There has been a lot of talk of preserving 30% of Britain for nature, whatever that precisely means. The wildlife trusts have set it as a target, using the slogan 30 x 30 to promote the idea of 30% of our land to be protected by 2030, and Boris Johnson has also mentioned the figure, though that is not linked to any actual plan that I can discover. But the figure of 30% caught my eye. At first I thought it was the amount of land that would be freed up by us all going vegan, but I find out that it is as much as maybe 75% of farmland that is used in one way or another to raise animals for meat. However, a more substantial 30% consists of upland hill and mountain land, something you could stub your toe on..
Most of this upland is covered with grasses, heathers and bilberries and so on. We have come to think of it as wilderness, an environment that we can enjoy for its grandeur, its wildness, and its beauty. We think of it as beautiful because we have learned to think it is beautiful. It was not always so, and people hated what they saw as desolation, but since Wordsworth and the Kinderscout trespass it has set for us a particular kind of landscape beauty datum line. I feel this myself, having been taught to feel it. When I lived in Sweden I longed for views that were not obstructed by forest, to the extent of seeking out a clifftop where one could see over the top of the forest. It was a grim place, an ättestupa, a place where old people burdening their families were supposed to have been, in the past, pushed off. It was not, to me, as beautiful as some of our noted landscapes in the UK, but even though I find them beautiful I find that ecological awareness has gradually revised my opinion of what is beautiful. Half dead places cannot entirely be beautiful.
Our uplands may also be valued by some ecologists as systems that need to be preserved because they have been like that for a long time. There is a scientific way of thinking that sees them as research documents rather than living – or in this case dying – landscapes. They can be labelled as ‘upland heaths’ or ‘acid grasslands’, for example, and it is possible to claim that their plant communities, or their surviving bird or insect populations, are in some way special and deserving of preservation, because they have been in that state for quite a long time. But in general they do not have very rich communities of species and have been degraded over the centuries by poor land management including overgrazing by sheep. Most of what are thought to be magnificent landscapes, like the Lake District or the Scottish Highlands, are in fact degraded wastelands which were once temperate rain forests. Their original forests have been stripped by man, sometimes deliberately but more often simply by allowing grazing animals to prevent the growth of young trees.
The judgement about what is beautiful is clearly very subjective, part of the baggage of our particular culture. A valuation of the land based on an ecological knowledge is much more scientific, much more quantifiable. It is, or ought to be, an ecological commonplace that a complex ecological system is better than a simple one, because it is richer in interactions and interconnections between species and is therefore stronger and more resilient. Each species is better able to survive when it can interact with a wider range of other species, either as predator or prey, or in the kinds of symbiotic relationships that enable fungi to support the nutrition of trees, or the spawning of frogs to bring nutrients off the land to feed fish and water-birds in the springtime, when the needs of their young put food resources under strain. This kind of understanding starts to enable one to see more beauty in a regenerating pine forest, even though it may be obstructing the splendid view of a desolate mountain. The knowledge that a treeless upland landscape once was nurtured by a forest that supported wolves and lynx and elk and beavers, pine martens and otters, and was rich in birds and berries, has long since started to erode my sense that bare fells are beautiful.
The roughly 30% of the UK landscape is represented by our uplands is kept in its historically fairly modern state by sheep farming and heather burning. In my part of the world the hills of Radnorshire once supported families squatting on the uplands with a potato patch and cow, much as in pre-Famine Ireland, and I suspect many upland farms may have begun this way. Although most of these upland areas are classed as farmland and used by farmers, farming there can only persist because we have had a system of subsidies. These work together with an assumption that pretty much all land is farmland, even when it is manifestly uneconomic to farm it, and taxpayers’ money has been used to perpetuate the ecological desolation of these areas under the guise of farming. This land is not farmland and should not be farmed at our expense. There are other much more exciting possibilities.
Much of this land is common land. Until a couple of hundred years ago much of our land was common land, land where various people had the right to share the use and produce of the land. Under this system the rights of the powerful, lords of manors and so on, were restricted by the rights of the common people, exercising ancient rights that pre-dated the idea of private property. The notion of owning land and having total control over its use and produce and the right to exclude everyone else had not come into existence. When the ruling classes hit on the idea of the massive land grab that history books call the enclosure movement, almost all productive common land disappeared, as the result of legislation in a parliament controlled by the aristocracy using processes to which the poor had no access. Not surprisingly the surviving large areas of common land are in mountainy areas where there was no profit in the aristocracy and landed gentry stealing them. One common over the border that I know well is over 4000 acres, where the surviving common land in my village is maybe four acres.
Which creates an interesting situation, which will get more interesting if agricultural policy recognises the futility of farming sheep in the uplands, especially if the price of lamb falls. Upland areas contain farming communities dominated by elderly farmers who may not have successors. Ideally governments might want to have policies that sustain or reinvigorate these communities, such as they are, but using sheep farming to prop up these communities may be an economic as well as a social and ecological dead end.
Down the road near Abergavenny is a project I have watched with interest, called ‘Stump up for Trees’. They have secured funding from the Welsh government for a project that aims to plant a million trees in the Brecon Beacons. The project is a cooperation between commoners and owners of common land, together with conservation volunteers, which provides a vision, as I see it anyway, for the upland commons of the future becoming ecologically vital, delivering what are called ‘ecosystem services’ such as water and carbon storage, supporting the return of endangered species, and offering ecotourism and recreational opportunities which, if evaluated in monetary terms would strongly contrast with the economic and environmental losses caused by sheep farming. I would like to think that governments might have the vision to promote such a democratised revitalisation of our upland commons in order to combat climate change and reverse ecological degradation. In Scotland, where the obvious inequities of land ownership are particularly resented by nationalists because landowners are frequently not even Scottish, recent moves to promote community land buy outs offer a lot of hope for change. In England and Wales the case for change is just as strong, even if the political climate is less propitious. But then very little work to promote environmental causes has ever been done by governments. Most of our structures of reserves and supporting conservation has been the result of the work of a few pioneering individuals such as Sir Peter Scott of Slimbridge, and others like him, inspiring us to join the nature trusts and support conservation organisations. If we had had to wait for governments to wade in with policies and funding to support conservation issues and projects we’d still be waiting. Luckily Stump up for Trees is not alone. There are other projects out there.
There is a particular reason why reforestation of our uplands is likely to be beneficial. Planting trees by enthusiasts is going on everywhere, often in what were fields. Unfortunately woods need to have the complex ecology of fungi and plants and shrubs and so on that are as important as the trees. Fell a wood and it is still in essence a wood. Plant trees in a field and years later all you have is still a field with trees in it. But our uplands often have heather and bilberries and bog myrtle and dwarf willow and birch and fungi and other organisms that would thrive as the understorey of woodland better than they do now on bare fells. These would not be the tight angular plantations of spruce that the Forestry Commission created. They could be open forests of birch and pine with space between the trees, like the forests I used to wander in in Sweden, full of berries and birds and animals like elk, rich in summer with the resinous perfume of the pine trees. Ecological purists might ask if Scots pine belonged down here, but we know just how much wildlife the pine forests support, and it was certainly once native all over Britain. Or we could use the pollen records to discover what once grew in these places and restore that. The point is to create as much biodiversity as possible, and there is room for creativity. Nature will soon show us what works best.
Time to make a start, I reckon. No point waiting for the government to do it. Find your nearest project. I’m aiming to join the crew at Stump up for Trees next month for their second season planting trees on the Black Mountains.