Wordsworth the Environmentalist?

The Skeptical Environmentalist

E R R Y E LL IS M in d en P ic tu re s conflict—they deserve full scrutiny. With that in mind, the book The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press), by Bjørn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, should be a welcome audit. And yet it isn’t. As the book’s subtitle—Measuring the Real State of the World—indicates, Lomborg’s intentio...

Environmentalist of the Poor

The Berkeley Nobel Laureate George Akerlof once remarked of his fellow economists that if you showed them something that worked in practice, they would not be satisfied unless it was also shown to work in theory. This insight explains much about the dismal science, including why, as late as 1980, the M I T economist Lester Thurow could magisterially write: “If you look at the countries that are...

Wordsworth, Presidential Address

to the Lake District and who, from the first flush of revolutionary fervour came to a dignified old age in Rydal, Westmorland as Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate, a Tory supporter, opponent of reform and adherent to the established church. There are several reasons for choosing this subject. I have heard some twenty Presidential Addresses to this Society, from Mr. Robert Cooke's 'Ship-Shape and B...

Introduction to The Great Gatsby (Wordsworth Editions)

Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze

In his article "Reading Wordsworth with Hegel and Deleuze" Douglas Berman reexamines Wordsworth poem The Ruined Cottage (1798) in terms of the importance of the Pedlar who serves as the witness and singular moral authority in the text. Berman focuses on the inherent tension between impermanence as exemplified by the trope of wandering and the redemptive vision which shapes the ending of the sec...