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The spectre of Spengler

Oswald Spengler. Woodcut by Bertrand Zadig
WADE SMITH revisits Decline of the West, and its critics

To paraphrase a famous Tory lexicographer, a death-sentence concentrates the mind wonderfully. People are born, flourish, weaken, and pass away, but so do nations and empires. Although the comparison is metaphorical, the phenomenon is real.

Surely the gradual crumbling of Great Britain from Lord Salisbury’s imperial zenith to Ed Miliband’s imbecile zero is undeniable. It fits into a general Euro-American deterioration, exacerbated by welfare-dependence, industrial unrest and defence-alliance disarray. Consequently, a revival of interest has occurred over questions of historical change, and in its successive commentators, from Plato and Polybius, through Ibn Khaldun and Giambattista Vico, to Paul Kennedy and Paul Cooper.

Overshadowing them all is Oswald Spengler, who died 89 years ago this May. His huge work on “Western decline” drew admirers. Nirad Chaudhuri called it “one of the greatest books of our time.” Henry Kissinger saw it as an “attempt at the resolution of the problems of existence,” while Fernand Braudel praised “its tone, the breadth of its views, its passion for understanding.” Christopher Dawson wrote that “Spengler wishes to make the present generation conscious of the crisis through which it is passing and of the true task that lies before it.”

However, the well-known historian Niall Ferguson, under the impression that Spengler had been influenced by Wagner (it was actually Goethe), once asserted that his “turgid” prose was nowadays seldom read [1]. But his giant Geist has rematerialized – to haunt the current geostrategic gloom of international trade turmoil and knife-edge security risks.

Many references to Spengler have lately appeared in print journalism, scholarly monographs, timely podcasts and specialist websites, from Professor David Engels [2] to Professor Stephen R. L. Clark [3].  His early historical studies and family photos have been publicised. The glib dismissal of his magisterial oeuvre as a ‘gargantuan horror-scope’ ceases to amuse in the world he so accurately predicted.

Recent books include the richly researched, indispensable Oswald Spengler & the Politics of Decline, by the Marxist scholar Dr Ben Lewis, on his principled “Prussian” activism and mutual incompatibility with Hitler, who (I discovered) specifically denounced him in a public address on May Day 1935. The Decline & Fall of Civilisations is a considerable survey from the prolific and idiosyncratic writer Dr Kerry Bolton, who endorses Spengler’s suggestion of the next major Culture emerging from the Russian landscape. Especially important is his place among Dr Neema Parvini’s constructively analytical Prophets of Doom, alongsideGobineau, Carlyle, Brooks Adams, Glubb Pasha, Evola, Sorokin, Toynbee, Turchin and Tainter. Ulrik Rasmussen’s relevant Fall of Western Civilization: The Cycle of Supremacy also deserves close attention.

Spengler began life near the Harz mountains and his heart finally failed in Munich when only fifty-five. His masterwork on the downslide of Occidental civilisation was conceived before and partly written during the first world war. Its so-called “cyclic” theme, preceded by the Slavophile Nikolai Danilevsky’s Russia & Europe, and echoed, less substantially, by the Anglo-Saxons Flinders Petrie [4] and Correa Moylan Walsh [5], made a dramatic impact and engendered serious debate in his defeated Fatherland.

The sinking-sun imagery powerfully evoked by its “Teutonic Title” was attenuated as Decline of the West in an excellent translation for English-speakers, whose more subdued response, admirably documented by John Carter Wood [6], in some cases recalls a notorious lordly dismissal of Gibbon’s narrative about the fall of Rome as just another scribbled tome. A contemporary classicist, E. H. Goddard, nonetheless ably supported its fundamental cross-cultural alignments with corresponding pull-out civilisation timetables [7].

I first encountered this book in the library of my then 430-year-old former grammar-school in Walthamstow. Its thick black spine made a welcome contrast to its Left Book Club amber-cover shelf-companions; and its fascinating contents likewise. My adolescent appetite was promptly reinforced by seemingly corroborative material in Geoffrey Barraclough’s History in a Changing World, Eric Bentley’s Cult of the Superman, Amaury de Riencourt’s Coming Caesars and Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd.

