The contemporary overtones of ‘green’ suggest that this anthology will
trace a specific line of contact between poetry and the way humankind defines
its place in the entire ecosystem. That poetry is a force to be reckoned
with is beyond question: the Romantic movement, from William Wordsworth
to Thomas Hardy, was and remains a powerful influence in the reshaping
of our attitudes to landscape, to wilderness values and to nature itself.
A collection of poems sharply focused on this progression of thought and
feeling over the past two centuries would indeed be interesting.

Ivo Mosley shares the same interest but in a much looser, and more
oblique, wide ranging way. Feeling that scientific advances have been applied
to the commercial exploitation of ‘the Earth’s riches’, which are ‘plundered
and turned to garbage’, he claims that the question is not ‘Is nature worth
preserving?’ but ‘Is humanity worth preserving?’ The search for an answer
could only lead to the poetry of the world.

So he marshals the world’s poetry into a body of several hundred poems,
originally in 30 languages and ranging over 4000 years, for the proclaimed
purpose of rekindling the human spirit. It is never difficult to recruit
volunteers to march under a banner bearing the words ‘Down with wickedness’,
but Mosley’s battalion is a remarkably cosmopolitan gathering.

Here, rubbing shoulders with each other, are Sappho, Petrarch, Li Po,
Rudyard Kipling, an Inuit, and a Turk, finding little in common beyond their
shared humanity and, in many cases, deprived of the resonance of their original
language. The treasuries of world poetry that appear from time to time glisten
with golden promise but tend to resemble a waxworks exhibition where one
marvels that the eminent figures can be so lifelike and yet so dead.

Mosley makes exceptional demands on his translators by his wide range
of tastes. The 17-syllable haiku, beloved of the Japanese, becomes not much
more than a verbal sneeze in English. Of all the arts, poetry must be the
most difficult to reconstruct in a totally different language and culture.

The English language element in Mosley’s selection is oddly assorted.
Ernest Dowson, Andrew Marvell, Matthew Arnold and Thomas Wyatt appear in
their most familiar anthology pieces; Samuel Coleridge, D. H. Lawrence,
Edward Thomas and Hardy are surprising omissions. There are welcome reminders
of the lesser, but valuable, talents of Charlotte Mew and Jean Ingelow
and an unusual emph-asis on Australian poets, one of whom – Judith Wright
– contributes 15 poems where one or two is the usual quota. As the book
progresses, any green thread becomes increasingly hard to discern, as does
a convincing reason for the inclusion or omission of almost any poem one
chances to think of.

The index is made humorously anarchic by listing surnames only, so that
Eliot turns out to be George, not T. S, Stevenson is not Robert Louis but
Anne, and Hughes is Langston and not Ted. The absence of all the Thomases
is perhaps fortunate in the circumstances.

Desmond Hawkins founded the BBC Natural History Unit and has recently
published Shelley’s First Love.

THE POET Edward Thomas, commenting on Richard Jefferies’s Wild Life
in a Southern County, spoke of ‘the irruption of an imaginative intelligence
into natural history, which is so often in danger of falling into the hands
of mere takers of notes’. Thomas’s words came back to me with some force
a few years ago when I first made the acquaintance of Richard Mabey in his
book In a Green Shade. Here indeed was just such an imaginative intelligence,
reviving the traditional genre that flourished during the 19th century in
pages of Jefferies, Thoreau, Hudson and others; and which, more recently,
has seemed to wither in the face of new forms developed by the media. In
purely descriptive terms it is now film, video and audio recording that
outshine the printed word: in more abstract considerations, it is a polemical
and politicised journalism that concentrates attention today on the environment.

None of this does much to foster Mabey’s undoubted literary talent.
His strength lies in a supple and finely tuned prose which captures and
communicates the perceptions of a keenly imaginative mind. At his best –
for instance, in the contemplation of a landscape of his childhood or of
a saltmarsh where ‘even the mud seemed alive, and slid out of the ebbing
water with the moist shine of a newborn animal’ – he responds with remarkable
clarity and delicacy of touch to the resonances he has aroused. For such
memorable sectors Home Country will be valued by those who want something
deeper than a splash of purple prose.

Even so, the book as a whole is unsatisfactory. It seems at the outset
to identify itself as an autobiography and then changes its character to
a rather random collection of essays, rehashing material that he has already
worked through in earlier formats. Going again over the Flow Country controversy
hardly seems worthwhile, with no new impact of events. Nor does a return
to the Best Kept Village, heralded by a slackening of quality of the writing
to the pedestrian level of: ‘In 1987 a Sunday newspaper asked me if I’d
be interested in doing a piece on the changing English Village.’ Too much
of Home Country is filled with all that is implied by ‘doing a piece’.

