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About this book
Explores English national identity and the environment, spanning agriculture, nature and culture.
England is known as a 'green and pleasant' land, but what does this mean? England's Green explores how the country's connection with the environment has shaped and reflected English national identity since the 1960s, when pollution, pesticides, industrial farming and upset ecologies were presented as signs of a world gone wrong. This book examines English cultures of nature, land, farming and other ways in which humans engage with the natural world; or with a world whose naturalness seems increasingly pressured and in question.
From agriculture to nature, leisure, climate change, the folkloric, the archaeological and the mystical, David Matless uncovers the genealogies of today's debates over land and culture, showing how twenty-first-century concerns and anxieties have been moulded by events over the past sixty years. From government policy to popular music, and from ecological polemic to television comedy, England's Green shows the richness and complexity of English environmental culture.
Customer Reviews
Biography
David Matless is a Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. His many books include Landscape and Englishness (Reaktion Books, 1998, revised edition 2016).
By: David Matless(Author)
352 pages, 56 illustrations
"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."
– Country Life
"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."
– 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
