Different Shades of Green : A Dark Green Counterculture in Ted Hughes's Crow

This essay argues that Crow, a collection of poems by Ted Hughes published in 1970, forms part of a countercultural movement that began to emerge in the 1960s and that continues to find new forms in the current century. In the form it takes in Crow, this movement protests against a relationship between humans and nature based on a primarily Christian world view combined with what it considers an exaggerated belief in science and technology. This combination and its relation to environmental crisis was first addressed by Lynn White in his classical article from 1967, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis”. This analysis attempts to demonstrate that the Crow poems, written in the years immediately following the publication of White’s article, express a similar set of ideas in poetic form. Hughes goes a step further than White, and envisions an alternative, spiritual rather than religious, framework for the nature‐human relationship. This alternative is characterised as part of a counterculture described by Bron Taylor in Dark Green Religion. According to Taylor, dark green religion defines a variant of environmentalism based on a spiritual view of nature (similar but not identical to deep ecology). This essay suggests that Hughes’s Crow is a version of this counterculture.QC 20150203