Fifteen Eighty Four

While the society began with economic arguments for the “value” of placing nature in “trust” for future generations, it was not until activists moved towards a rhetoric of recovery and regeneration for a suffering nation that the case for nature protection resonated with a larger public in the interwar years and during postwar reconstruction. Making this shift intelligible, as I argue in my book Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery, required not only work from activists, but also the aesthetic innovations of artists and writers like Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Chinua Achebe, and many others, to critique the psychosomatic effects of modernization.

Suffering from the sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, Charles Rothschild took his own life in 1923. His land, Woodwalton Fen, became one of the first nature reserves in the United Kingdom. After a few train transfers, a bus ride, and a short walk, I enter the fen on a cool and rainy summer day. Despite the fatigue of travel, I feel a surge of energy. The rain lets up and the lush green comes alive with flowers, birds, insects, and even a few cows.

Woodwalton Fen (Photo courtesy of the author)

While it is tempting to feel transported back to the marshes of England’s pre-industrial past, a microcosm of the setting D. H. Lawrence transforms in his novel The Rainbow, the fen’s existence alongside agricultural land, industrial quarries, and wind farms speaks to the complicated amalgamation of humans and nature that defines life in the Anthropocene. Modernist writers explored this entanglement avant la lettre through a rejection of idealized nature in favor of immersive, psychological, and material engagements with environment.

After working on a project for many years, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Archival research at The National Archives, The Museum of English Rural Life, The Wildlife Trusts, and many libraries brought the book to life. At the same time, watching the wind move through the reeds, it is obvious that the land itself is a text too: one that tells a story of people struggling to articulate the importance of environmental care to bring relief, recovery, and renewal to a modern world obsessed with speed, profit, and consumption.

Exhausted Ecologies by Andrew Kalaidjian