David Matless is surely among the most influential living geographers to inform British studies in recent years. To take a work that now enjoys hundreds of citations, Matless’s Landscape and Englishness (1998) has shaped how historians think about the relationship between English national identity and its natural environment during the first half of the twentieth century. The conception of “planner-preservationism” outlined in that book remains an important touchstone for scholars like Matthew Kelly (“Conventional Thinking and the Fragile Birth of the Nature State in Post-war Britain,” in The Nature State: Rethinking the History of Conservation, ed. Wilko Hardenberg, Matthew Kelly, Claudia Leal, Emily Wakild [2017], 114–34) and Katrina Navickas (“Conflicts of Power, Landscape and Amenity in Debates Over the British Super Grid in the 1950s,” Rural History 30, no. 1 [2019]: 87–103), who explain the growth of the state’s interest in managing the landscape. England’s Green offers fresh contributions through a rich cultural history of English attitudes to the natural world from the 1960s to the present.
In Matless’s hands, England’s “green” is a useful metaphor to interrogate various “cultures of fauna, flora, 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” (8). Moving beyond the resonances of William Blake’s “green and pleasant land,” the book maps a multiplicity of green cultures, with chapters on landscape, farming, environmentalism, the Anthropocene, mystery, and folk arts. The concept succeeds as a productive lens to bring together such variation in form and practice across the decades under consideration.
This emphasis on difference informs the arguments in England’s Green. Running through the book are tensions between the green as a hopeful sphere of action and the green as a site of anxiety. This dynamic is shown by Matless’s skillful handling of the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s. On one hand, as he suggests, this burgeoning form of politics suggested an urgent care for the natural world and a chance for renewal. The Nature Weeks and “Faerie Fairs” of these decades are cast by England’s Green as hopeful signs of these priorities. On the other hand, Matless captures the pessimism that underpinned environmentalist bestsellers like A Blueprint for Survival (1972), which was first published in the radical Ecologist journal and warned of impending resource scarcity. If England’s Green cannot discuss all the motivations behind the rise of environmentalism (notably, fears of “overpopulation” which were prevalent in British texts like A Blueprint for Survival), then he nonetheless offers a fascinating exploration of the contradictions within the rapidly changing attitudes to the natural world across these decades.
Another line of interpretation in the book centers on how green cultures engage with different timescales. This theme is illustrated by the author’s consideration of the Anthropocene. Interested in how the landscape might display signs of a coming epoch defined by the climate crisis, he considers shifting interpretations of weather events. The summer of 1976, for example, is still invoked by those who remember it as something of a benchmark for British heat. At the time, the scorched fields and melting tarmac were not, in the main, understood as evidence of a boiling climate caused by burning fossil fuels. However, as Matless demonstrates, extreme weather is now framed by these anxieties, as the conversations that surrounded flooding in places like Somerset during the 2010s confirmed. Writing before the rejection of the “Anthropocene” as a distinct epoch by the International Union of Geological Sciences (which reported on the issue in March 2024), Matless makes a worthy contribution to the arguments that the term should be retained in the humanities and social sciences.
While some historians may have wanted Matless to more concretely set out these central arguments, the book benefits from the author’s free-flowing and experimental style. Throughout, Matless weaves in his own experiences and memories of the trends that he now approaches as an academic. Growing up in Norwich during the 1970s, his school curriculum was shaped by a new “green” consciousness, and the book includes a wonderful spread of personal artifacts such as a felt-tip pen drawing of Stonehenge from a junior school field trip. Other items include a Womble made by his Great-Aunt Alice in 1974, featured by the author to illustrate a growing awareness of the importance of recycling during the decade. Matless also leans heavily on music to shed light on the green, with discussion of the now-fashionable Glastonbury Festival as well as the somewhat less-fashionable Wurzels. These parts of the book are enriched by Matless’s evidently wide musical interests and offer a model of how to bring together a diverse base of cultural materials.
England’s Green is written with both an academic and a public audience in mind. It succeeds in appealing to both. For scholars, it offers a wide-ranging history of green cultures since the 1960s through an interesting analytic category. The book will also be excellent for teaching big-picture classes on the history of environmentalism or the English landscape. It does not claim to be exhaustive. Other ways of exploring green cultures might have centered on health, for example, and included expanded discussion of how air pollution or urban/rural inequality shaped the green. But England’s Green productively leaves open such paths for others to follow. For a wider audience, Matless has written an accessible, personal, and vibrant account that will appeal to readers interested in the history of green cultures - a topic of ever-growing significance to our own moment, as well as to the future.
