Afterword

Summary

In the 1980s, when Hamilton Finlay's garden was coming to maturity, another Scottish poet created an institution aimed at regaining poetry's relationship with the natural world. The International Institute of Geopoetics in Paris was launched in 1989 by Glasgow-born Kenneth White, then Professor of Twentieth-Century Poetics at the Sorbonne. Geopoetics was a response to the fact that ‘it was becoming more and more obvious that the earth (the biosphere) was in danger and that ways, both deep and efficient, would have to be worked out in order to protect it’, and that what was required was a return to ‘the richest poetics’ which ‘came from contact with the earth, from a plunge into biospheric space, from an attempt to read the lines of the world’. White linked his project to a tradition which included Patrick Geddes, but through Geddes ‘geopoetics’ was linked to a much longer tradition of Scottish environmentalism that went back to Scottish concerns with the consequences of deforestation, an issue that became urgent in many parts of the British Empire. as a result of the ruthless exploitation of natural resources.

One of the most important contributors to the understanding of deforestation was John Croumbie Brown, born in Haddington (1808–95), who started to research the impact of deforestation while a missionary in South Africa in the 1840s, and wrote numerous books on forestry after returning to Scotland to train in botany. Brown's theories had a significant impact on influential botanists such as Joseph Hooker, whose father had been Professor of Botany at Glasgow University from 1820 till 1841, and who followed his father as head of Kew Gardens in 1865. Hooker spent the summer of 1877 in California, collecting plant speciments with John Muir (born Dunbar, 1838 –1914), who had just begun his career as an environmental campaigner and who, by the early 1900s, would convince US President Theodore Roosevelt to establish National Parks to protect the ‘wilderness’ and the ancient sequoia forests of California. Six years earlier, in 1871, Muir had been visited by America's greatest writer and thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, at a time when Muir was living in isolation in the Californian forests: ‘I have everywhere testified to my friends, who should also be yours,’ Emerson wrote, ‘my happiness in finding you – the right man in the right place – in your mountain tabernacle’.