Over the years I’ve written essays, features, news reports, opinion pieces, interviews and other things that can’t be easily classified.
I’ve interviewed names such as Noam Chomksy, David Attenborough and Arundhati Roy, reported from several continents and given talks to conferences and festivals. In the process I’ve written for most of the Fleet Street broadsheets, the occasional tabloid and most of the big political weeklies. But the work I’ve found more interesting has been for more specialist outlets, such as the the Ecologist, of which I used to be deputy editor, Adbusters, The Land or my own publication, Dark Mountain.
I’ve also written articles for the programmes of plays and contributed chapters to books about radical politics, English icons and the enchantment of rivers. It’s this kind of thing – more particular, more contemplative – that contains the essence of what I do, and it’s the kind of thing I tend to focus on these days.
Below is a good selection of my best work from the last fifteen years. Start at the bottom and work your way up and you can follow the development of my ideas, my writing skills, my eccentricity and my ability to get commissioned by publications that sometimes even pay.
(I’m still in the process of transferring articles here from my old website and various other cyber-places. It’s taking a while! If you want something that you can’t yet find here, try looking on my old site)
Burns and Barnes: a tale of two Poets
Published in the Guardian, 25 January 2012
The differing fates of two dialect poets may tell us something about the differing priorities of England and Scotland.
This collapse is a 'crisis of Bigness'
Published in the Guardian, 26 September 2011
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
Upon the Mathematics of the Falling Away
Published in Dark Mountain issue 2, June 2011
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.
The Salmon God
Published in Dark Mountain issue 2, June 2011
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’.
The sole business of poetry
A talk given at the Tagore Festival in Devon, May 2011
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 – this gathered storm beginning to break on the shores of our civilisation?
Austerity is for the English
Published in the Guardian, 22 April 2011
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 the whole of the UK, but most of its blows are landing on England.
The Quants and the Poets
Published on the Dark Mountain blog, 21 April 2011
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 technological solutions guided by the neutral gaze of Science, has forced it into a ghetto from which it may never escape.The Poet and the Machine
Published on the Dark Mountain blog, 15 February 2011
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 lifetime. In an age of loss, our task is surely to keep safe what we can when the Machine passes…An untutored townsman's invasion of the country
Published in The Land, November 2010
Last autumn, I moved from the city to the country. After fifteen years in Oxford, and with a young daughter now in tow, my wife and I shifted ourselves to a rented former barn on a hill farm in south Cumbria. It had been long in the planning, and it’s intended to be the first stage in a process which will lead us to…
Journey to the Dark Mountain
A talk given at the Big Tent Festival in Scotland, July 2010
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 that it is curiously hard to explain. Often people ask me what it is, expecting a short summary, and I find that…
Progress and the land
Published in The Idler, June 2010
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 thing. You are a privileged, bourgeois escapist. You dream of a prelapsarian rural idyll because you can’t cope with the modern multicultural, urban reality. You are a…
Confessions of a recovering environmentalist
Published in Dark Mountain 1, May 2010
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 emotional reaction to the wild world. In this country, most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called ‘sustainability’. What…
England is the unheard word
Published in Comment is Free, April 2010
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 constitutional reform ’ a suddenly popular subject ’ we have heard nothing from our politicians about the English Question: why is England the only UK nation whose people have…
Oak, ash and thorn
Published in the programme for the play 'Jerusalem', January 2010
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 any of the other peoples of the British Isles. The Scots and the Irish share Cúchulainn and the legends of Finn, and celebrate any number of ancient and…
From Munich to Copenhagen
Published on Comment is Free, November 2009
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 National Trust tea rooms will have to be submerged under eight feet of water before we can grasp that the future is not behaving in the way it was supposed…
Waste
Published in the Independent, 17 July 2009
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 return, we turn them into bacon. Ungrateful, perhaps, but a system of mutual reliance which has worked across Europe for millennia.
The upper Thames
Commissioned for the anthology 'Caught by the River', published by Cassell in 2009
If the lower Thames ’ the docks, the capital, the estuary, the tide ’ is the world, the upper Thames is home. If the London wharves and the Cutty Sark represent the England of bombast and conquest ’ Empire and redcoats and capitalism and the White Man’s Burden ’ then Northmoor Lock and Tadpole Bridge represent an England that is older than that, and…
Singing for their supper
Published in the Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2009
Ed, Will and Ginger are three men in their mid-twenties who have embarked on a journey both remarkable and ordinary. They are walking the length and breadth of Britain , singing as they go. As they walk they are picking up more songs ’ the traditional songs of this island ’ from people they meet, and passing them on to others.
A line in the green sand
Published in The Guardian, 10th February 2009
Last week, the government published a shortlist of five potential schemes for harnessing the tidal power of the river Severn, in the interests of providing renewable electricity. It is no secret which of them is favoured in Whitehall . As ever, it is the biggest one: a ten-mile long mega-barrage which would cost £14bn and could generate 5% of Britain ’s power.
Obama the archetype
Published on Granta.com, November 2008
Obama’s archetypal status is not just about his race. It is also about his youth, his oratorical power, his good looks, the generation he represents. Just look at him: watch him move, listen to him speak. It’s hard not to be impressed. It’s also hard to remember precisely what he’s saying
Set in Prociono and Linden Hill Italic, both by Barry Schwartz.
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