The Lie of the Land. Who Really Cares for the Countryside? William Collins, 2024.
I had thought to use these evening sky pictures purely as decoration for this post, then I thought they were inappropriate since land and sky are in a sense opposites of each other. But then I had the idea or even revelation that they represented the last of the elements that is more or less unregulated and unexploited: the sky, the air. The air at least remains unowned.
The four elements in ancient Greece were earth, air, fire and water. Other ancient cultures had similar classifications, such as in Angola, Tibet, India and Mali. This important book is principally about the earth of course. But if we think of fire as energy, especially from fossil fuels, control of that has long since passed to mega-corporations, both faceless and shameless. And water in the UK was privatised long ago and is now in the hands of a small number of foreign private venture capitalists and investment companies who care only about bonuses and dividends, whilst blithely destroying our rivers, lakes and streams and the life therein. Greenpeace is constantly under legal attack by the fossil fuel companies about which it protests and their ship, the Rainbow Warrior (in its current incarnation, the first having been blown up by the French government in 1985) is being used to investigate the damage caused by deep sea supertrawlers globally, whilst in the UK such vessels legally wreak havoc in Marine Protected Areas. Deep sea mining is the latest terrible threat to the planet.
In the Animal Wild chapter about Jamaica I wrote:
There is a growing problem in Jamaica as hotel chains and private individuals buy up more and more land – to an increasing extent Jamaican people have little or no access to the beaches. Mutabaruka, the Rastafarian dub poet and reggae musician has a lot to say about it in interview and verse, sounding the protest bell: “How can you buy or sell the sky? The warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them?”
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The “Nature’s Whistleblowers” chapter opens with a sentence with which I could not empathise more: “Lately, whenever I see a KEEP OUT sign in the countryside, I wonder what it’s hiding.” The “Trespassers will be prosecuted” signs are an outright lie of course, but the countryside does indeed guards its secrets closely. Trespassing in woods belonging to the Duke of Somerset, the author decries the littered plastic pollution from pheasant shooting which always upsets me so much: the gun cartridges, fencing and feed bags. Plastic tree protectors are all very well to protect saplings from deer grazing, but why can they not be removed in due course, instead of being left to leach into the environment? Shrubsole and his 200 or so fellow trespassers also found an open mass grave of pheasants, left to rot. It happens a lot. Of course they don’t want us to know. He quotes the poet John Clare in ‘The Moors’, 1820, about a time before the commons were enclosed:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between …
Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds…
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth.
I have written about the enclosures and their aftermath in my own books. Landowners react furiously, claiming that ordinary people will cause incalculable damage but that small minority of those who will can easily be dealt with and legislated for. Really they don’t want more eyes and ears on the ground, seeing what is happening, what they’re up to. We need citizen activism, we need whistleblowers. We need trespassers. Land may be fenced off, sometimes with razor wire, but the self-proclaimed, landowning ‘custodians’ we know cannot be trusted. Most people would like proper, full access to nature for obvious reasons, but also we want to be of service. The landowners mostly just pretend that they do.
The following chapter bewails the terrible, depleted state of our national parks – except that they are not ours, they do not belong to the nation. Most of them are largely in private hands (96% of the Yorkshire Dales for example) and most of the owners are the aristocratic or the “newly minted” . Much of them is taken up by sheep farming, grouse moors and modern conifer plantations. The Ministry of Defence owns chunks as well. The National Park Authorities own tiny fractions and in any case have had their funding slashed with resultant land sales, of all things, becoming necessary. They have a certain amount of planning control over what little they do own, but excluded from that are agriculture and forestry. Many of their board members have vested interests, are landowners and farmers. A long stream of extensive and expensive reviews and enquiries over the years have led pretty much nowhere. And there has been always been a furious backlash. A photograph in the book shows a a group of farmers responding to the designation of part of the Somerset Levels as an SSSI by the Nature Conservancy Council: they made effigies of conservationists, hung them from makeshift gallows and set them on fire.
As an aside, but still on the subject of our aristocrats, during the last parliament, around 15 members of the House of Lords claimed c. £585,000 in allowances and expenses for doing absolutely nothing except turning up.
The book’s penultimate chapter, “An Ecological Domesday”, gives a history of surveys of land use in England, which first took place in the 1930s, with much of the work being done by schoolchildren. What was also essential was a survey of land fertility. This was followed by a democratisation of decisions about land use, thanks to the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, something our present government is in a tearing hurry to reverse entirely. But, again, agriculture and forestry were excluded, rapidly leading to intensive farming and forestry and the destruction of wild meadows, ancient woods, hedgerows and chalk downland.
