Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 141

The impulse behind publication of this memorial volume was not simply to celebrate the life and writings of Robert Waller (1913–2005). There was also, clearly, a fear that without this book Waller’s work would soon be entirely forgotten. Many of those who knew Waller felt he should be given a wider – or second – airing, and so the historian of the British organic movement, Philip Conford, has put together a wide-ranging collection of Waller’s essays, journalism, fiction and poetry as well as reminiscences offered by friends and family.

The result is eclectic, with some useful nuggets for those interested in how agricultural industrialization was (unsuccessfully) resisted during the second half of the twentieth century as well as in the emergence of a British environmental movement during the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, historians seeking to track the development of the BBC in south-west England may find this volume helpful.

Waller was not from farming stock, growing up in south London and spending his early adulthood attending philosophy lectures, writing poetry that attracted considerable praise, and flirting with the likes of Sonia Brownell (later Sonia Orwell). A move to Bristol in 1949, where his work for the BBC included producing farming programmes, prompted the flowering of Waller’s enduring interest in ecology and a belief in the urgent need for humanity to reform its ways in order to life within environmental limits.

During this period Waller met grassland scientist Sir George Stapledon, and was influenced strongly by Stapledon’s ideas about ‘human ecology’. In 1962, Waller’s biography of Stapledon, Prophet of the New Age, was published. Amongst Waller’s agricultural writings excerpted in this memorial volume is a 1950 essay written for the anti-communist journal The Catacomb, in which Waller argues against over-reliance on food imports, particularly frozen meat from nations as distant as Australia. ‘If we wish to increase our meat ration we must improve our marginal lands … First, what are the marginal lands? It is the land where meat that ought to be eaten unfrozen is not raised’ (p.91).

Later, Waller served as editor of the Soil Association’s quarterly journal. This was during the years following publication of Rachel Carson’s anti-pesticide tract Silent Spring, when for the first time since the Second World War the proponents of industrial agriculture found themselves on the intellectual back foot. As editor Waller widened the scope of the Soil Association’s editorial output to include the full range of issues that lay at the heart of a then-emerging environmental movement. In this section of Poet of Ecology, Conford includes recollections from individuals involved in the organic and environmental movements, including Michael Allaby and Ecologist magazine founder Edward Goldsmith. These recollections offer a wealth of detail about social networks and the intellectual perspective of key environmentalists of the day.

The extracts from Waller’s ‘green’ writing serve as an excellent reminder of the ‘radical’ nature of the post-war environmental movement. Environmentalists were not merely seeking to tinker at the edges. They were idealists who envisaged profound societal change. Although uniquely his own, Waller’s writings are also characteristic of the British environmental movement of the late twentieth century and, as such, offer assistance in delineating the intellectual history of post-war ecological campaigning.

Like many members of the early Soil Association, Waller’s interests were not earth-bound; he was also a religious man with an apparently wide-ranging curiosity about religious and spiritual traditions and beliefs. Like many supporters of the organic movement, he was highly critical of scientific materialism. Poet of ecology contains much evidence to support the argument that the early organic movement in Britain was home to many with an interest in mysticism and esoteric thought.

Waller’s 1982 booklet, The agricultural balance sheet, written for the Green Alliance and the Conservation Society, is noteworthy, offering trenchant and still-relevant arguments about the hidden inefficiencies of industrial agriculture. Meanwhile, an article for the Ecologist cynically describes the post-war agricultural revolution:

… in the 1950s a doctrine of salvation for agriculture was proclaimed, that ‘Farming is a business not a way of life’. Eager young graduates like missionaries visited farms for the National Agricultural Advisory Service with the new gospel … Human needs and traditional practices were subordinated to an all-embracing, irrefutable principle known as efficiency … All cultural values, such as beauty of landscape, humus content of the soil and so on had to take second place … You could in fact farm too well to be efficient and survive within the prevailing framework of economic efficiency. And economics, being a science, had proven laws which only an irrational person would defy.

As many contributors to this memorial volume note, Robert Waller had few kind words to say about rationalism. This does not mean his writings are not clear and powerful – they are often both – and, while they are original they are also representative of the counter-culture movements of the day, making them historically relevant.