Lucio: Why, how now Claudio! whence comes this restraint?
Claudio: From too much liberty my Lucio; liberty,
As surfeit, is the father of much fast;
So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint..
(Shakespeare, Measure for Measure Act 1 Scene 2 )
What we can call ‘greenery’ is all about ordering one’s life. It is about how to live in our common home; to be green it is not necessary to be a Christian. An eclectic mix of cosmology and apocalyptic speculation, politics and sheer commonsense, make up what Germaine Greer has called the ‘Tyranny of the Green Religion’. This embodies both criticism and hope and, more immediately, a call to change the minutiae of one’s life in the face of a perceived threat to that life. In the face of massive pollution outside the private sphere of influence we are trying, rather desperately perhaps, to rediscover personal ways of becoming clean. Ironically, this might be achieved by romantically rediscovering the organic, the soil, dirt, clay itself, the natural, the given in the face of the man made; an attempt to place the moral and political orders once more in the context of the natural order.