Surely one of the most interesting of all environmental columnists is George Monbiot of The Guardian, who this week penned a luminous tribute to the great "peasant poet" John Claire.
Clare found great success in his youth, but saw his beloved coutryside divvied up by enclosure and, argues Monbiot, it drove Clare crazy. Into the asylum, in fact.
What Clare suffered was the fate of indigenous peoples torn from their land and belonging everywhere. His identity crisis, descent into mental agony and alcohol abuse, are familiar blights in reservations and outback shanties the world over. His loss was surely enough to drive almost anyone mad; our loss surely enough to drive us all a little mad.
For while economic rationalisation and growth have helped to deliver us from a remarkable range of ills, they have also torn us from our moorings, atomised and alienated us, sent us out, each in his different way, to seek our own identities. We have gained unimagined freedoms, we have lost unimagined freedoms – a paradox Clare explores in his wonderful poem The Fallen Elm. Our environmental crisis could be said to have begun with the enclosures. The current era of greed, privatisation and the seizure of public assets was foreshadowed by them: they prepared the soil for these toxic crops.
Clare was a poet naturalist the likes of which we are not likely to see again, who wrote poems to meadow grass, to countless birds and their nest,to insects, walks, crickets and hedgehogs, memory and the past...
The past there lies in that one word
Joys more than wealth can crown
Nor could a million call them back
Though muses wrote them down
The sweetest joys imagined yet
the beautys that surpast
the dearest joys man ever met
are all among the past...
[image from Tim Oliver]
