SOURCE: Harrison, Robert Pogue. “London Versus Epping Forest.” In Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, pp. 211‐20. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Harrison describes the social protest verse of the poet‐laborer John Clare and illuminates his concern about how the private ownership of property was resulting in environmental changes and the loss of freedom in his native English countryside.

Forests cannot be owned, they can only be wasted by the right to ownership. Forests belong to place—to the placehood of place—and place, in turn, belongs to no one in particular. It is free. Of course nothing can guarantee that a place's freedom, like its forests, will not be violated or disregarded, even devastated. On the contrary, this natural freedom of placehood is the most vulnerable element of all in the domestic relation we have been calling logos.

On certain rare occasions this...