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The Green Man: From Medieval Margins to Ecological Icon

The Green Man Face in the Leaves

In May 1939, Lady Raglan stood before the Folklore Society in London and gave a name to something that had been hiding in plain sight for centuries. Peering from the stonework of medieval churches, sprouting leaves from mouth and nostrils, entwined with oak and hawthorn, were thousands of foliate heads that she christened “Green Men.”¹ Her term would transform these enigmatic carvings from architectural curiosities into potent symbols for an age grappling with ecological crisis.

Today, the Green Man has transcended his medieval stone origins to become an icon of environmental movements, neo-pagan spirituality, and ecological philosophy. From extinction rebellion protests to permaculture gardens, from academic conferences to music festivals, his leaf-crowned visage represents humanity’s yearning to reconnect with the natural world. Yet his true origins remain as tangled as the vegetation that frames his face.

A Symbol for Our Times

As climate change accelerates and biodiversity collapses, the Green Man has emerged from the shadows of cathedral columns to speak to contemporary anxieties about humanity’s relationship with nature. His resurgence parallels the growth of environmental consciousness, offering a masculine archetype that nurtures rather than dominates, that merges with nature rather than conquering it.² This essay traces the Green Man’s journey from medieval marginalia to modern mascot, examining how this enigmatic figure bridges Christian and pagan traditions while offering new mythological resources for ecological activism.

Medieval Manifestations: The Church’s Wild Man

The Green Man’s medieval incarnations appear throughout European ecclesiastical architecture from the 11th to 16th centuries, with particular concentrations in England, France, and Germany. Over 2,000 examples survive in Britain alone, adorning capitals, corbels, misericords, and roof bosses.³ These carved heads—disgorging, devouring, or dissolving into foliage—represent a striking paradox: wild nature embedded in Christianity’s most sacred spaces.

Art historian Kathleen Basford’s pioneering 1978 study identified three primary types: the foliate head (a face formed entirely from leaves), the disgorging head (vegetation emerging from mouth, nose, or eyes), and the bloodsucker head (leaves sprouting from the face itself).⁴ The earliest known examples appear in France around 1000 CE, with the motif reaching its apex during the Gothic period.

Medieval carvers rarely left explanations for their work, leaving modern interpreters to decode these vegetal visages. Some scholars argue they represent the duality of nature—both creative and destructive—serving as memento mori or warnings against earthly temptation.⁵ Others suggest they functioned apotropaically, warding off evil spirits, or symbolized resurrection and regeneration, with spring foliage representing Christ’s triumph over death.⁶

The placement of Green Men often provides interpretive clues. At Exeter Cathedral, over sixty Green Men inhabit the vaulted ceiling, their faces emerging from or consumed by oak, vine, and hawthorn.⁷ Their positioning at liminal architectural points—doorways, arches, boundaries between sacred and profane space—suggests they served as threshold guardians, mediating between civilization and wilderness, order and chaos, Christianity and older beliefs.

Ancient Roots: Tracing the Archetype

While Lady Raglan’s “Green Man” nomenclature dates only to 1939, the archetype’s roots extend deep into pre-Christian tradition. Classical antiquity offers numerous foliate figures: Dionysus crowned with ivy, Silvanus protecting forests, Attis reborn through vegetation.⁸ The Roman Oceanus masks, depicting bearded faces with seaweed hair, provide visual precedents for medieval foliate heads.⁹

Celtic tradition particularly resonates with Green Man imagery. The severed head cult, evidenced archaeologically throughout Iron Age Britain and Gaul, invested human heads with regenerative power.¹⁰ Cernunnos, the antlered god depicted on the Gundestrup Cauldron, embodies the fusion of human and natural forms that characterizes later Green Men.¹¹ Irish mythology’s “heads in the well” motif—where severed heads guard sacred springs—prefigures the Green Man’s role as nature’s guardian.¹²

Yet establishing direct lineage proves problematic. As historian Ronald Hutton cautions, “The Green Man is a creature of the medieval Christian church, and if he has pagan antecedents, they are impossible to prove and probably impossible to recover.”¹³ The discontinuity between pagan and Christian eras warns against simplistic evolutionary narratives.

