ABSTRACT
I first consciously heard, or rather misheard, the word ‘ecology’ some thirty years ago, from the mouth of Stuart Hall whom I was interviewing for a radio station. We were talking about the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, first under the aegis of Richard Hoggart, and then the new direction it was taking under Stuart Hall once Hoggart had left to become the Assistant Director-General of the UNESCO. In describing the Centre’s approach to youth subcultures Stuart referred to the local school as an institution where the dominant and the subordinate cultures intersected. While the dominant culture penetrated into working-class life by means of the teacher and the syllabus, the ‘school was yet a part of the parent culture of the working class, part of the neighbourhood, part of the ecology of working-class life’ (cf. Hall 1977). This actually came across to me as the ‘economy’ of working-class life, which didn’t make much sense but had a more familiar ring. I now wince with embarrassment at my ignorance. To talk about Cultural Studies at the time was to talk not only about
Hoggart and Hall, but also about Raymond Williams. A cross-section of Williams’ work had appeared in German translation1 almost simultaneously with the said radio interview.2 More to the purpose here, 1976 was also the year of publication of Williams’ lexicon of Keywords, in which, however, one looks in vain for an entry on ecology or environment. Williams remedied this in a later edition of the book, but the omission, and my own misunderstanding, may be taken as symptomatic of a lack of felt urgency of these matters. And one could also cite here the New Left Review interviews conducted with Williams in 1977 and published two years later as Politics and Letters. None of the interviewers – Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern – took the author up on environmental issues. Clearly such an agenda, far less a materialist literary or cultural criticism with a ‘green’ awareness, was just not the order of the socialist day. One reason for the Left’s aloofness from ‘green’ issues may have been
the rightwing domination of the ecological debate spilling over from the United States where, following Rachel Carson’s eye-opener Silent Spring
(1962), such influential publications as Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s handbook Population, Resources, Environment (1970) had expressed white middle-class fears of overpopulation and the Club of Rome’s The Limits of Growth (1972), authored at the MIT, had come straight from managerial concerns about the future of capitalism. Both typically discussed ecological matters in terms of Spaceship Earth. Yet, in retrospect, it is evident that in The Country and the City (1973)
Williams had provided a range of topics, demarcated areas of research and discussed authors that were to figure prominently in the ecocritical debates of the 1990s: the historicizing of ‘nature’ and nature writing, the theory of pastoral, urban-rural relations, John Clare and ‘A language that is ever green’, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas. And even while he was writing this second opus magnum, Williams displayed his acute sensitiveness to the natural and the man-made habitat in a lecture on ‘Ideas of Nature’ delivered in 1971 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and published a year later in a collection entitled Ecology: The Shaping Enquiry.3
