Novelists who use environmentalism tend to turn it into the premise for dystopian fantasies, as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, but lately it’s started creeping into more realist fictions, too. The book is full of ideas – about root systems, computer games, actuarial science but there's a cost to this plurality As Keats once wrote: “Scenery is fine – but human nature is finer.” The real point of nature was to go out in it and have a feeling it was a necessary luxury of the poetic classes. The Romantics believed in the rehabilitating powers of nature, but there was always a streak of escapism that undermined their political seriousness. Of course, there’s a long tradition of what might be called “environmental” writing. These days he might have been tempted to apply it to environmentalism.
It’s a kind of litmus test for the health of a worldview – to measure the art it produces. Any political view, no matter how useful or right, that can’t persuade artists to make good art out of it, has real problems. Regardless of what we think of Auden, Orwell has a point. He goes on to say that “the high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist Literature, is WH Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling, and the even feebler poets who are associated with him” – trying to kill two perfectly good birds with one slightly childish stone. I n The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell complains that “artists of any consequence can never be persuaded into the Socialist fold … Nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad.” He calls this fact “disastrous”.
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