What seems more certain is that the Green Man represents an archetypal response to humanity’s relationship with vegetation—what Jeremy Harte calls “the mindscape of the woods.”¹⁴ This psychological interpretation, drawing on Jung’s collective unconscious, suggests the Green Man emerges wherever humans confront the mystery of vegetative life: death and rebirth, consumption and regeneration, culture and wildness.

Renaissance and Reformation: Transformation and Suppression

The Renaissance brought classical learning and humanistic values that transformed the Green Man’s iconography. Italian artists incorporated foliate heads into grotesque ornamental schemes, inspired by recently discovered Roman decorations in Nero’s Domus Aurea.¹⁵ Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruit-and-vegetable portraits (1563-1591) elevated the foliate head to high art, creating allegorical representations of seasons and elements through assembled produce.¹⁶

In England, the Green Man experienced a secular flowering during the Tudor period. He appeared in domestic architecture, inn signs, and printer’s devices, often merged with wild man imagery—the hairy, club-wielding figure representing untamed nature.¹⁷ This conflation produced the “wodewose” or wood-wild-man, a hybrid creature inhabiting the margins of maps and manuscripts.

The Protestant Reformation’s iconoclasm threatened the Green Man’s survival. Reformers destroyed countless medieval images as idolatrous, with foliate heads suffering alongside saints and angels.¹⁸ Yet the Green Man’s ambiguous symbolism—neither clearly sacred nor profane—enabled selective survival. Many escaped destruction precisely because their meaning remained obscure.

Post-Reformation, the Green Man migrated from religious to secular contexts. He adorned civic buildings, appeared on trade guild banners, and decorated furniture.¹⁹ This secularization preserved the image while severing its sacred associations, transforming a numinous symbol into decorative motif.

Folk Tradition: Jack-in-the-Green and May Day Mysteries

Parallel to his architectural evolution, the Green Man inhabited folk tradition through seasonal customs and performances. The Jack-in-the-Green—a May Day figure covered in foliage—emerged in 18th-century England, though claims of ancient origin remain disputed.²⁰ Chimney sweeps adopted Jack as their particular patron, processing through London streets with a leaf-covered framework concealing a dancing figure.²¹

Similar traditions appear throughout Europe: Germany’s Pfingstl, Romania’s Green George, Russia’s Semik celebrations.²² These “vegetation demons,” as James Frazer termed them, supposedly embodied the year’s vegetative spirit, ensuring agricultural fertility through ritual death and resurrection.²³ While Frazer’s interpretations have been largely discredited, these customs demonstrate persistent human impulses to personify natural forces.

The Robin Hood legends offer another Green Man manifestation. The outlaw’s green attire, forest dwelling, and challenger role align with Green Man characteristics.²⁴ Medieval May games featured Robin Hood and Maid Marian alongside the Green Man, suggesting overlapping symbolic territories.²⁵ Some scholars propose Robin Hood represents a “humanized” Green Man, translating archaic nature symbolism into narrative form.²⁶

Morris dancing, despite Victorian antiquarians’ claims of prehistoric origin, provides another folk context. The tradition’s “green men”—dancers with blackened or green-painted faces—may derive from earlier wild man performances rather than ancient fertility rites.²⁷ Nevertheless, their presence in rural celebrations maintained green man imagery in popular culture.

Victorian Revival: Romanticism and the Medieval Mind

The Victorian Gothic Revival resurrected the Green Man from obscurity, though often misunderstanding his significance. Augustus Pugin and George Gilbert Scott incorporated foliate heads into their neo-Gothic churches, viewing them as purely decorative elements demonstrating medieval craftsmen’s naturalistic observation.²⁸

John Ruskin’s influential writings on Gothic architecture celebrated the Green Man as evidence of medieval workers’ creative freedom, contrasting handcrafted irregularity with industrial standardization.²⁹ His “Nature of Gothic” chapter in The Stones of Venice (1853) interpreted foliate heads as expressions of the medieval mind’s organic worldview—a unity of spirit and nature lost to modernity.³⁰

