Waller was brought up in South London, attended Dulwich College, and spent a year in bed with rheumatic fever, during which time he read voraciously and formed a lifelong love of Shakespeare.

Having tired of London, he transferred in 1949 to BBC's Western Region in Bristol;[4] he and his family lived for a time in the house of the novelist L.P. Hartley.

In his later years he undertook editorial work for the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council (CHEC),[8][9] and returned to write a column for the Soil Association journal Living Earth.

Robert Waller was a prolific writer throughout his life, contributing to the UCL student journal in the 1930s, and to Hugh Ross Williamson’s The Bookman.

[13][14] Waller’s attempt at summing up his own philosophy, Be Human or Die (1973), though not without interest, is over-ambitious and perhaps reflects the confusion of his domestic life at the time he was drafting it.

Waller also wrote for The Ecologist and Resurgence; his poetry appeared in The Criterion, Outposts, and New Writing, among other places; and he reviewed for Time and Tide and Books and Bookmen.

Waller worked as a Western Region producer of agricultural programmes, with figures such as A.G. Street, Ralph Wightman and Henry Williamson, coming to appreciate the importance of farming for a nation’s social structure and economy.

[17] Waller’s work on Stapledon’s biography brought him into contact with the organic husbandry movement, and during his time as editorial secretary of the Soil Association he sought to broaden the organisation’s appeal to the younger generation of environmental activists concerned by the revelations of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962).

Subtitled “A survey of some contemporary health problems in relation to nutrition which suggests that there is a new pattern of diseases in Western civilisation”, this is a symposium based on the Soil Association's Attingham conference of 1969.

Describing himself as an “undogmatic Christian”, he developed in many essays and long letters a philosophical outlook that steered between arid rationalism (whether theological or atheistic) and self-indulgent emotionalism or mysticism.

Robert Waller was a prolific and generous letter-writer, and a close friend of the poet, critic and pacifist Derek Savage, with whom he maintained a correspondence for many years.

Most of the information in this article is from the memorial volume The Poet of Ecology (see 4.8 above) and from the obituaries in The Independent by Philip Conford (30 November 2005) and The Guardian by Robert Fyson (7 December 2005).