Get Off My Land Again!

This has been quite a week. For months now the campaign to stop the export of elvers (glass eels), the young of the endangered European eel, from Gloucester to Kaliningrad in Russia’s Baltic enclave, has been taking up much of my time and energy, and I have also been wrestling my proto book ‘The Eel Trap’ into a form fit to send to an agent. Finally a few days ago the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) finally announced that this year they would not be granting export permits to the UK’s last elver merchant, UK Glass Eels, who had been hoping to send 5 tonnes (15 million endangered eels) to Russia. The campaign sought to demonstrate that this project was not, as claimed, a conservation project but rather had become part of a Russian food self-sufficiency project linked to Putin’s war. The ending of this export trade is a significant result. Defra, given the choice, as it often is, will usually side with the landowner, the farmer or the business interest rather than with the conservationist, but thanks to the almost 56,000 people who signed my petition we were able to persuade Defra to take our evidence seriously. If you were one of those signatories, thank you.

Meanwhile another of my preoccupations has been watching how the the local farmers and landowners are responding to the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change. Many of us have made small changes, but –apart from buying or leasing an electric vehicle – our options are limited. Farmers and landowners, however, have enormous power to make change. Even if they remain hopelessly addicted to the use of poisonous chemicals, every single one of them could plant a few trees, or restore one of the hay-meadows or ponds that their fathers destroyed. You and I may feed the birds or let the lawn grow flowers; farmers and landowners can halt or reverse biodiversity loss and sequester carbon at a scale available to no-one else. If they took the situation seriously –which by and large they absolutely don’t – things could improve dramatically. So please, before you get irritated, as some of you do, at any criticism of farmers, take a look around you. If you investigate any rewilding, or any woods or hedges being planted or ponds and wildflower meadows being restored in your neighbourhood, you will almost certainly find it is being done by some incomer, who has bought a house with a bit of land. That at least is my experience.

I look around for signs of hope as I travel the county, and I rarely find them. A windblown tree is eagerly cut up for firewood, but never replaced. Even those who fell woods and are bound by law to replant often try to turn their woods into cricket-bat willow plantations, and often get away with it. Sometimes they simply ignore the law, because their neighbours will not dare to report them. Their farming methods – those same methods that have resulted in the UK having one of the world’s worst records on biodiversity loss – continue as before. I look out for the one just farmer, planting a tree or digging a pond, or leaving a wild margin in a field. Not much luck so far, and not for want of looking. Everywhere I see the same old tired progression of chemical-fuelled ‘combinable crops’, the same old arable fields turned sickly yellow several times a year by the glyphosate weedkiller that is eliminating all the wild flowers that were once the glory of our countryside, taking with them the insects, and with the insects the birds, the disastrous domino effect that has reduced my dawn chorus to rooks and pigeons. My brother tells me of a farmer near Pembridge who is an inspiring example of a conservationist farmer, remarkable because of his rarity, and there must of course be others. But in spite of the crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, none of the farmers I see around here have changed one whit. As Basil Fawlty might have said, we still have the same old whits we always had. I continue to look out for the one just farmer in my neck of the woods, and a few weeks ago I thought I had found him. On a farm already slightly remarkable for allowing a field to host an annual display of dandelions, more glorious than any daffodils, without ‘spraying them off’ with glyphosate, trees were being planted at regular intervals within robust tree guards. Several fields were planted in this way, like embryonic parkland, and others had clumps and strategic scatterings of trees.

Was this a farmer with a vision of a better future? I hoped so. Farmers like to call themselves the ‘custodians of the countryside’, but if you dare to suggest that people should visit and enjoy that same countryside that farmers claim to look after for us, by suggesting we should have the Right to Roam, too many of them are often quick to use another stock phrase and remind you that the countryside is ‘their factory floor’, revealing the utterly chilling reality of their actual attitude to the use of the small piece of this extraordinary planet on which they have managed to get their grubby mitts.

I watched this farmer with interest, hoping to meet him one day and talk about his vision for the future. My mood lifted at the thought of a farmer committed to pioneering a change of land use, only to discover that this farmer was actually a tenant of the National Trust and it was they, not him, who were behind the tree planting.

