English Pastoral by James Rebanks (cat reading book .txt) 📗

good thing when they got bigger, and could reshape the fields and spill scarcely a grain of barley on the stubble. We cared so little about how crops were grown, as long as our bread was cheap, that we ignored them being doused in poisons. We didn’t even notice or much care when they planted those crops in the autumn instead of the spring and created sterile green fields in which birds could no longer feed in winter.

We didn’t think it was our job to know, or care. We were too busy doing other things. And if giant corporations would give us the things we wanted (and tell us sweet little lies about how they did it), we let them. But it was an illusion, an industrial arrogance, a future that didn’t work: a dystopia. Only now are we slowly awaking from this comfortable coma to realize that we are a long way from the fields that feed us and from knowing enough to make good choices. What we do know in our hearts – even the most optimistic of us – is that finding our way back will take time and faith, and radical structural changes in our relationship with food and farming.

~

My inheritance is an ancient one, the chance to live and work on a piece of much-loved land. From the moment I looked at those familiar fields drawn on those old title deeds in the solicitor’s office, I knew it was both a blessing and a privilege, and a grim financial and work challenge. I knew we could live in an amazing place surrounded by nature and beauty, but I also felt a deep familial obligation (I’m not supposed to sell it or betray my father’s faith in me). I knew I was now married to this land for better and for worse.

In the most practical and real way imaginable, I began to think about how we shaped the earth. I would have to work out how we could create a farm that would keep us, and regenerate our land and its ecosystems as best we could. I knew that we needed to be honest about the past and the present, and to use some imagination and courage to think about the future. I also knew that while respecting my father’s work and knowledge, I would be free to change things if we could find ways to do so.

But how? What sort of future could we shape for our children? I was already determined that I would not intensify and scale-up, take huge financial risks or make factories out of our fields. But nor could I see how to manage our land entirely for nature, producing less, without going broke. I knew that if we farmed in more sustainable ways – and no one wanted to pay us to do that – then we would just go bankrupt. The applause of middle-class people who ‘care about the environment’ isn’t worth much when the bank manager says ‘No’. I knew we would have to chart a difficult and compromised course: being good enough farmers to pay our bills, while continuing to steward the wild things on our land so that we could hold our heads up and look our children, and perhaps someday grandchildren, in the face.

UTOPIA

After more than thirty years I have at last arrived at the candor necessary to stand on this part of the earth that is so full of my own history and so much damaged by it, and ask: What is this place? What is in it? What is its nature? How should men live in it? What must I do?

I have not found the answers, though I believe that in partial and fragmentary ways they have begun to come to me.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill (1968–9)

I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that, and that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better.

Jane Jacobs, interview with James Howard Kunstler (March 2001), quoted in Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2001)

The old men sit around on the ‘posh’ seats and a few extra garden chairs brought in to accommodate guests. They are holding beer cans in one hand and glasses half-full in the other. The dining room in these old farmhouses is often still ‘saved’ for funerals, christenings and gatherings like this one. A little porcelain kingfisher perched on the mantelpiece is ready to dive for fish among the swirling patterned carpet. Rain lashes on the grey window.

The farmhouse is immaculately clean and tidy, fretted over for weeks no doubt, and there is enough good food to feed everyone twice over. The house-proud women of the family have filled the tables with homemade bread, sausage rolls, sandwiches, chutneys and salads, slices of home-cooked meats and puddings. They fuss around us like hens, clucking about whether we have eaten enough, or had a cup of tea. The younger daughter of the family (who left years ago for a life in the modern world that doesn’t work like this anymore) looks to me as if she is enduring a day trip back to the 1970s. She seems to be heroically putting up with all this old-fashioned domesticity out of respect and love for her parents. I catch her eye, and she smiles nervously, as if to say, ‘Oh heck, was it that obvious what I was thinking?’ And I smile back to say it’s OK.

We are at the seventieth birthday party of one of my father’s best friends, David, a small man with bandy legs and a barrel chest, which makes him appear as if he is bursting with strength that his body can’t contain. He is a dynamo, always buzzing with a new idea and a plan.

It is a very Cumbrian party. I am surrounded