Greens – now and then

James Woudhuysen, in a programme on BBC Radio 4 and an accompanying article on spiked, contrasts nineteenth century greens with those of today. For Woudhuysen nineteenth-century romantic poets such as John Clare, Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth at least had an idea of human transcendence:

“Altogether, we can forgive much in the nineteenth-century greens. At least they were confronting industrialisation in its infancy and adolescence: though their reactions were often impulsive, they retained a basic faith in humanity. By contrast, today’s environmentalists are so weary and ignorant about industrialisation, they seem only able to condemn it, and all the human beings they deem perpetrators of the process.”