ABSTRACT
Thus wrote the Roman poet Juvenal in his Third Satire, Against the Life of the City, in approximately AD 110. There is nothing especially new about dramatic moral contrasts validating the simple virtues of nature’s realm against the corrupting characteristics of the urban condition, and such notions can be found amongst antecedents as varied as the Sophists, the Stoics, the popular medieval ballads of sylvan liberty, various agrarian styles of republicanism and, of course, the Romantics. But though all these traditions may be tapped into by modern greens, the rise of a politics explicitly and self-consciously centred upon the moral importance of non-human nature is a recent phenomenon, a product of the distinctive problems and possibilities of modern society, and as the editors of this volume know well, as recently as a decade ago many academics regarded this novelty, green politics, as a passing fad.
