Column: Larkin’s environment challenge rings more true than ever

The poet Philip Larkin was invited to write a prologue in verse. The result was not quite as bland as the Government had expected.

The poem was called ‘Going, Going’. The very title indicated where he was heading.

We all know the auctioneer’s refrain: ‘Going, going, gone.’

The poem begins: ‘I thought it would last my time –/The sense that, beyond the town,/There would always be fields and farms…’

He had, he tells us, always assumed that even if our towns were ruined – old streets and buildings destroyed, to be replaced by ‘bleak high-risers’ and ‘split level shopping’ – there remained the chance to get away to the open countryside. ‘We can always escape in the car’.

But the escape only confirms his sense of a larger problem: ‘The crowd/Is young in the M1 cafe;/Their kids are screaming for more /More houses, more parking allowed.’

Essentially, reflects Larkin, the trouble is that we assume the natural world is resilient to our irresponsibility: ‘Things are tougher than we are, just /As earth will always respond /However we mess it about; /Chuck filth in the sea, if you must: /The tides will be clean beyond.’ We are wrong.

That said, he concedes that much of the damage is not deliberate. As he concludes: ‘Most things are never meant. /This won’t be, most likely; but greeds /And garbage are too thick-strewn /To be swept up now, or invent / Excuses that make them all needs. /I just think it will happen, soon.’

So that was the early 1970s. What about the 2020s? There have been many reports on the state of our countryside. A recurrent charge is that the UK’s destruction of the natural environment is one of the worst in the world.

Typical insights are as follows:

The traditional smallholding has almost disappeared, to be replaced by a large-scale agricultural model involving almost universal use of pesticides and ripping up of remaining hedges.

Wild places are disappearing at an alarming rate, thanks to the encroachment of major roads, train-lines, housing and general ‘development’.

Plastic pollution is killing a huge variety of marine species, and sewage discharge in rivers is escalating.

There are 73 million fewer birds today than there were in 1970.

Larkin’s challenge rings more true than ever.