By an odd coincidence, the late Roger Scruton made a similar youthful discovery, but disappointment with Spengler’s “unscholarly inaccuracy” diminished this conservative intellectual’s approval of his “grim” prognosis. Given the arduous circumstances of its original composition, and the information then available for revision, however, occasional errors are forgivable; several disputed aspects have also since found defenders.

After initially greeting his magnum opus, the anti-Nazi novelist Thomas Mann afterwards recoiled as if handed a demonic grimoire. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg complained that its “morphological view” of destiny denied “race and personality.” Irving Babbitt described the singularly erudite and earnest polymath as a “charlatan of genius.”  Martin Heidegger and Wyndham Lewis attacked him much more thoughtfully, along with established historians. Aurel Kolnai ridiculed his “harsh Olympic coldness,” whereas Theodor Adorno granted the “destructive soothsayer” a nuanced appreciation.

Nevertheless, the book impressed poets like W. B. Yeats, David Jones and Robinson Jeffers, authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Whittaker Chambers, Colin Wilson and Camille Paglia, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, the systems-theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and surprisingly Ludwig Wittgenstein. And it left me personally with a lifelong interest in “philosophies of history.”

Spengler wrote with the eye of an artist and the pen of a poet, producing beautiful passages of keen sensibility, exemplified by his account of infant Christianity:

Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis and Osiris must have seemed [compared] to the still recent story of Jesus [whose utterances resembled] those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world…. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesaret, while all around them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined western society, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy…. The one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation.

This delicate passage appears within a mammoth text, whose martial attitude elsewhere was ironically condemned by communists [8] as brutal advocacy for the Junker aristocrats they sought to eradicate in the “violent overthrow” of existing society and “bloody struggle or extinction,” as Karl Marx expressed it. Even during Spengler’s short literary lifetime, millions perished in the USSR.

He depicted the West as one of eight self-contained Hochkulturen, in addition to the Babylonian, Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Indian, Chinese, Magian, and Classical. Each possesses a distinctive ethos characterised by its cosmology, symbolism and architecture, yet all pass through comparable stages, like the inevitable transition from spring to winter, though without recurrence. We need not discuss pertinent definitions of “civilisation”, as previously covered by Samuel Huntington, Pitirim Sorokin and Naohiko Tonomura, except that Arnold Toynbee responded to the challenge with over 20 “mortal” examples, historians Philip Bagby and Caroll Quigley choosing fewer, and Nicholas Hagger listing 25.

Setting aside Spengler’s own metaphysical “collective-soul determinism”, complex macro-societies often proceed through almost parallel patterns, such as solely waning average intelligence [9]. The empirical examination of the multiple causes of their growth, decay and collapse is a legitimate and rewarding pursuit.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s “environmental features,” Claire & Bill Russell’s “population cycles,” Jim Penman’s “behaviour biodynamics,” David Hackett Fischer’s “price revolutions” and Heiner Rindermann’s “cognitive capital” are among numerous contributions towards a fresh and fruitful development in objective social science, aided by comprehensive data-led websites like Peter Turchin’s valuable Cliodynamica and Seshat.

Several terminal phases have been linked to urban sprawl and congestion, and failing competence and character among the rulers of a largely hedonistic populace. Cluttered with material and mental sewage, the “megalopolis” becomes vulnerable to farmland depletion, infections and addictions, depravity and disability, sectarian discord and organised crime, plus susceptibility to invasion. In 1927 the pacifist Aldous Huxley voiced the fear that industrialisation of numerically greater races could put us at their military mercy. By 1951 Shephard Clough’s economic analysis of the rise and descent of civilisations expected envious outsiders eventually to attack Europe.

The validity of Spengler’s century-old foresight is easily overlooked precisely because of its present familiarity. The literary critic Northrop Frye described at length, fifty years ago, how the “detail of Spengler’s vision is all around us… What [he] said would happen is happening, to a very considerable degree” [10]. Does not parliamentary democracy, for instance, operate by deception, bribery and “shameless flattery,” so that “election affairs” become “games staged as popular self-determination” to suit obscured wealthy interests? “People want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.” Ideological convictions are dissolving into disposable fashions, except for an emergent “second religiousness,” possibly indicated by Gen Z revival of Bible study, and potentially focused on the Holy City of Jerusalem.

