“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”

Aldous Huxley

Today there are over eight billion people living on planet earth and this has only become possible through our ingenuity. To the economist Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766 - 1834), who wrote the famous essay on population, this would have been an impossibility. However, our ingenuity based on a formal application of science and technology has remade the world, and brought about a new geological era that we currently call the anthropocene. Today, we now shape our own landscape. The scientific revolution has been brought about by the sovereignty of reason, but this is at the expense of imagination. The result is to threaten our own very existence. The poet William Blake understood this existential threat, and symbolised it in his painting of the scientist Newton, and fought for imagination to be restored as a counterweight to reason. These ideas have been unpacked in my recent book William Blake, the Single Vision and Newton's Sleep.