It's 10 years since Ted Hughes died. At his remembrance service in Westminster Abbey, Seamus Heaney talked of the former poet laureate as a guardian of the language and the land, and although many will be familiar with the image of Hughes as farmer and fisherman, it's only recently that the full extent of his engagement with environmental causes has become clear. This was a man whose environmentalism went well beyond the writing of nature poetry and the occasional contribution to fly-fishing anthologies.
Hughes was in the US when the naturalist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. With its warnings of doom, it was a book that changed the attitudes of many, and it certainly struck a chord with Hughes. Letters in the Hughes archive now confirm just how far he was prepared to go, lobbying Michael Heseltine, John Gummer and Margaret Thatcher on the themes of pollution and poison. At a national level he was attempting to open a dialogue, warning Heseltine in particular that the country needed to be on a war-footing to counteract such destruction. He was a kind of Joanna Lumley without the lipstick, I suppose. On a local level, Hughes was even more determined, becoming something of an expert on the subject of sewage, and giving evidence at a hearing for a water treatment plant in Bideford.
Hughes once took me to a river in Devon where he fished, and after talking passionately about the life cycle of the trout and other miracles of the water, he said, "Course, it's dead now." Hughes was instrumental in setting up a trust to safeguard the rivers of the south-west, and even though the region hasn't reverted to a Garden of Eden, people there tell me that, through his actions, a catastrophe has been averted. The English language has become better off for Hughes's involvement with it, and so have a few small corners of the planet. "Poetry makes nothing happen," said the always jolly WH Auden. Maybe that's true, but poets can, apparently.
• Simon Armitage presents Ted Hughes: Eco Warrior on Radio 4 this Friday at 11am.
