Our Place review - damning indictment of Britons' ecological complacency

Mark Cocker delivers a blistering attack on the country's collective failure to protect its landscape and wildlifeAt the beginning of Our Place, Mark Cocker sets out his vision of the kind of book he's trying to write. Springing out of his attempts to steward five acres of sodden fenland in the floodplain of the river Yare in Norfolk, he says he wants to compose a work that interweaves "an autobiographical narrative of place and a historical exploration of how and why the British countryside has come to look as it does". Like any great book - and this is a seriously great book, important and urgent - Our Place does so much more than merely fulfil its author's admittedly wide-ranging aims. It is an elegy for a beloved landscape, an anguished lament, a manifesto, a call to arms.Cocker steps rather carefully around the subject of Brexit and his rallying cries are directed more to the people of Britain than to its politicians, but that shouldn't mask the fact that this is a radical and polemical work in the tradition of those figures from the past and present that Cocker calls on throughout the book: Cobbett, Hazlitt, Wendell Berry, Marion Shoard. Continue reading...