Englands Green: Nature and Culture since the 1960s

(Hardback)

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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.

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"

Author Bio

David Matless is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. His many books include Landscape and Englishness (Reaktion Books, 1998, Revised Edition 2016).