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.