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Distributed for Reaktion Books

England’s Green

Nature and Culture since the 1960s

A sweeping history of how ecological challenges have shaped English society over the last sixty years.
 
England’s Green explores how environmental concerns have shaped and reflected English national identity since the 1960s. From agriculture to leisure, climate change, folklore, archaeology, and religion, David Matless shows how national environmental debates connect to the local, regional, global, and postcolonial worlds. Moving across a breadth of material including government policy, popular music, ecological polemic, and television comedy, England’s Green shows the richness and complexity of English environmental culture. Along the way, Matless tracks how today’s debates over climate and nature, land, and culture, have been molded by events over the past sixty years.

376 pages | 56 halftones | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2024

History: British and Irish History, Environmental History


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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"

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