Entering the epoch of less heavenly inner-cities and global skyscraper competition, we find, exactly as he said, “primitive instincts” let loose in sexual relations, the “reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds,” “incomprehension of tradition,” the “extinction of great art” and of “courtesy,” “betting and competitions” for excitement,“ alcohol and vegetarianism” as prominent issues, and crucially the “childlessness and ‘race suicide’ of the rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed – and of course not remedied – in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.”

The 1939-45 titanic “war of contending states”, which bypassed Spengler’s ignored warning to Germanic nationalists against “biological antisemitism” and a “Napoleonic adventure in Russia,” shifted the “imperium” from Berlin to Washington, thereby fatally disarranging his anticipated sequence for conclusive contests between “blood” and “money.”  Caesarism today is manifested not in fascist legions, but in the formlessness of American politics, despite ambiguity over machine-technics, financial-flux and armed-force deployment; Musk rather than Mussolini.

His phrase “the world as spoil” neatly applies to impending rare-earth search and supply-lane safety from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and beyond. The invention of “weapons yet unforeseen” has alarmingly accelerated, with continental territories “staked – India, China, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counter-played.” We can match his futurology against reflections by present-day writers like Thomas Frey, Bruno Macaes and Ian Morris, regarding particularly the tumultuous interactions of Putin, Trump, Xi and “great cosmopolitan foci of power.”

Shortly before his death, Spengler further envisaged a devastatingly concurrent underclass and colour conflict. It would make no difference, he explained, if Bolshevism “ceased to dictate”, for “the work goes forward of itself.” Did not this danger arrive, a mere three decades later, from the US New Left “race, gender, class revolution,” subsequently exported as “critical theory” for a “long march” or (more accurately) incremental infiltration, through Western institutions, targeting “white privilege,” “white patriarchy” and “embedded whiteness,” and culminating, for example, in both DEI regulations and BLM rioting?

Perhaps Paris 1968, Brixton 1981, Madrid 2004 and Munich 2025 are pointers. The Network Contagion Research Institute reports a surge in approval of political violence, mainly among left-wing networkers. Effective protection against foreign-community intrusions remains morally paralysed as uncharitable “racism,” despite unabated mass-exodus of the multi-million ‘wretched of the earth,’ aided by profiteering traffickers, in a “nomad century.”

Number-philosopher Philip J. Davis thought his fellow-mathematician from the Kaiserreich classrooms was correct to discern the advent of “theories of everything” in science, and possibly, in the outcome of mass-media and telecommunications, the control “like that of Faust” of human minds by a self-operating computer-system “wrapping the earth with an endless web of delicate forces, currents and tensions.”

Spengler’s refutation of universally inevitable linear “progress” has anyhow been largely vindicated, in my judgement, by the evils of vacuous postmodernism, compulsory multiculturalism and suicidal wokeism [11]. Was he too imaginatively attached, however, to ancient and classical models to follow through his unique insight into the heroic exploration, energetic curiosity and infinite endeavour that typify our exceptional “Faustian” ethos? Maybe our railways will lie ultimately forgotten “as dead as the Roman wall” and monuments “ruined like Memphis,” but the last prolonged turn of the western wheel must entail extensive fulfilment as well as senescent exhaustion.

“Only the future,” observed another academic admirer, Professor John Farrenkopf,

…and not Spengler’s innumerable detractors, is in a position to authoritatively answer the question if mankind is nearing in apocalyptic fashion, whether through nuclear Armageddon, the synergistic interaction of international economic collapse and the explosive North-South conflict, or the intensification of the global ecological crisis, the much-discussed end of history. [12]

Nevertheless, could Western science, which has split the atom and spliced the gene, reached the outer planets and penetrated the brain itself, under sagacious guidance, yet modify our caducity with robotics, ecological management and biological enhancement? “Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” we should at least respect the venerable advice of der Weissager to face up to facts, with fortitude and fidelity to our noblest values.

