Yesterday evening I spent an hour and a half attending a webinar hosted by Wild Card, “a grassroots movement challenging Britain’s biggest landowners to rewild their land before it’s too late.” They are in co-operation on this issue with the campaign group 38 Degrees.
50% of our land is owned by less than 1% of people. There is no land democracy. We, the unlanded, have no say. A campaign to persuade the royal family, the biggest landowner of them all, has met with some success: the Crown Estate has announced that they will release beavers and begin rewilding at Balmoral and the Duchy of Cornwall is expanding one of our rare temperate rainforests, but there is still a very long way to go. They could for example invest some of their huge profits from their estates into supporting tenant farmers who manage for wildlife.
The webinar was specifically about the Church of England – the issue of the poor state of common land is also to be addressed. The CofE owns land three times the size of Birmingham, some 200,000 acres, of which more than half is used for investment, mostly from tenanted farmland, the rest comprising churchyards (which can of course and to some extent are already being seen as potential wildlife havens) and the like.
The younger speakers spoke movingly about sleepless nights – all of our existential angst no doubt exacerbated by the recent dreadful news from America. They know that where we are now is not the baseline. Joel (by whom, along with Imogen, of the younger speakers I was particularly impressed, their intelligence, passion and compassion shining through), expressed his hope that he would one day talk to his grandhcildren in a reversal of the conversation with his grandfather who remembered when the countryside was full of insects, especially bees and butterflies. Chris Packham’s sleepless nights, he said, arise particularly because of the low efficacy (to put it mildly) of the bodies supposed to exist to protect our bio-diversity.
Another speaker made the theological case for rewilding which didn’t interest me personally, but if that’s what it takes …
Imogen reminded us that the Church is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (wouldn’t you know it and why the secrecy?) so that there is no public certainty as to exactly how much land is owned, but that this was not about the ‘big, bad Church’ who have made great strides in terms of divesting from fossil fuel exploitation and ensured that some rewilding and restoration projects were already under way. The Church Commissioners hold £10bn in reserves, a tidy sum by any standard. Only 4% of Church land is covered by trees and over half of the SSSIs therein are in unfavourable condition in spite of the legal obligation to maintain them. To this end a march at the weekend concluded with the delivery of “95 Wild Theses” written by a wide spectrum of campaigners, scientists, academics and others. To his credit, one of those, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, wrote: “God saw that it was good. Do we? Letting the natural world be itself – not just a reserve bank for our convenience – is an act of grace, and one that we should be glad to embrace, because when the world around us flourishes, so do we. The material life in the midst of which we live is the neighbour we must learn to love – and love for itself.” The present incumbent, encouragingly, supports all of this. The full 95 can be read here:
Joel led with the discovery of the tooth of a cave lion which was found during excavations for the installation of the lion statues in Trafalgar Square. Along with other megafauna, it probably became extinct between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago. It was a thought-provoking start. Only 3% of our farmland now is adequately protected for nature. Some farmers are rewilding but so much more could be done – even if we all ate just a bit less meat. The beaver, a keystone species, which creates wonderful habitats for a wide variety of wildlife, is still resented and even persecuted by some farmers since reintroduction. He mentioned a bugbear of mine – those plastic tree guards. I get the need for them I suppose, to protect saplings from deer, but I have lost count of how many times I have walked through woodland to see thousands of them, broken and redundant, littering the understorey. Surely landowners could and should be forced to clear them up?
Joel explained how agriculrutal land is graded from 1 to 5. Grades 1 and 2 are the highly productive top end, 4 and 5 mostly uplands, grade 3 is perfect for other uses. Of the Church’s land, 39 % is grade 1 or 2, but 56% is grade 3.
Naomi spoke next. She is an organic, regenerative and indeed inspirational farmer, who talked about what can be done with upland landscapes, including low-intensity and therefore beneficial grazing by cattle and ponies. She praised the Duchy of Cornwall for looking to change. She rejoiced in the beauty of small things: lichen, sunshine on a leaf. Wonderfully, her farm in Devon is entirely open to the public, all the time. I am keen to visit.
Reverend Clara, the most theologically minded of the contributors, made the point which I made in my book Animal Trust (and again in Animal Wild):
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”, are the cause of a lot of the trouble. The word ‘dominion’ is the issue, and however it should have been translated or interpreted, it remains an unfortunate choice from the rest of creation’s point of view. Similarly we read that God told humankind “to fill the earth and subdue it”, neither of which instructions turns out to have been a terribly good idea.
Chris Packham expostulated that we are not living in the world that we want to live in, can live in. He is around the same age as me – it could at least be the world we remember as children. But the human lifespan is short and not a very good barometer. The inequality of land ownership means that yes, we have nature reserves, little pockets, but that the rest is in terrible state. Natural England’s budget has been slashed by government after government. People generally, he said, are resistant to change, none more so than farmers. So we have to sound the alarm but also provide solutions. We know what they are and that rewilding does work at scale. As the Church has been asked, we need 30% of their land and all of our land to be wild for basic sustainability. This is not a fight, he argued, but the beginning of a conversation, to be conducted in the hope of paving a way for the Church Commissioners to act with kindness, patience and tolerance. It does not seem an unreasonable thing to ask of them. As Joel said, we the unlanded, can only hope – give us the maps at least. Young people today want hope, but it is lacking. That is a terrible thing. And as Naomi said, farmers could be the heroes. We need brave leadership and the Church could be part of that. But let nature take the lead.