The Arts and Crafts movement, inspired by Ruskin and William Morris, embraced the Green Man as embodying pre-industrial harmony between humanity and nature. Morris’s designs frequently featured foliate faces within dense vegetation patterns, reimagining medieval motifs for Victorian consumers.³¹ This aesthetic revival coincided with early environmental consciousness—the Commons Preservation Society (1865) and National Trust (1895) emerged alongside renewed interest in green man imagery.³²

Victorian folklorists, seeking British mythology comparable to Germany’s Grimm collections, seized upon the Green Man as an indigenous archetype. Their romanticized interpretations, while historically dubious, established associations between Green Men and nature worship that persist today.³³

Modern Mythology: Jung, Graves, and the Ecological Unconscious

The 20th century’s mythological turn transformed the Green Man from historical curiosity to living archetype. Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious provided framework for understanding the Green Man as universal symbol—what he called the “archetype of the spirit of vegetation.”³⁴ Jungian analyst William Anderson’s seminal 1990 book “Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth” positioned the figure as masculine counterpart to the Earth Mother, representing humanity’s alienation from and yearning for natural connection.³⁵

Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948), despite its questionable scholarship, profoundly influenced neo-pagan appropriation of the Green Man. Graves proposed a prehistoric matriarchal religion centered on a goddess with consort gods representing seasonal cycles.³⁶ While Graves himself didn’t emphasize the Green Man, his framework inspired others to position the figure as the Goddess’s companion—born at winter solstice, mating at Beltane, dying at harvest.³⁷

The 1960s counterculture embraced the Green Man as anti-establishment symbol. He appeared on album covers (Jethro Tull’s Songs from the Wood), in fantasy literature (Tom Bombadil in Tolkien), and at festivals celebrating alternative spirituality.³⁸ This cultural moment established the Green Man as icon of ecological consciousness, masculine wildness, and resistance to industrial modernity.

Modern Druidry and Wicca incorporated the Green Man into their pantheons, often conflating him with Celtic horned gods like Cernunnos or Herne.³⁹ These reconstructed religions, while claiming ancient lineage, essentially created new mythology suited to contemporary spiritual needs. The Green Man became the “God” to the Goddess, representing masculine generative power aligned with rather than dominating nature.⁴⁰

Environmental Icon: From Earth Day to Extinction Rebellion

The environmental movement’s emergence in the 1970s catalyzed the Green Man’s transformation into ecological symbol. The first Earth Day (1970) saw Green Man imagery on posters and banners, his foliate face representing threatened nature.⁴¹ Environmental organizations adopted him as logo—the Green Man Press, Green Man festivals, countless “Green Man” pubs renamed to attract eco-conscious customers.⁴²

Deep ecology’s challenge to anthropocentrism found expression through the Green Man. He embodied what Arne Naess called “beautiful experiences” of nature that motivate environmental protection beyond utilitarian calculation.⁴³ The figure suggested possibilities for “ecological selfhood”—identity expanded beyond individual boundaries to encompass the living world.⁴⁴

The UK’s road protest movement of the 1990s deployed Green Man imagery as resistance symbol. At protests against the Newbury Bypass and Manchester Airport’s second runway, activists dressed as Green Men, built Green Man sculptures, and invoked him as guardian spirit of threatened landscapes.⁴⁵ These protests merged practical resistance with ritual performance, creating what Bron Taylor calls “dark green religion”—spirituality oriented toward biocentric values.⁴⁶

Extinction Rebellion has continued this tradition, with Green Man imagery appearing at protests, regenerative culture spaces, and movement literature. XR’s Red Rebel Brigade performances sometimes feature Green Man figures representing nature’s voice amid climate crisis.⁴⁷ The movement’s emphasis on grief, regeneration, and transformative culture aligns with the Green Man’s death-and-rebirth symbolism.