NOTES

[1] War of the World (2007), p.645; cf. Doom (2022); The Great Degeneration (2014); Civilization (2012)

[2] Oswald Spengler: Introduction au ‘Declin de l’Occident (2024); Spengler: Pensando en el Futuro (2022),&c. The author presides over The Oswald Spengler Society

[3] “New Histories of the World: Spenglerian Optimism,” Philosophical Journal of Conflict & Violence (2022) online

[4] The Revolutions of Civilisation (1911)

[5] The Climax of Civilisation (1917)

[6] “’German foolishness’….Spengler & the Inter-war British Press,” www.academia.edu/3315175, online

[7] Civilisation or Civilisations [with P. A. Gibbons & F. C. S. Schiller] (1926)

[8] E.g. Nikolai Bukharin (1934); cf. Melvin Rader, No Compromise (1939)

[9] Elmer Pendell, Why Civilizations Self-Destruct (1977); Cf. Edward Dutton & Michael Woodley, At Our Wits’ End (2018); Robert Klark Graham, The Future of Man (1981); Raymond Cattell, A New Morality from Science (1972), pp.146-147; Donald Kagan (ed) Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (1962)

[10] “Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited,” Daedalus (Winter, 1974), pp.1-13

[11] Cf. David Ashton, “Decline of the Best?” Council of European Canadians, February 12, 2024, online

[12] John Farrenkopf, “Spengler’s ‘Der Mensch und die Technik’,” German Studies Review (October 1991), p.548; Prophet of Decline (2001)

 ADDENDUM

I have long thought and expressed the view that the exceptional “Faustian” character of our Western civilization would enable its successful prolongation. Since completing the above, I came across an interesting National Interest article online which covered some of the same ground, including a similar thought about that future possibility. This was a welcome coincidence, not plagiarism on my part. Here is that article, by Robert W. Merry, an adapted extract from his 2005 book Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition – Spengler’s Ominous Prophecy – The National Interest

Posted on by Derek Turner

The political landscape

Photo: Derek Turner

Green Albion – Restoring Our Green and Pleasant Land

Various authors, Conservative Environment Network, 2022, 101 pages, free download

DEREK TURNER welcomes a practical contribution to often overheated eco-arguments

Environmental protection is conventionally seen as a ‘leftwing’ concern, because its most voluble advocates are often equally vociferous on what are dismissively called ‘woke’ preoccupations, from asylum-seekers to transsexuals, or EU membership to Scottish independence. Yet there has always been a conservative kind of environmentalism – famously represented by the late Duke of Edinburgh, and his son – although at times in postwar history it has faded from view, sidelined by administrations prioritizing the economy over the environment.

If modern Greens often gravitate in leftwing directions, it is at least partly because from the 1950s on, mainstream conservatism developed a brusque, complacent and unimaginative streak, which held that business, ‘freedom’ and ‘growth’ mattered more than the natural world. Influential opinion-formers and politicians chortled at ‘tree-huggers’, and sometimes even said environmental damage was just Darwinism in action. An effect of this almost Randian reductionism was essentially to abandon a hugely important area of concern (and large swathes of university-educated and younger voters) to the ideological left – which whatever its other shortcomings could see that the environment was not only precious, but priceless.

This was ironic, because during the twentieth century socialist countries had a shameful ecological record. Soviet and Maoist economic, industrial and social practices laid waste their respective ecosystems, whilst in America supposedly retrograde conservatives took some difficult long term decisions, often against the wishes of big business backers. Theodore Roosevelt established the United Forest Service, five national parks, and fifty-one bird reserves. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed both the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, while Ronald Reagan designated more than ten million acres as wilderness. Whatever their other limitations may have been, these could at least see that conservation and conservatism are adjacent conceptually as well as alphabetically.

The natural world, with its blind instinct, harshness, hierarchy, and territoriality is not an obviously congenial area of interest for ‘progressives’ or ‘radicals’, who are usually more concerned with abstract moral values, and believers in human plasticity. Nature is neither egalitarian nor kindly, and examples from what was tellingly called the ‘Animal Kingdom’ lead logically towards a Hobbesian interpretation of the world. Early environmentalists and organic agriculture advocates were more often ‘right’ than ‘left’, seeing animals and landscapes as contributors to, and symbols of, national characters. Into the 2000s, there was a strand of English conservatism which supported hunting as rooted in national history and human nature, epitomised by writers like Robin Page, R W F Poole and Roger Scruton, and the huge, if ultimately unsuccessful, campaigning of the Countryside Alliance. The fact that in most modern Western countries environmental politics have become a kind of leftist reserve says much about the ‘culture war’ fighting capabilities of the West’s conservative parties.

