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Waste

What do farmyard pigs eat? Easy answer, you might think: they eat swill. They clean up after us, chomping on trough after trough of our potato peelings, carrot tops, sour milk and stale bread. In...

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Edward Goldsmith, 1928 - 2009

I was very sad to hear last week of the death of Teddy Goldsmith, one of this country’s pioneering greens, and a man I knew personally and worked with for a time. Teddy was a curious paradox of a man....

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From Munich to Copenhagen

I wonder how many more people will have to be rescued from their cottages with military helicopters, and how many more A-roads will have to collapse into the torrents beneath, and how many more...

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Oak, ash and thorn

The English, notoriously, have a blind spot when it comes to their myths, the legends of their past and their people, their folk tales and their origins. This is not something that could be said of...

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England is the unheard word

English governance is a canker at the heart of our crumbling constitution. England is the place where 80% of the electorate lives and votes, yet nobody ever talks about it. In all the talk of...

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Confessions of a recovering environmentalist

Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. We are not environmentalists now because we have an...

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Progress and the land

You are a nimby, a reactionary and a Romantic idiot. You want to go back to a Golden Age, in which you can play at living in prettified village poverty because you have never experienced the real...

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Journey to the Dark Mountain

I’m going to try now to explain what the Dark Mountain project is – how it came about ’ what it is for ’ and where it is going? I say ‘try’ because one thing I have discovered about Dark Mountain is...

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An untutored townsman's invasion of the country

In all this, of course, I am very English. Ronald Blythe pinned down the vague feeling that so many of us townies have in his classic work of rural reportage Akenfield back in the late sixties. ‘The...

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The Poet and the Machine

Be a poppy then, in the face of the Machine? It seems, to me, a good task to set myself. To wait and learn and save and sow seeds and wait for them to flower, knowing that they may not do so in my...

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A relaunch

It’s been a long time since I wrote this blog. I’ve been distracted by other things: the Dark Mountain Project, various book ideas, moving to Cumbria, having kiddies … it seems to be an alarmingly...

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The Quants and the Poets

The green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challenge which must be overcome with...

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Austerity is for the English

Here is a question for St George’s Day: how should England respond to the government’s austerity agenda? If it sounds like an odd question, it is only because we never ask it. Austerity will affect...

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The sole business of poetry

What use can writing possibly be in a world like this? And what, in particular, can poetry do? How can experiments in heightened language possibly have anything to say about this great Vanishing –...

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The Salmon God

The late Glyn Hughes summed up his work – the historical novels, the travel books, the semi-autobiographies, the volumes of poetry – as ‘a protest on behalf of nature’.

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Upon the Mathematics of the Falling Away

Suicide is everywhere in this culture, under every stone, and once you come to be a part of that great, unspeaking clan of people who have been touched by it, you see this.

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The space between writing and doing

Writing is not just an activity. Writing is a way of being. Poetry, in particular, requires a certain stillness, some time, some space, inner and outer. It requires reflection, contemplation, input,...

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This collapse is a 'crisis of Bigness'

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it

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Wound down

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Burns and Barnes: a tale of two Poets

The differing fates of two dialect poets may tell us something about the differing priorities of England and Scotland.

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