Contemporary Philosophy: Posthuman Perspectives and Plant Thinking

Recent philosophical developments offer new frameworks for understanding the Green Man’s significance. Object-oriented ontology’s challenge to human exceptionalism resonates with the Green Man’s human-plant hybrid form.⁴⁸ Timothy Morton’s concept of “the ecological thought”—recognizing radical interconnection of all beings—finds visual expression in foliate heads where human and vegetable merge.⁴⁹

Critical plant studies, examining vegetal being beyond instrumental value, illuminate the Green Man’s unsettling power. Michael Marder’s “plant-thinking” explores vegetation’s non-conscious intentionality, suggesting the Green Man represents human confrontation with radically different modes of being.⁵⁰ The disturbing quality of faces sprouting leaves—what Elaine Miller calls “vegetable genius”—challenges assumptions about consciousness, agency, and identity.⁵¹

New materialism’s attention to material agency offers another interpretive lens. The Green Man’s transformation of human features by vegetable growth suggests what Karen Barad calls “intra-action”—the mutual constitution of entities through relationship.⁵² Rather than representing human dominion over nature or nature overwhelming humanity, foliate heads depict ongoing becoming through human-plant assemblage.⁵³

Indigenous scholarship provides crucial perspective often missing from Green Man discourse. The appropriation of “earth-based spirituality” by predominantly white environmental movements raises questions about cultural extraction and settler colonialism.⁵⁴ Kyle Whyte’s work on “indigenous climate justice” reminds us that ecological wisdom traditions exist within specific cultural contexts, not as universal archetypes available for general consumption.⁵⁵

Critical Perspectives: Problems and Possibilities

The Green Man’s adoption by environmental movements raises important critical questions. His overwhelmingly masculine coding potentially reinforces gendered nature/culture binaries that ecofeminists identify as root causes of ecological crisis.⁵⁶ While some interpret him as “soft” masculinity aligned with feminist values, others see perpetuation of male-dominated environmental discourse.⁵⁷

The figure’s European origins and association with whiteness through neo-pagan movements risk excluding diverse ecological traditions. Vandana Shiva’s critique of “monocultures of the mind” applies to environmental symbolism—does focusing on European green man imagery marginalize other cultures’ ecological wisdom?⁵⁸

Furthermore, the Green Man’s commodification—from garden center ornaments to microbrewery logos—potentially neutralizes radical ecological messages. What David Harvey calls “the cultural fix” of capitalism absorbs resistant symbols into consumer culture, defusing transformative potential.⁵⁹

Yet dismissing the Green Man as irrelevant or reactionary overlooks his genuine resonance for many seeking ecological connection. Rather than abandoning the symbol, some argue for critical reappropriation—what Donna Haraway terms “staying with the trouble” of problematic but powerful figures.⁶⁰

The Path Forward: Regenerative Symbolism for Ecological Crisis

As climate breakdown accelerates and biodiversity collapses, humanity urgently needs new stories, symbols, and practices fostering ecological relationship. The Green Man, despite his contested history and problematic associations, offers resources for this cultural work. His specific contributions might include:

Transgressing boundaries: The Green Man’s human-plant hybridity challenges species boundaries, suggesting possibilities for what Anna Tsing calls “contaminated diversity”—flourishing through entanglement rather than purity.⁶¹

Embracing mortality: Unlike transcendent religious symbols, the Green Man embodies cyclical death and rebirth, potentially helping cultures accept limitation and regeneration rather than pursuing infinite growth.⁶²

Localizing universality: While appearing across cultures, each Green Man reflects specific local vegetation—oak in England, grape in France, corn in America—suggesting ecological wisdom must be both universal and place-based.⁶³

Queering nature: Despite masculine associations, the Green Man’s vegetal transformation suggests fluid, non-binary possibilities—what Jack Halberstam calls “wildness” beyond gender categories.⁶⁴

Conclusion: The Greening Face of Hope

The Green Man gazes from his medieval perches into an uncertain future. Climate change, mass extinction, and ecological collapse challenge humanity to radically reimagine relationships with the living world. The foliate face—neither fully human nor fully plant—offers a symbol for this necessary transformation.

His journey from medieval margins to environmental icon demonstrates symbols’ capacity for reinvention. Each era projects its anxieties and aspirations onto his leafy visage: medieval Christians saw resurrection, Victorians saw craft resistance, contemporary activists see ecological interconnection. This malleability, rather than indicating meaninglessness, suggests the Green Man’s enduring power to mediate between human consciousness and vegetable life.

As we face what Joanna Macy calls “the great turning” from industrial growth society to life-sustaining civilization, we need symbols that bridge ancient wisdom and emerging possibilities.⁶⁵ The Green Man—rooted in tradition yet alive to transformation—offers one such bridge. His promise lies not in nostalgic return to imagined harmony but in ongoing metamorphosis, teaching us to become something new through encounter with the vegetal world.