In Britain, there are precedents for the Johnson government’s notable interest in environmental issues from energy policy via gene-edited crops (to reduce fertiliser and pesticide use) to rewilding. David Cameron’s Green stances earned him considerable scorn within his own party and from some in the Conservative press, but like Johnson he was borrowing from old ruralist Tory tradition, and more recent small-c conservative thinkers like Edward Goldsmith, who founded The Ecologist, and was instrumental in the founding of the Green Party. There were political precursors too. Macmillan’s, Eden’s and Major’s governments passed noise abatement and clean air legislation, while Churchill’s created several new National Parks (following the Labour government’s creation of the first, in 1951).

Although Thatcherite neo-liberal policies entailed a hefty environmental price tag – encouragement of conspicuous consumption, the opening up of ecosystems to rapacious corporations, road building, relaxation of planning laws – sometimes they also meant improved environmental protection, as the new private company executives became suddenly accountable to public opinion. Mrs Thatcher took a perhaps surprising interest in global warming, acid rain and pollution. Her aversion to the British coal industry was based at least partly on her knowledge of coal’s environmental impact. In 2012, former Friends of the Earth leader Jonathan Porritt noted marvellingly, ‘Thatcher…did more than anyone in the last sixty years to put green issues on the national agenda.’

In 1989, she told the UN General Assembly, ‘The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out… No single generation has a freehold on the earth.’

These were resonant words from a politician not even the most callow Objectivist could accuse of fuzzy sentimentality, or anti-business sentiment, or ‘big government’ instincts. There were contradictions in her outlook, but something in her sensed that governments have an historic and moral responsibility to protect the landscapes and wildlife which help define the character of the nation they govern. She saw that the Green movement, for all its faults, was addressing real problems. She could also see that the Greens would benefit greatly by the involvement of more down-to-earth ‘Blues’ to represent the legitimate interests of agriculture, industry and landowners, and balance frigid universalism with local attachments, and the ideal with the achievable.

Thatcher’s words are emblazoned along the masthead of the Conservative Environment Network’s (CEN) website, because of their insightfulness, but also because her name is likely to disarm anthropogenic climate-change sceptics, who are drawn almost exclusively from the political Right, from libertarian conservatives to populists in the Farage, Trump and Bolsanaro mould.

Environmental problems can seem intractable, the literature is frequently tedious, and ‘activists’ often smugly jejune. Considerable credit ought therefore to be extended to the politicians who have taken the trouble to contribute to this compendium, which nods at national nostalgia (Blake, Wordsworth, Larkin et al) but also offers practical suggestions on a range of interrelated issues. It is about time that Britain’s long-suffering landscapes were afforded less exploitative kinds of treatment – ‘undevelopment opportunities’, to allow it (and us) to recover.

There are contributions by eleven MPs and one peer on wetlands, peatlands, woodlands, maritime habitats, rivers, and some of the possibilities for UK agriculture in the post-Common Agricultural Policy landscape. The essays are topped by a Foreword by the Minister for Farming, Victoria Prentis, and tailed by an Afterword by Ben Goldsmith, Chair of the CEN, representing the public-spirited family which has done so much in recent years to force responsible environmentalism onto a sometimes reluctant party (Ben’s brother, Zac, is Minister of State for the Pacific and International Environment). It offers an ambitious and thoughtful vision for a renewed environment – even if we suspect much of it may never be realised, amid Brexit, Covid and global insecurity, on top of the usual political vicissitudes.

The Minister hails ‘the biggest changes to farming and land management in 50 years,’ using environmental land management schemes (ELMs) to make agriculture more efficient and improve food security, while increasing biodiversity and protecting existing habitats. Stroud MP Siobhan Baillie speaks of incorporating ‘natural capital’ into Treasury thinking, to restore 100,000 hectares of wetlands as carbon sinks, floodwater repositories, and refuges for rare species – and even as a means of improving mental health. Robert Largan calls for the rewetting of lowland peat where possible, new kinds of crops that can be grown on wetter soils, the banning of peat-based fertilisers, and the prohibition of disposable barbecues, often the cause of devastating moorland fires.