It seemed a great shame that only around 350 people attended.
Before the webinar began one of the songs played was Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, recorded in 1970. From Wikipedia:
1996, speaking to journalist Robert Hilburn, Mitchell said this about writing the song:
I wrote ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ on my first trip to Hawaii. I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart […] this blight on paradise. That’s when I sat down and wrote the song.
“They paved paradise to put up a parking lot … Hey farmer, farmer, put away that DDT now … They took all the trees, and put ’em in a tree museum / And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see ’em”.
I Love Yew
An entirely unoriginal I am sure and terrible pun, but if you have read this blog before, you will know I cannot resist them.
In my previous post:
Even more fungi, the Tree Register and a not so welcome presence in my hair – Animal Wild
I mentioned my intention to visit Farringdon parish church in Hampshire to see the Yews listed on the Tree Register, which I did on Monday following my morning at nearby HART Wildlife Rescue. As I said, they were described by both great naturalists Gilbert White and W.H. Hudson. Both survive although the larger is a hollow shell – but it is still growing.
It is necessarily supported now by metal rods and wires, thanks to the parish council and local residents and congregation and others, but the crown is healthy.
It is at least 3,000 years old, one of the country’s ten oldest trees and is considered to be of special national and international scientific interest. The Tree Register’s website, incidentally, includes details of the rules to be followed when measuring trees, which are both interesting and of course necessary for consistency.
It is impossible not to notice, opposite the church in this charming village, an unusual, incongruous and very large redbrick building – there are seventeen rooms, Massey’s Folly, built it seems by the eccentric Reverend Thomas Hackett Massey to impress an Indian widow (allegedly) who had moved to the village, largely with his own hands, over forty years beginning in 1870. It sat empty for long time and fell into a state of neglect and in spite of use for education and as the village hall, remained unsustainably expensive. It is now being converted into houses, but the facade must remain. An intriguing curiosity. Seeing the Yews felt like a privilege.
I wrote about Yews before here:
Animal Wild January / February 2024 – Animal Wild
That was a while ago (it was in fact my very first post), so I will publish it again:
British Wildlife magazine – a round-up
Rather belatedly, I find time to catch up on the December 2023 issue of British Wildlife magazine. Some of the science is quite beyond me but even then it sends me down some interesting mental byways.
Yew trees
The cover features a gorgeous Redwing in a yew tree and the first article is The natural and cultural history of Yew by experts Peter Thomas, Fred Hageneder and Chris Knapman. Before beginning to read it I dredged up what I remembered and thought I knew about yew trees which came from studying Shakespeare at school. In Richard II which I think was the first Shakespeare play I read, there is a reference to “double-fatal yew”. We were told that deadly and effective longbows were made of yew for its strength and flexibility, and that the tree was highly poisonous, hence its common presence in Christian churchyards to deter animals from entering. So “double-fatal”. Shakespeare associates the tree with death and foreboding elsewhere. One of the ingredients in the potion concocted by the Weird Sisters, or Three Witches, in Macbeth, is “slips of yew, silvered in the moon’s eclipse”.
The article in British Wildlife explains the irony. For most of human history the yew has been regarded as the tree of birth, or life, not death, in many cultures, not least in Nordic myth as the Yggdrasil, a word I happen to have come across once or twice as an answer to a clue in the cryptic crosswords to which I am addicted.
Yews are, furthermore, probably the oldest trees in Europe. The Forthingall Yew in Perthshire is in all likelihood some 2,000 years old (they are not easy to age accurately).
They are not as toxic as all that either. The poison is an alkaloid called taxin but it has just recently been shown to be absent from the wood itself, and although the seeds and leaves can kill humans and other animals, it is a very rare occurrence. Animals seem able to develop an immunity over time and some extracts from the tree have proven to be useful in treatments of cancer.
Two words (at least) in the article were entirely new to me. One is “aril”, the bright red seed covering which attracts and thereby nourishes a variety of birds and mammals. The other is “dioecious” (knowing it will perhaps prove useful in a crossword some day). Most plants fall into one of two categories, monoecious and dioecious. The yew into the latter, since the trees are either male or female. Monoecious plants, which are in the majority, produce both male and female flowers.
Just to complicate things, there is another category, polygamo-dioecious, those plants having either female and bisexual or male and bisexual flowers.
The definition of dioecious above is a simplification however. A single yew can carry both sexes since one branch can be a different sex from the rest of the tree and very occasionally both sexes can be seen on the same branch. To quote the article directly, “To make life interesting, occasionally a whole tree can change sex.” The authors conclude by expressing their concerns about the yew’s future, since it is in sharp decline owing to climate change, the extensive use of its wood and “worries about livestock-poisoning (paradoxically coupled with nonetheless intensive browsing)”.
It is something of a theme of Animal Wild and for me stimulating to the heart and mind when the best science, however incompletely I personally understand it, proves itself a great buster of myth.
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