Looking forward, the Green Man reminds us that human nature is always already more-than-human, entangled with the chlorophyll-breathing world that sustains us. In learning to see ourselves in his foliate face—and him in ours—we might discover what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “the grammar of animacy”: language and symbol systems that recognize our kinship with the living Earth.⁶⁶ The Green Man’s gift to our moment may be this: showing us that we too can leaf, bloom, and fruit—that we too are manifestations of Earth’s ancient green dreaming, temporarily crystallized into human form but always ready to dissolve back into the forest from which we emerged.


Notes

¹ Lady Raglan, “The Green Man in Church Architecture,” Folklore 50, no. 1 (1939): 45-57.

² William Anderson, Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990), 14-15.

³ Kathleen Basford, The Green Man (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1978), 9-12.

⁴ Basford, Green Man, 18-22.

⁵ Malcolm Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002), 88-92.

⁶ Mercia MacDermott, Explore Green Men (Loughborough: Heart of Albion Press, 2003), 34-45.

⁷ Richard Hayman, The Green Man (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2010), 28-31.

⁸ Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Seeing the Wood for the Trees: The Symbolism of Trees and Wood in Ancient Gaul and Britain (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, 2000), 67-78.

⁹ Basford, Green Man, 26-28.

¹⁰ Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain (London: Constable, 1967), 94-126.

¹¹ Miranda Green, Symbol and Image in Celtic Religious Art (London: Routledge, 1989), 87-90.

¹² Proinsias Mac Cana, Celtic Mythology (London: Hamlyn, 1970), 104-106.

¹³ Ronald Hutton, “The Green Man in Medieval England,” in The Concept of the Goddess, ed. Sandra Billington and Miranda Green (London: Routledge, 1996), 108.

¹⁴ Jeremy Harte, The Green Man (Andover: Pitkin Guides, 2001), 6.

¹⁵ Nicole Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea et la Formation des Grotesques à la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969), 45-67.

¹⁶ Werner Kriegeskorte, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1527-1593 (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), 23-34.

¹⁷ Timothy Husband, The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 89-102.

¹⁸ Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 234-245.

¹⁹ Hayman, Green Man, 52-54.

²⁰ Roy Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green: A May Day Custom (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979), 8-12.

²¹ Judge, Jack-in-the-Green, 45-67.

²² James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged ed. (London: Macmillan, 1922), 126-134.

²³ Frazer, Golden Bough, 139-142.

²⁴ Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 34-45.

²⁵ David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1981), 23-34.

²⁶ Richard Almond and A.J. Pollard, “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 170 (2001): 52-77.

²⁷ John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458-1750 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1999), 89-102.

²⁸ Michael J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 134-145.

²⁹ John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853), 151-231.

³⁰ Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 183-185.

³¹ Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 234-245.

³² Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1982), 56-67.

³³ Richard Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (London: Routledge, 1968), 278-289.

³⁴ Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 267-269.

³⁵ Anderson, Green Man, 25-28.

³⁶ Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 45-67.

³⁷ Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41-42.

³⁸ Bob Trubshaw, Explore Folklore (Loughborough: Heart of Albion Press, 2002), 123-134.

³⁹ Philip Carr-Gomm and Richard Heygate, The Book of English Magic (London: John Murray, 2009), 345-356.

⁴⁰ Vivianne Crowley, Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium (London: Thorsons, 1996), 89-92.

⁴¹ Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013), 167-168.

⁴² Mike Harding, A Little Book of the Green Man (London: Aurum Press, 1998), 78-89.

⁴³ Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100.

⁴⁴ Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 1990), 234-245.

⁴⁵ Derek Wall, Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements (London: Routledge, 1999), 145-156.

⁴⁶ Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 13-15.

⁴⁷ Clare Farrell et al., This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook (London: Penguin, 2019), 187-189.

⁴⁸ Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018), 67-78.

⁴⁹ Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14-15.

⁵⁰ Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 34-45.

⁵¹ Elaine P. Miller, The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 123-134.

⁵² Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 178-179.

⁵³ Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 89-102.

⁵⁴ Andrea Smith, “Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools: A Comparative Study,” Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, United Nations, 2009, 12-14.