Michael Fabricant wants millions more trees to be planted, plus natural regeneration, and better protection from imported diseases by home-growing saplings – with special provisions for threatened temperate rainforest, and an updating of the Forestry Commission’s century-old charter. Hastings and Rye MP Sally-Ann Hart seeks to encourage coastal (especially saltmarsh) and undersea carbon sequestration, ban bottom trawling in Marine Protected Areas, and action on maritime pollution to increase underwater vegetation and boost fish stocks.

Andrew Selous gives a ‘Christian stewardship’ perspective, setting out ideas to improve management of statutory nature reserves as well as Church and National Trust properties, and improving biodiversity through a new land designation of ‘wildbelt’. He also calls for less intensive farming methods to improve soil and reduce flooding, with reduced grazing and tilling pressures, and using fewer chemicals. Craig Williams, whose Montgomeryshire constituency is threaded by the Severn, envisages an holistic riparian management strategy to cover tributaries and whole watersheds, with better waste management, bankside tree planting and channel restoration to reduce pollution, boost wildlife and reduce flooding.

Anthony Mangnall and Jerome Mayhew draw urgent attention to the financial pressures faced by farmers, but discern possible benefits from Brexit. While welcoming organic methods, they acknowledge these are not applicable to all farmland, and generally mean more expensive food. Rewilding, engaging and useful though it is, is not easily compatible with large scale food production, and needs to be tempered with a ‘land sharing’ approach (which Ben Goldsmith terms ‘wilder farming’). Ideally, their contributions would have been balanced by one making the case for rewilding, but they make valuable suggestions, such as less use of high-carbon chemical fertilisers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and chemical runoff into waterways, and market mechanisms to ensure attempts to contain carbon at home do not lead inadvertently to increased emissions abroad.

Jonathan Djanogly calls arrestingly for expediting cellular meat production – meat grown in laboratories from muscle tissue harvested from living animals. Cellular meat of course entails no animal deaths, far less land use and pollution, and far fewer hormones or other chemicals. This would not replace conventional livestock farming, but could open up huge new markets, especially in Asia, where burgeoning middle classes are demanding ever more meat that at the moment is not always available, or only at great environmental cost.

Baroness Jenkin is concerned with minimising UK food waste – the UK wastes more food than anywhere else in Europe – through better supermarket practices, redistribution of still–edible food to the neediest, more food waste collections by councils (that can then be used to make energy), and – a Thatcherian touch – thriftier household management to simultaneously benefit the planet, and save families money. The government’s ambitious (and hugely controversial) energy policy is scanted in this volume, but Pauline Latham demands an end to the burning of biomass, now known to be not renewable as once thought, in order to lessen air pollution and land use, as well as the carbon released by the removal and burning of trees. Ruth Edwards takes up the bosky theme, with a call for global as well as domestic action on deforestation, building on existing government commitments to bar imports of products like palm oil and soya produced on recently deforested land.

This book overflows with ingenious ideas which, if realised even in part, would go a considerable way towards meeting the objectives of the likes of Extinction Rebellion, without endangering the economy. But there are curious omissions. While it was only to be expected that the huge and complex area of energy policy would need to be treated separately, it is strange to have little or nothing about such matters as plastic pollution, factory farming of animals, the wasteful profligacy of the electronics and fashion industries, eco-building technology, planning laws, or the proper management of parks and verges for wild flowers. One would also have liked some detail on the thinking behind the crop gene-editing legislation presently going through Parliament, and about post-CAP farm finances, especially of smaller farms.

And what about overpopulation? The United Kingdom is already one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and the Office for National Statistics predicts that the present population, of around 68 million, will increase to some 77 million by 2050, largely attributable to immigration. Whatever mitigations may be in place, or whatever fixes may be found, the truth is that more people equals less nature. The government is taking little or no interest in this subject, partly because busy with other matters, but also, one suspects, out of unwillingness. Yet if they do not start to soon, lovers of the British countryside, whether romantic rewilders, pragmatic farmers, well-meaning MPs or weekend walkers, may all ultimately find that their efforts, ideas and inmost emotions are rendered redundant by sheer pressure of people. ‘Greenness’ and ‘pleasance’, and sense of place, can only be located within quietude and space.

It is to be hoped that this admirable caucus will increase our sense of obligation to them by taking up these subjects in subsequent publications.

The booklet can be downloaded from https://www.cen.uk.com/green-albion