At one time I had thought that the National Trust was a wheeze designed to keep aristocrats on their estates in spite of changing times and the (usually exaggerated) impact of death duties. If that was ever true, it is no longer. In a country with the ownership of land in the hands of remarkably few people, organisations like the National Trust and the Woodland Trust are quietly increasing their landholdings through generous public support and the power of the internet. This is land held in trust for the people, for the benefit of all and for the benefit of the environment. The National Trust is now one of Europe’s foremost conservation charities. The holdings of such trusts are the nearest that we in the UK have to the publicly-owned National Parks and forests found in other countries. This is a challenge to the orthodox views of UK landowners many of whom value their apparent right to use their land for their personal enrichment, and for the impoverishment of everyone else.

As a result the National Trust, like Natural England, is under attack by a coalition of landowners. An insurgent group called Restore Trust, as well as media and Conservative figures, campaign to take over the National Trust in order to oppose some of its decisions – especially efforts to address links to slavery and Britain’s colonial past. Many of its stately homes were paid for by the lives of slaves on the sugar plantations, slaves who died of malnutrition, disease, overwork and sometimes murder, within an average of three years of the arrival of those who survived the journey in the slave ships. When their ‘owners’ were rich enough they often returned to the UK with the funds to create fashionable new estates and stately homes. These people were referred to as West Indians at the time. It is right that the National Trust should acknowledge the origin of the wealth that paid for many of these estates. The cheap and easy way to attack the National Trust in the press is to focus on anything that can be called ‘woke’ but I suspect the National Trust’s critics are also as fundamentally opposed to the National Trust’s challenge to the landowning status quo as to their acknowledgement of our slaving past. A similar lobbying group tries to weaken the power of Natural England, because if they were allowed by Defra to effectively protect and enhance biodiversity, they would certainly have to challenge the interests of the landowning and shooting lobbies.

We are well used to farmers demanding to be paid for any conservation work that they do, and claiming that farming is so difficult that they need subsidies to plant hedges or to farm less intensively. Unfortunately the National Trust provides living proof that this is not the case. Throughout the country they rent land to farmers, often on condition that at least part of the land is farmed for conservation. Potato farmers on their Pembrokeshire estates, for example, may grow potatoes conventionally but have to manage the less fertile land and the heathland strips behind the shore and the sea cliffs primarily for conservation. This model is common on their land holdings, where profitable farming appears to be perfectly easily combined with conservation.

The contrast is stark. On the one hand privately owned land, often glyphosate monocultures devoid of wildlife, for the exclusive benefit of individual landowners. On the other hand, land that is effectively public, that we can all access and enjoy, land that demonstrates that conservation and the restoration of the biosphere is not incompatible with farming. On the one hand enthusiasm and innovation and creative ways of increasing biodiversity that can sometimes spearhead rural revival. On the other hand landowners with no wish to change, no vision of a countryside with its wildlife and biological vitality restored, just doing what they have always done, persisting in using the methods that have devastated UK biodiversity for the last seventy years. In such hands the countryside is anything but safe. Nor is it producing the many public goods of which it is capable.

A prime example is the National Trust for Scotland’s Mar Lodge estate, until 25 years ago a traditional estate of bare mountains grazed by sheep and deer, principally for the benefit of a few wealthy sportsmen, a model repeated over much of upland Scotland. Mar Lodge is now part of the regeneration of the Cairngorms National Park, where deer and sheep are under control, and peat bogs and pine forests are recovering. Now thirty percent of the UK’s red-listed bird species can be found on the Mar Lodge estate, and the glorious open Caledonian forest is reviving, seeded by the few surviving ‘granny pines’. This is a place of extraordinary biological vitality where once there was the wrecked landscape of the Highland sporting estate. And it employs far more people than the previous few shepherds and ghillies, and, like most rewilding projects, brings in more money to the local area and offers a more interesting variety of employment than before.

The history of the English landscape shows us two visions of richness, one typified by landowners enriched by slave plantations. Since the enclosures the riches of the biosphere have been concentrated in the hands of a small number of landowners. Some of these drained off pristine wetlands rich with resources for wildlife and for the local people, replacing them with a much depleted landscape of arable fields that might enrich a single owner at the expense of everyone and everything else. Many of these fenland farms are still leaching carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the peat soils break down, where once the ancient fenlands and meres were the most biodiverse ecosystems in the UK. The story of our landscape is of the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many and of the natural world. The Natural Trust that I once thought existed for the benefit of those predatory landowners, despite the image created by the scones and tea-towels in their estate shops, is quietly leading a revolution in attitudes towards land ownership and land use, and shows up conventional farmers as very largely lacking in the will or the ability to face the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, or the imagination to see different possibilities , a complacent group sheltering behind the mindless slogans of ‘No Farmers No Food’ ‘Custodians of the Countryside’ and the familiar shout of ‘Get Off My Land!’