Our current environmental crisis, compounded by a significant resistance to the clear signs of ecological degradation, suggests that it is an opportune time to revisit the insights and the forewarnings that W. H. Hudson articulated so thoughtfully over a century ago. This session not only frames the work of Hudson as an important early voice in environmental criticism but also underscores the significance of his work in understanding our current eco-predicament.

What sets Hudson’s writing apart from his contemporaries is a commitment to the natural world that he recognized, even then, was under siege. Unlike speculative and fantasy narratives of, say Wells and Haggard, Hudson locates his work in the very real landscapes of both South America and rural England.

Hudson drew attention to the environment and to the price of human destructiveness. His early works of note, The Naturalist in la Plata and Idle Days in Patagonia, were influenced by his experiences in Argentina and they found an audience eager for narratives of exotic nature. The depth of his knowledge of bird life elevated his stature amongst nature readers and within a short period of time, he published major ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology and British Birds; the two publications quickly established him as a naturalist of note. As an émigré, Hudson sought to make his work meaningful to the British experience, and so he broadened his scope in three well-loved books, Hampshire Days, Afoot in England , and Nature in Downland which explored rural England.

Hudson should be remembered as the brilliant forerunner of environmental writing: a relatively new genre, yet in the spirit of Gilbert White’s Selborne. Following White, Hudson’s observations of localized natural history gained meaning and significance for fin-de-siècle readers. It was in Green Mansions that Hudson combined his skill in fiction with his understanding of nature in a novel set in South America. “All Hudson's books,” wrote novelist and playwright John Galsworthy, “breathe this spirit of revolt against our new enslavement by towns and machinery and are true oases in an age so dreadfully resigned to the ‘pale mechanician’."

But even Galsworthy, who also called Hudson a “prophet,” failed to grasp the potency of Hudson’s anxiety about the ineluctable degradation of nature. The papers in this session will focus on the sadly forgotten Hudson with an eye to reinvigorating his reputation, but also to explore two important topics embodied in Hudson’s work. First, of course, is his commitment to environmentalism which leagued Hudson with such luminaries in natural history as Darwin, Wallace, and Humboldt. (But Hudson was also an activist and one of the founders of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.) The second, and less understood, is the perception of Hudson as an exotic—which he fully exploited in his work. Although British to the core, there was no forgetting the fact that he had lived amongst the Gauchos and “natives” of South America. Thus, in works such Tales of the Gauchos and El Ombú, Hudson was viewed as a writer who drew his material and his thinking from his “bond” with primordial nature.

Hudson, remarkably popular in Britain and Canada throughout most of the 20^th century, waned in popularity possibly because of the misguided film Green Mansions (1959). The movie misconstrues Hudson’s subtitle “A Romance of the Tropical Forest” to suggest that what drives the novel is a human “romance” as opposed to a passion for nature itself. Hudson consistently envisions the possibility of a natural world that, notwithstanding the reckless intrusions of agriculture and industrialism, might endure for the use and pleasure of the common individual.

That vision, of “cautionary hope,” distinguishes Hudson’s interest in offering original and provocative ecological statements about the future of humanity in the coming 20^th century. Many important authors and critics, including Galsworthy and H. E Bates provided introductions to various editions of Green Mansions, and Hector Villa-Lobos’s symphonic poem, The Forest of the Amazon, is based on the novel. Hemingway and Conrad, among others, were inspired by Hudson’s work. A memorial to Hudson, sculpted by Jacob Epstein, in Hyde Park depicts a bas-relief of Rima. Now celebrating its 100^th anniversary the monument, and the surrounding bird sanctuary, both remain important features of London’s landscape. Although there has been little attention to Hudson in recent years, the importance of his work is deeply meaningful (and prescient) as we continue to confront the realities of climate change and the perils of oceanic plastics, waste disposal, animal extinction, and global famine.