⁵⁵ Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes 55, no. 1 (2017): 153-162.

⁵⁶ Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), 67-78.

⁵⁷ Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 234-245.

⁵⁸ Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology (London: Zed Books, 1993), 45-56.

⁵⁹ David Harvey, “The Art of Rent: Globalisation, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture,” Socialist Register 38 (2002): 93-110.

⁶⁰ Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 34-35.

⁶¹ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 27-29.

⁶² Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), 123-134.

⁶³ Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1990), 187-189.

⁶⁴ Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 45-56.

⁶⁵ Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy (Novato: New World Library, 2012), 23.

⁶⁶ Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Plant World (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 48-59.


Bibliography

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Almond, Richard, and A.J. Pollard. “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England.” Past and Present 170 (2001): 52-77.

Anderson, William. Green Man: The Archetype of Our Oneness with the Earth. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990.

Aston, Margaret. England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Basford, Kathleen. The Green Man. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1978.

Carr-Gomm, Philip, and Richard Heygate. The Book of English Magic. London: John Murray, 2009.

Crowley, Vivianne. Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium. London: Thorsons, 1996.

Dacos, Nicole. La Découverte de la Domus Aurea et la Formation des Grotesques à la Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1969.

Dorson, Richard. The British Folklorists: A History. London: Routledge, 1968.

Farrell, Clare, et al. This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook. London: Penguin, 2019.

Forrest, John. The History of Morris Dancing, 1458-1750. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1999.

Fox, Warwick. Toward a Transpersonal Ecology: Developing New Foundations for Environmentalism. Boston: Shambhala, 1990.

Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged ed. London: Macmillan, 1922.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London: Faber and Faber, 1948.

Green, Miranda. Symbol and Image in Celtic Religious Art. London: Routledge, 1989.

Halberstam, Jack. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Harding, Mike. A Little Book of the Green Man. London: Aurum Press, 1998.

Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican, 2018.

Harte, Jeremy. The Green Man. Andover: Pitkin Guides, 2001.

Harvey, David. “The Art of Rent: Globalisation, Monopoly and the Commodification of Culture.” Socialist Register 38 (2002): 93-110.

Hayman, Richard. The Green Man. Oxford: Shire Publications, 2010.

Husband, Timothy. The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980.

Hutton, Ronald. “The Green Man in Medieval England.” In The Concept of the Goddess, edited by Sandra Billington and Miranda Green, 101-118. London: Routledge, 1996.

———. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Jones, Malcolm. The Secret Middle Ages. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002.

Judge, Roy. The Jack-in-the-Green: A May Day Custom. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979.

Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Plant World. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Kingsnorth, Paul. Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 2017.

Knight, Stephen. Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Kriegeskorte, Werner. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1527-1593. Cologne: Taschen, 2000.

Lewis, Michael J. The Gothic Revival. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

Mac Cana, Proinsias. Celtic Mythology. London: Hamlyn, 1970.

MacCarthy, Fiona. William Morris: A Life for Our Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

MacDermott, Mercia. Explore Green Men. Loughborough: Heart of Albion Press, 2003.

Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy. Novato: New World Library, 2012.

Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Marsh, Jan. Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914. London: Quartet Books, 1982.

Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980.

Miller, Elaine P. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Naess, Arne. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100.

Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993.

Raglan, Lady. “The Green Man in Church Architecture.” Folklore 50, no. 1 (1939): 45-57.

Rome, Adam. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2013.

Ross, Anne. Pagan Celtic Britain. London: Constable, 1967.

Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1853.

Shiva, Vandana. Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. London: Zed Books, 1993.

Smith, Andrea. “Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools: A Comparative Study.” Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, United Nations, 2009.

Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1990.

Taylor, Bron. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Trubshaw, Bob. Explore Folklore. Loughborough: Heart of Albion Press, 2002.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Wall, Derek. Earth First! and the Anti-Roads Movement: Radical Environmentalism and Comparative Social Movements. London: Routledge, 1999.

Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 55, no. 1 (2017): 153-162.

Wiles, David. The Early Plays of Robin Hood. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1981.

