My niece rang me in a fury the other day. She had been visiting a favourite small meadow in the fairly sylvan landscape above her childhood home when the farmer arrived with a big machine and started to brutalise the trees overhanging the field along the Hindwell Brook. I suppose he was reducing the trees in order to let more sunshine in so that the grass would grow better, or the hay dry more quickly. Or maybe he was just keeping it looking tidy to maintain his credit in the farming community, on a day when there was a big machine in the yard and he had nothing else to do. She felt unable to protest or even discuss it, a young woman facing a big farmer in a big machine with the laws of Private Property on his side.
This is the season when farmers think it is a good idea to tidy up. Down the road from my village one of them has completely cleared out two old hedge lines and bushes and brambles on land along the roadside that isn’t even his land, and replaced it all with posts and rails and fence wire and bare earth. Every year he has a spring crop of calves which are immediately taken from their mothers and usually put in this field, a bunch of motherless waifs trying to act like a proper herd of miniature cows. Now the field will look even more sterile and cold than before, not a bush to hide behind. How a farmer can have not noticed that you are now supposed to replant hedges and encourage trees and maybe, God help us, even stop eradicating wildlife, baffles me completely.
I was watching RSPB videos about hen harriers when my furious neice rang. These critically endangered and protected birds of prey are often fitted with radio transmitters by ornithologists. As soon as they fly anywhere near a grouse moor the signal disappears or stops moving, and if harriers try to nest anywhere near grouse moors either they or their eggs go missing. The only people motivated to shoot or poison them are gamekeepers, paid to encourage large numbers of grouse on these open moorlands to provide sport for their wealthy owners and their friends. Because birds of prey like harriers sometimes eat grouse, they are killed in spite of being critically endangered and protected by law. Sportsmen and huntsmen tend to act as if the law does not apply to them.
Further south the game birds are pheasants (an alien species), and the keepers kill birds of prey – again, illegally - by trapping or poisoning them to protect the pheasants (which are harmful in our ecosystems, particularly to reptiles). The worst form of trapping is the pole trap. Birds of prey such as buzzards like to perch on posts. If you chain a gin-trap to the top of a post, camouflaged with a bit of moss, and the bird of prey tries to perch, it will end up dangling from the post with two broken legs, slowly dying.
Owning land confers many privileges. Landowners have been lavishly paid just for owning land, under the EU single farm payment scheme, which is still running in the UK. There are very few curbs on the power of landowners. Sure, they have to get planning permission for some of their schemes, but the granting of planning permission immediately makes the land concerned hugely more valuable, so that planning law is as much a mechanism for enriching landowners as it is a control on development. Farmers can’t grub up hedges – they can be fined for it – but if they simply cut them down and allow the stock to browse the regrowth until all the hedge plants are killed, they can’t be touched. If they fell a wood and fail to replant it, it will be several years before the forestry authorities can questioning their lack of action, by which time the ex-wood will have lost much of its ecological value or the forester will have retired and all will be forgotten.
The locals aren’t very keen to report landowners for breaches of the few rules, and incomers may not know what the rules are. So much of land is private that it would be hard to catch a keeper trapping kites, or eagles, or buzzards, because as soon as you started walking around Lord Muck’s pheasant preserves a gamekeeper on a quad bike with a shotgun would be rounding you up. The landowners, in these circumstances, tend at first to ask if they can help you, in tones that leave no doubt that this is posh talk for ‘What are you doing on my land?’ The keepers progress far less subtly to telling you to leave and maybe even to ‘Fuck off’. So the laws of property tend not only to protect the landowners’ right to do almost anything they like to exploit their land, they also protect them from any concerned citizen who might like to stop catch them illegally killing protected birds, for example, or illegally hunting foxes.
The issue is of course far wider than simply catching gamekeepers killing birds of prey. There are many landowner activities that we, the public, do not want landowners to do. We don’t, in general, want them to kill badgers, not only because we like badgers, and think it is wrong for chunks of our ecosystems to be eliminated at the whim of landowners, but also because we know that 98% of bovine TB transmission is from cow to cow and killing badgers is just a sop to farmers by a government that hasn’t a clue. We don’t want them to rid the countryside of cuckoos, either, and lapwings, and curlews, and larks, and swallows, and yellowhammers and snipe and the rest of the endless list. We know now that industrial chemical farming is killing our birds, by ridding the land of the seeds and insects that they eat, and we know that that style of farming has been developed to mould agriculture to the needs and profits of the pesticide and fertiliser makers. We know that organic farming or regenerative farming is more sustainable and a perfectly viable alternative to chemical farming, and a minor tweaking of the regime of huge subsidy payments could allow it to out-compete chemical farming. But at present we are largely powerless to stop all this, because our rights as stakeholders in this planet are not accepted by governments and landowners and therefore have little impact on laws or public policy, and our voices are not heard. Sure, nature is seen as a place where people can relax and restore their mental health, provided they stay on the footpaths. And governments have now acknowledged our concerns enough to increase the possibility of some land management changes and some tree planting. But none of that will be of any consequence if the industrialised 70% or so of the UK’s farmland is treated as a hydroponic medium which, if treated with certain indiscriminately poisonous chemicals, will provide a return for the farmer and the chemical companies. This will not provide a return for the cuckoo or the swallow or the lark and the rest.
Our democracy took a long time to remove the property qualification that entitled only property-owning men to vote in parliamentary elections, and although eventually we progressed to everyone over 18 having the vote, where land management is concerned old inequalities persist. I’m not going to argue for any radical land ownership changes here, because it would be a waste of time and I’m going to watch something on the telly in a minute. But there is a good case for making changes at least to the way we manage land, in order to give us democratic control of the ecosystem. Land owners, one line of argument might be, are only a small minority of the population and should have to recognise the rights of the majority who may want to ban cruel sports or dangerous bee-killing pesticides, and to see the return of beloved birds like the swallow or the spotted flycatcher. The other argument is very similar and also acknowledges the huge social injustice that exists. I forget the proportion of Scotland said to be owned by 127 individuals, for example, and it doesn’t matter, because whatever numbers are quoted the imbalance of power is always grotesque whichever way you slice it. One purpose of democracy should at least be to counter or to moderate that imbalance of power. Most of us don’t own enough land to park a doormat and can’t afford to pay the rent of the house that lies behind it, and in such circumstances the need to have open access to our countryside and the power to stop a few people from exploiting it to death has never been greater.
There is a growing recognition that we might want and even be able to prioritise nature conservation and biosphere restoration on maybe a third of the UK. Much of this land would be in the uplands. If huge sections of this land are controlled by the very rich so that they can hunt and shoot, and by farmers whose subsidised livestock prevent the return of our forests, this will not be achievable. In the USA over a third of the landscape is public or federal land. It would be a slow process to gain public ownership of this amount of land in the UK, but a widening of the rights of the public, and restrictions on the way landowners can exploit land, might achieve many of the benefits of having public lands.
Yep.
I look forward to your eudite and we'll crafted articles even when they make me sad and angry.