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

I remember my old man standing, wild-eyed, surrounded by flames as he set the crackling tinder-dry gorse on fire. And I want to go down to the village to see the head teacher’s wife who complained all those years ago and tell her the birds were better off with my dad and the old farming ways, and the burning every ten years. But she has gone too, and the world has changed, and it isn’t my place anymore.

~

There is an old saying that we should farm as if we are going to live for a thousand years. The idea is that we might protect our natural resources better if we had to face the long-term consequences of our actions instead of passing on a mess for someone else to sort out. I find the thought of a thousand years in the future rather daunting and impossible to comprehend. Who is rich enough to be that holy? A few aristocrats or large conservation organizations perhaps? No one with any sense doubts the need for change. The statistics on the decline of wildlife on British farmland in my lifetime are damning, and the climate is doing weird, terrifying, unprecedented things. We know that change is needed, but we have to work out what that change should be, and how we can deliver it – when we are neck-deep in the realities of this age.

We live on the earth; we cannot float above it like angels or separate ourselves from it entirely. Such misguided idealism emerged from the Enlightenment and intensified during the Industrial Revolution. People left the land for towns and cities, and then, a generation or two later, when they were better educated and more affluent, they returned to it as a form of leisure and escapism, developing a new kind of relationship with the landscape. When we left, we were farmers. When we returned, other people, tougher people, were the farmers, and we just loved ‘nature’. We had become free of the harsh realities and were then several steps removed from what others now did in our name to feed us. We found the old ways hard to stomach and sought to escape from slaughter and death. Such utopianism speaks to our better selves, but there is a very thin line between idealism and bullshit.

Technically, the best thing we could do for nature in most landscapes is to not be there at all. Ecological despair at the scale of our impact has led some to suggest we should do just that, and embrace the worst intensive farming practices in some places in order to ‘spare’ as much land as possible for wild nature in others (e.g. in the uplands). While such desperation is understandable, this potential solution won’t actually work: the theoretical ‘spared land’ rarely becomes the wilderness that is promised (the glorifying of ‘efficiency’ involved actually ensures farmers everywhere embrace intensification using the huge arsenal of chemical and mechanized tools, completely sterilizing their fields in the process). Even if this weren’t the case, large tracts of the countryside couldn’t be wild in any meaningful sense because of essential human infrastructure: roads, railways and housing. And, even if wild uplands were possible, these places would never exist separately as isolated ecosystems. To be anything remotely approximating to ‘wild’ there would require seasonal migration of large herbivores in large numbers between the uplands and lowlands, and large carnivores moving them around the country. That kind of truly wild landscape (and some of the species that made it function) has gone and isn’t coming back. Abandoning farmland isn’t remotely the same thing as restoring a wild ecosystem – plagues of deer replace hordes of sheep and little good is achieved. We might wish it was otherwise, but humans are the top predator and can either provide that function in an enlightened nature-mimicking way, or species like deer or wild boar will wreak ecological havoc in the absence of predation.

Thankfully, we don’t have to recreate an impossible past, as many species actually thrive in traditional farmland – especially in areas like hay meadows, coppiced woodland and hedgerows. Many of our farmland species have now become rare, so we need to be careful not to lose the remnants of traditional farmed landscape that remain. A bird like a curlew has existed alongside mankind for so long that no one is quite sure where it lived in the distant wilder past. This isn’t to say that we don’t need wild places, and big ones – of course we do – but the complicated truth is that we need nature everywhere, even in our most intentive farmlands. To make them sustainable, we need to find workable compromises. In most of our landscapes there will never be perfect single-use solutions – pure wilderness or pure productivity. We need to put farming and nature back together, not drive them further apart.

England has a population density of over 1,100 people per square mile, and 56 million people to feed three times a day. Most of England is farmed, and realistically will continue to be, so our biggest and most vital ecological challenge is how to make productive farms much better places for nature. We can’t wipe the slate clean, but every farmer can work up from where we are and make it much better. Some of the answers lie in the past – in how we farmed before we could cheat with new technologies. Other solutions require new ways of doing things, based on science (for example by analysing soil health, studying grazing practices to see what works best, or learning from ecologists about the habitats and natural processes we need to recreate). We can work the land and still have healthy soil, rivers, wetlands, woodland and scrub. We can have fields full of wild flowers and grasses, swarming with insects, butterflies and birds. We just have to want