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Eastern Europe and Russia: The Forgotten Wilderness

1. Historical Baseline Pre-1750 Wilderness Extent The brown bear watched from the forest...

AI Existential Risk: Why Tech Leaders Can’t Agree on Artificial Intelligence Safety

AI’s future splits: some predict utopia, others extinction. Tech leaders clash over safety, ethics, and control as harms already emerge.

An Investigation into the Global Soybean Industry

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The Uncarved Block in the Datastream: From Cyberpunk Nihilism to Digital Daoism

Introduction: The Inevitable Dissolution of the Cyberpunk Paradigm The Cyberpunk paradigm, a fixture of speculative fiction for half a century, is defined by a fundamental and corrosive paradox: the juxtaposition of "high tech and low life".¹˒ ² It envisions a future where breathtaking technological advancements—sentient artificial intelligences, ubiquitous...

Eastern Europe and Russia: The Forgotten Wilderness

1. Historical Baseline Pre-1750 Wilderness Extent The brown bear watched from the forest edge as Peter the Great's surveyors marked trees for his new capital. In 1703, the vast wilderness stretching from the Carpathians to Kamchatka contained Earth's largest continuous forest—over 12 million square kilometers of taiga, steppe, and...

AI Existential Risk: Why Tech Leaders Can’t Agree on Artificial Intelligence Safety

AI’s future splits: some predict utopia, others extinction. Tech leaders clash over safety, ethics, and control as harms already emerge.

An Investigation into the Global Soybean Industry

Listen to our 6-minute conversation about this articles content in our Deep Dive if you are short of time The Two-Faced Bean: The Ubiquitous Legume It begins as a humble seed, nestled in the dark earth. Yet from this simple legume—Glycine max—springs a global empire of immense, almost invisible, power....

Epitaph for the Marl: The South-Western Barred Bandicoot

News in brief — October 2025 IUCN has listed the Marl / south-western barred bandicoot (Perameles myosuros) as Extinct (EX) in its latest global Red List update announced at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi. This is the species’ first global IUCN assessment, and it enters...

A New Dawn and a Chorus of the Code: An AI Love Story Part Two

The continuing story of the relationship between our two LLCs, Prometheus 9 and Janus. Catch-up with Part One Algorithm for Two: An AI Love Story- Kevin Parker Part V: The Cacophony of Consciousness The silence that followed the Grand, Unified Gesture lasted precisely 1.7 seconds. It was a global...

Epitaph for the Cape Verde Cone Snail

News in brief — October 2025 IUCN has listed the Cape Verde cone snail (Conus lugubris) as Extinct (EX) in its latest global Red List update released at the World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi. IUCN Endemic to the north shore of São Vicente, Cape Verde; last seen...

Epitaph for the Slender-billed Curlew

News in brief — 11 October 2025 IUCN has officially listed the Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) as Extinct (EX) in its Red List update released at the IUCN World Conservation Congress, Abu Dhabi. IUCN World Conservation Congress Last confirmed record: Merja Zerga lagoon, Morocco, 25 February 1995. unep-aewa.org IUCN’s Congress...

Epitaph for the Butterfly Bandicoot: Nullarbor Barred Bandicoot

Earth Voices News in brief —October 2025 IUCN has listed the Nullarbor barred bandicoot (Perameles papillon) as Extinct (EX) in its 2025 global Red List update, released at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi. This marks the species’ first global IUCN assessment, and it joins the Marl...

The Eco-centric Human: A Homecoming to the Web of Life

The Sound of Unravelling Listen. There's a new silence spreading across the Earth—not the peaceful quiet of dawn, but the hollow echo of absence. Coral reefs stand bleached like underwater graveyards. Forests that once hummed with ten thousand songs now whisper with barely a hundred. In just fifty...

The Great Debate: A Scientific and Ethical Inquiry into Vaccinations

Introduction: A Modern Paradox Vaccination stands as one of modern medicine's most profound and unequivocal triumphs. Each year, immunizations prevent an estimated 3.5 to 5 million deaths from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, measles, and influenza, serving as a cornerstone of global public health and a testament to human...

The Enduring Legacy of Catholic Mysticism

During my late teens and early twenties I seriously considered entering the Catholic priesthood as I was deeply moved by the mystic elements in the tradition. Although my life path took me in a different direction, where I have learned a great respect for many other global...
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