Orwell’s life was punctuated by war: “He was born on June 25, 1903, right after the Boer War, reached adolescence during the First World War […] with the Russian Revolution and the Irish war of independence raging into the 1920s and the beginning of his adulthood” (8). Then came the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought and was shot, and the Second World War, from which he reported. Orwell even has the dubious honor of “coin[ing] the term cold war in 1945” (9), which describes the long period of political tension between the East, as represented by the Soviet Union, and the West, as represented by Europe and the US. Solnit notes that Orwell’s response to such forces was to celebrate nature and find respite in gardening: “Those conflicts and menaces consumed a lot of his attention—but not all of it” (9).

In the essay that first captivates Solnit’s imagination, “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” Orwell explicitly makes a connection between the endurance of nature and the destructive tendencies of war. He suggests that the vicar, who changed sides during the debates over religion in his time, was actually a savvy operator: “That fickleness let him survive and stay in place, like a tree, while many fell or fled” (7).