By Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas, Britain’s first Green MP and, since 2025, the first Professor of Practice in Environmental Sustainability at the University of Sussex, says why English matters so much to her.
In so many ways, political failure can be seen as a failure of imagination. A failure to imagine what it’s like to be in the shoes of someone else – a failure to imagine that a better world is possible.
Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the failure to rise to the challenge of the nature and climate emergencies – which reflects exactly this imagination deficit. It’s not that we don’t have enough scientific knowledge to understand the harm we are doing to this one precious earth. There is more than enough data about the scale of the damage, and already we risk going down in history as the species that spent all its time monitoring its own extinction, rather than taking active steps to avoid it.
It’s not that we don’t have the necessary technology to deploy to protect the earth. Wind, solar, wave solutions are already here; as are batteries, interconnectors, energy efficiency.
What are electricity interconnectors? | National Grid)15 Cool Types of Wind Turbine: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=Wind+Turbine&&mid=49FB8AD9DBB57330347A49FB8AD9DBB57330347A&FORM=VRDGAR
And it’s not that we don’t have enough money to address the crisis. We are one of the richest countries in the world. And can you seriously imagine anyone explaining to their grandchildren that we’re very sorry but we’ve destroyed the earth because ‘we couldn’t afford’ not to? That the cost-benefit analysis didn’t justify acting to protect it?
What we lack isn’t the science, the technology or the money. What we lack is the imagination to genuinely *feel* what we are doing to this one precious earth. And to be able to conjure up a compelling picture of what it would be like to live in harmony with it once again. To be as intertwined with the land as brambles in the bushes.
And this is where the study of English literature comes in. Literature is the way we exercise the muscle of the imagination. Through literature, we are helped to experience what it’s like to connect emotionally with the loss of the natural world – and to imagine its restoration.
And unless we can imagine a greener, fairer world, we’ll struggle to achieve it.
A world where all of us can thrive, alongside the many extraordinary species with whom we’re privileged to share this one precious planet. A world where the wildness of the natural world is protected, restored, celebrated and loved.
Listen to the plea from one of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins:
“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”.(Poetry By Heart | Inversnaid)
The alliteration creates a lush, rolling sound that mirrors the richness of the natural world; the repetition underlines the sense of longing and entreaty; the rhyme creates a flowing rhythm that reflects nature’s vitality.
The UK is meant to be a nation of nature lovers. David Attenborough has more moral authority than all the MPs in the land rolled together. And yet, famously, we are one of the most nature depleted countries in the world.
How on earth has that happened?
I’d argue that, in large part, it’s due to a failure of imagination. And that a study of English literature is precisely the way we can reverse it.
Caroline Lucas published Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story in 2025 (ISBN: 978-1804941591).
Chapter 6 looks at the poems of John Clare in particular and what they reveal about the importance of our relationship to the land.
Caroline also recommends:
Letters to the Earth: Writing to a Planet in Crisis (2019), with an introduction by Emma Thompson (https://www.letterstotheearth.com/book)
And Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You (2025) (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/wild-service-9781526673299/ with chapters from lots of the people involved in the Right to Roam campaign.
‘I particularly love’ she writes, ‘the lines of Jon Moses where he says “we’ve become a lonely species, unstitched from the tapestry of life.”’
David Attenborough’s most recent documentary is Wild London, exploring the wildlife of his home city; it’s available here: Wild London – BBC iPlayer