Mabey’s own account of the construction of the book is that it is ‘an
attempt to tell the story of how an attitude to nature was formed out of
the experience of different landscapes. It is not quite an autobiography,
but a collection of personal sketches of love affairs, in which landscapes
rather than people are the principle (sic) characters’.

His delightful description of children in woodland shows him to be no
misogynist but it is moments of solitude in a landscape that reveal his
descriptive powers at their best, among beech trees in the Chilterns or
on the foreshore at Cley, watching the turn of the tide – ‘no more than
a sheen at first, a satining across the surface of the flats; then fingers
of water . . .’

Mabey is not helped by interludes of what might be described as the
kaleidoscopic method of printing, shaking an assortment of words to form
novel but unintelligible groupings. Such fanciful phrases as ‘make little
their own chlorophyll’, ‘wondered if it overcome’ and ‘Norfolk and begun’
makes parts of Home Country an experience like reading the Guardian by the
light of glow worms.

Mabey’s ‘most nagging ambition’, he confesses, ‘is to go into semi-retreat
under the cherry trees, like a scholar gipsy’. There’s much to be said for
that.

Desmond Hawkins founded the BBC Natural History Unit.

A NEW ailment, spreading increasingly in recent decades, is a form of
melancholia that is induced by exposure to the doom-laden pronouncements
of anxious environmentalists. As Gavin Weightman puts it in his description
of the symptoms: ‘Even a sunny winter’s day is greeted now with trepidation:
it is evidence not of fortune smiling on the world but of a hole in the
ozone layer.’ In Brave New Wilderness, he has sought a set of contrary symptoms
to justify a countervailing optimism. In the belief that we are surfeited
with tales of human folly, neglect and ignorance he comes forward with the
good news: ‘Today the birthplace of the industrial revolution is infinitely
cleaner and greener than it was a century ago . . . Very few species of
bird, mammal, fish, insect or plant have become extinct in Britain in the
past two centuries.’

Taking the iron founders in Britain’s Shropshire as the fathers of the
Industrial Revolution, Weightman sketches the progressive interaction between
industrialism and the natural environment, noting with pleasure that nature
has the recuperative powers to break down and overwhelm abandoned factories
and palaces alike until they disappear from the view of all but the archaeologist;
but this historical truism can hardly be celebrated as a discovery of the
present age. More positively, he emphasises the happier consequences of
some commonly criticised innovations.

Motorways, hungry for gravel in their construction, have inadvertently
created the flooded pits in which waterfowl thrive, while their roadside
verges have become unplanned corridors of a new wilderness seldom trodden
by human foot. Land occupied by the Ministry of Defence preserves some of
the features of a status quo countryside, unmodified by modern industrialised
agriculture. In both cases the recipe for success is the elimination of
‘unauthorised persons’, which provides no model for general application.

In other chapters Weightman looks for comfort in the subjects of introduced
species and field sports. His conclusions here are a reminder of how subjective
our judgments are liable to be. We have more deer, in number and in variety,
than in 1800, and more woodland: does ‘more’ represent ‘better’ automatically?
Are escaped animals from privately imported collections an enrichment of
the native fauna? Are the conifer plantations in the Flow Country a degradation
of one of Europe’s scarcest habitats or a praiseworthy expansion of forestry
and tax consultancy? Weightman may fairly condemn the popular belief that
‘a kind of Garden of Eden was destroyed by the steam age’. There was not,
and never could be, an immutable inventory of British wildlife; as a dynamic
force nature is subject to movement and change. Our evalu ation of such
changes may be – indeed, should be – influenced by scientific knowledge,
but will also respond to our individual tastes and social demands. On my
home ground I can rejoice in the abundance of great crested grebes, almost
extinct in my boyhood, or in the presence of species denied to my grandfather
– Canada goose, collared dove, Cetti’s warbler – while I simultaneously
mourn my loss of species my grandfather could have seen, such as black grouse,
red-backed shrike, corncrake and cirl bunting.

Nowhere are these conflicts of value judgments more intense than in
the impact of the chemical industry, transforming agriculture and decimating
predators at the top of the food chain. Satisfaction that we had the research
skill and the will to stop short of a pesticide disaster is akin to the
discovery that it is pleasant to stop banging one’s head against a wall.

Weightman’s cheerful report, written to support a television series,
is always in danger of a simplistic selectivity, but it is at any rate a
welcome reminder that nature is a tough old dame with a long-practised technique
of survival. There is a belated realism in the final questions he poses,
‘whether or not industrialism generates the means, through science and political
awareness, to control its own destructiveness’. Myself, I still have my
melancholy moments.

Desmond Hawkins founded the BBC National History Unit