Global Environmentalism

Abstract

If other scholars (Gifford 2018) have argued that Hughes’s global environmental awareness developed during the 1980s, this chapter shows that Hughes had long written about the afflictions of the entire earth. Earlier examples of global awareness include his article ‘The Environmental Revolution’ (1970), his post-colonial play The Tiger’s Bones (1974), and his fable of overhunting ‘The Head’ (1978). His letters and campaigns tackle international problems, such as the decline of the Atlantic salmon in the 1980s, and his writing engages fully with the global problem of climate change in the 1990s. This chapter shows how Hughes’s Tales from Ovid (1997) is ‘ecologised’ to a greater extent than Jonathan Bate (2000) or Keith Sagar (Sagar 2009) have realised: it imagines the droughts and floods that might occur during an advanced stage of climate change. In the 1980s, Hughes was also writing elegies for species that were becoming extinct. ‘The Black Rhino’ elegises a vanishing species, while raising funds for the charity Rhino Rescue. Deploying work on the ecological elegy by Timothy Morton and David Gilcrest, this chapter analyses a sequence of Hughes's environmental elegies from Wolfwatching (1989).