past sixty years.

Full Product Details

9781789149210

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""England's Green is another masterly work by Matless, tracking six decades of tussles over English identity and the land itself, lit up by insights into farming, gardening, geology, conservation, and folk dancing. Mixing geographic specificity with sly wit, Proustian memory-dives with encyclopedic reference, Matless misses nothing: Kate Bush, the Clangers, Richard Mabey, PJ Harvey, all are accorded the same eloquent attention. What results is nothing less than a field guide to life in the Anthropocene.""--Steve Waters, University of East Anglia, author of ""The Contingency Plan"""

This is a sharply critical view of what England’s green and pleasant land has undergone . . . a brilliant environmental kaleidoscope . . . The book’s publication could not be timelier, in a world whose naturalness seems increasingly pressured. -- Timothy Mowl * Country Life * Matless traces the meeting of English people and the environment from the 1960s over a period of six decades. His well-researched narrative explains how this starting point gave a ‘novel twist’ to environmental concerns, which began shaping a Green political agenda highlighted by its criticism of industrial society. -- Jules Stewart * Geographical * England’s Green explores how the country's connection with the environment has shaped and reflected English national identity since the Sixties, touching on a wide range of issues including agriculture, climate change, folklore and culture. -- Simon Evans * Choice * England's Green is another masterly work by David Matless, tracking six decades of tussles over English identity and the land itself, lit up by insights into farming, gardening, geology, conservation and folk dancing. Mixing geographic specificity with sly wit, Proustian memory-dives with encyclopedic reference, Matless misses nothing: Kate Bush, the Clangers, Richard Mabey, PJ Harvey, all are accorded the same eloquent attention. What results is nothing less than a field guide to life in the Anthropocene. * Steve Waters, Professor of Scriptwriting, University of East Anglia, and author of The Contingency Plan * In England’s Green, David Matless offers an extraordinarily compendious history of the encounter between England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, that much invoked place of the imagination, and the ecological ravages of industrial development, suburbanisation, and the chemical-agricultural complex. What has happened, he asks, since the 1960s, when ‘green’ became a source of critique rather than celebration? Only Matless could answer this question by taking the reader from an imaginary episode of Blankety Blank to William Blake’s Jerusalem to the ‘Countryside in 1970s’ conferences to current debates about rewilding, or leave the reader quite so interested in gravel pits or the back catalogue of Genesis. * Matthew Kelly, author of The Women Who Saved the English Countryside *

Author Information

David Matless is professor of cultural geography at the University of Nottingham. His books include Landscape and Englishness, also published by Reaktion Books.

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