The government, I read today in the papers, has spent its entire budget for the sustainable farming incentive and has abruptly ended it, which seems cruel to those farmers relying on it. The scheme was intended to encourage farmers to sow wildflowers and create hedges. One of the farming interviewees for the piece makes a strange choice of words however: “You can’t switch nature on and off, but the government is now forcing me to switch nature off for a year.” It is quite the admission that farming and nature are antithetical, that you can only have one or the other.
Max Nicholson, head of the Nature Conservancy Council in the 1950s, wrote: “It is as if we are trying to extinguish and prevent fires amid a community of mad arsonists.” Marion Shoard in her best-selling book The Theft of the Countryside, argued, not unreasonably, that planning restrictions should not only apply to those who lived in towns. Why should farmers alone be permitted to do whatever they liked? Fast forward to the 1980s: an NCC report admitted that “conservationists had underestimated the ‘powerful entrenched interests’ [of landowners, farmers and forestry].” Over and over again we see even government attempts to right the scales fall prey to deference to landowners and political inertia. In this current decade, the truly dreadful environment secretary Therese Coffey (the accents on her first name are an affectation she was not born with and so I will not use them here) stated: “Whitehall’s not going to tell each farmer exactly what they’re going to do”, “as if that were ever on the cards” comments Shrubsole. The Secretary of State was so keen not to upset landowners that he even resisted publishing future maps of land use. The rest of the chapter puts forward a raft of proposals for change under a new Labour regime – how the author must despair, like so many of us, seeing what the present government is doing and failing to do.
The concluding chapter lists the huge advantages brought to the countryside by the reintroduction of beavers by the best kind of farmers: better for everyone, including farmers, better for biodiversity, and fantastic for flood prevention. Who could be against such a thing, or suffering from “beaver derangement syndrome”? It is all so very predictable. Then prince now king Charles is thought to have been very anti beaver, the inventor and wealthy landowner James Dyson who claimed that they killed “all this years and last year’s cygnets” and his fish whose heads they “bit off” – beavers are of course herbivores, Tory MP Richard Drax of whom I have written a good deal elsewhere in this blog*, claiming that beavers caused flooding and complaining that they did not stick to “their allocated space”, the NFU which demanded compensation for farmers who would in fact be beneficiaries of reintroductions, and the NFU in Scotland whose president stated that some Scottish farmers thought that beavers were a greater threat than Brexit. The sorry tale epitomises the struggle against a landed establishment which is “reactionary, jealously wants to maintain control, and is often ecologically illiterate.”
So, Shrubsole asks, who are they (failing to) be stewards of the countryside for? Future generations perhaps but they cannot hold them responsible in the present. “For claims of stewardship to be meaningful, landowners have to be accountable to the public now.” Landowners have various rights, including jus abstendi, the right to waste and destroy. Yet there is no corresponding legal duty … to be the good stewards they often claim to be.” John Clare is quoted again:
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave
Whilst the creation of SSSIs and nature reserves has brought some restraints into play, there needs to be a fundamental change giving nature, our ecosystem, priority over the rights of the landed. Their claims to speak for the rural majority are nothing but hogwash.
The National Food Strategy determined that giving 21% of our least productive land back to nature “would only lead to a 3% loss in food production”, really not a problem as we are already consuming so much less meat and dairy produce.
The book closes with of ten eminently sensible, reasonable and inarguably essential proposals, each explained in detail.
- Take back control of our most important carbon stores: ban moorland burning and outlaw driven grouse shooting
- Democratise land ownership: create a Community Right to Buy in England.
- Use public money to buy land for nature: ser up a Public Nature Estate
- Make polluting landowners pay: levy a carbon land tax
- Stop letting landowners unleash their plague of pheasants on Britain
- Let the public become whistleblowers for nature: create a right of responsible access across the English countryside
- Put in place a land use framework for England and open up data on land
- Carry out an Ecological Domesday Survey: require large landowners to give an account of their stewardship
- Join campaigns to hold landowners to account and change the laws of the land [a plea to the book’s readers]
Extensive endnotes and an index are testament to Guy Shrubsole’s tenacity, his thoroughness, his attention to detail, his vigorous research, his belief in the cause and his righteous anger. All of these things are threaded throughout this wonderful piece of work.
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