Non Fiction
Category: Current Affairs, Essays, Non Fiction
Number of pages: 200
ISBN: 9781854111012
Publication date: February 23, 1995
Price: £7.95
Out of stock
In the 1970s, it was ignorance, in the 1980s, enthusiasm, and from the 1990s environmental issues were greeted with a peculiar fatalism. Green Agenda, the first popular volume of its type to be published in Wales, confronts head on our ideas of what constitutes ’the environment’ and how we perceive it. These essays acknowledge the danger of allowing environmental concern to flourish within a green ghetto, the perils of over-speculation, the banality of ’issues’.
In a developed world where it is political suicide to suggest that we are living beyond our means, and where established campaign organisations have become obsessed with self-image, Green Agenda suggests new ways of looking at the environment, both in Wales and further afield. Here are the leading environmental writers in Wales addressing matters that affect us all – transport, energy, planning, agriculture. But even as it highlights the importance of established threats such as acidification and increased traffic, Green Agenda anticipates a future in which the most pressing matters will include the consequences of the abandonment of the work ethic in favour of the leisure principle; media pollution, and the ever-expanding ability of computer technology to map and exploit the planet’s people and resources.
The volume also stresses the meaninglessness of ’environmentalism’ if it is not integrated within a local cultural context.
Green Agenda does not pretend to have the answers. But the questions it asks are some of the most important now confronting Wales and the world.
Robert Minhinnick
Robert Minhinnick is one of Wales’ (some would say Britain’s) most eminent writers. He is a multi-prizewinning poet, essayist and novelist; his most recent poetry collection was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2017 and won Wales Book of the Year, which he has won three times. Two of his novels have been shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. He edited Poetry Wales for ten years. Minhinnick is also an environmentalist and founder of Friends of the Earth Cymru and Sustainable Wales who has written extensively on the environment.
His debut novel Sea Holly (2007) was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2008. Robert’s second novel Limestone Man (2015) is a gripping story of a man who tries to connect past and present yet is haunted by dreams of Australia and his youth. His novel Nia was longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019
He edited Gorwelion: Shared Horizons (2021) a book of essays about climate change. His latest non-fiction book Delirium was published by Seren (2021).
