If you want to hold back the earth on the side of a cutting, say, or protect a river bank from erosion, you can buy some big metal cages that you arrange in rows and fill with stones. Then you wire down the lids and do another row on top, maybe set back a bit. It’s a whole lot easier that building a wall. Ten to one you’ve seen them and don’t know what they are called. So if you want to talk about them, you have to say “You know, those… they’re like big boxes, or cages, and you put stones in them, and it’s like, a wall or something… You must have seen them…” If you are talking to me, because I’m a bit of a smart-arse about that sort of thing, I’ll say “Oh, you mean gabions!” and I might even go on a bit about how useful the word is, because if you know it you don’t have to say “You, know, those… they’re like big boxes, or cages, and you fill them full of stones…” every time. It only works if you both know the word, otherwise I say “You could use gabions!” and you say “What are they?” and off I go again saying “You know, those… they’re like big boxes….or cages,,, and you put stones in them…”
So this week’s useful word, ‘struthonian’, was mentioned on Twitter the other day and I took a fancy to it because of my experiences of visiting Hay Festival. It means something to do with denying a truth because you don’t like it, and it is derived from the Latin word for ostrich. A useful word if you both know it, and if you don’t you have to go back to first principles and mention ostriches and sand. But I quite want to hang on to it, because in the world of ecology and conservation it might be a useful concept, like ‘shifting baseline’. And useful when talking about George Monbiot, who was at Hay, to whom I’ll get around in a minute.
I’ve taken a perverse pleasure – until this year - in having nothing to do with the Hay Festival. There are still things to object to, of course, but none of them quite cancel out being able to listen to some very lucid and thoughtful people, and though being an old curmudgeon has its pleasures, this year I have swapped that solitary misanthropic fun, forked out a bit – quite a lot actually - and listened to some rather interesting people. OK, I know it’s about selling books, but if you buy one and don’t like it you can recycle it more easily than the average yogurt pot. And if you don’t recycle it but put it on your bookshelf, you are sequestering carbon. If you were a farmer you would probably be able to get into carbon futures trading if you had anything of a library in the farmhouse. You’d be amazed at how much carbon is sequestered in my house in book form, and if you pay me enough I’ll let you offset some of your carbon with me every time I buy another. Just like a farmer! Buying me a copy of George Monbiot’s ‘Regenesis’ will offset half an hour in the Landover talking with a neighbour with your elbow out of the window and the engine running..
So one session at Hay, ‘Are Trees the Solution to Climate Change?’, involved the CEO of the Woodland Trust and the CEO of Natural Resources Wales, ably chaired by a local author and tree planter. The discussion combined a wide, even global, perspective with a more local focus, and if it was in any way unsatisfactory that was because the topic was too large for the time allowed.
Because it was so wide ranging, there was maybe not enough about Wales, where the debate on tree planting, carbon offsetting and rewilding can get very heated. I suppose I steered the questions in that direction by asking for the panel’s views on why rewilding is going like a train in Scotland and is a dirty word in Wales. They skirted round the complexities and suggested it was all about small farmers in Wales and the power of very large landowners in Scotland, which is putting it rather superficially. At this point a woman in the audience squeezed in a last question, one of those questions that is not really a question but a position statement. The panel did not answer her, having run out of time.
She was apparently from a farming community in Carmarthenshire that sees itself as threatened by carbon-trading speculators buying up farmland in order to plant trees and claim carbon credits and so on. So she described the community in glowing terms. Before the carbon traders came it had been an idyllic community, she seemed to be saying, a place where Welsh language and culture were nurtured, and wholesome food was produced in the beautiful Welsh landscape. Sensing that she was running out of time, she used the final part of the question to make sure she also included the wonderful Welsh hill-sheep farmers, producing the wonderful Welsh lamb on the wonderful Welsh mountains. No part of her rural world was to be ignored or disrespected.
Essentially she was saying that she didn’t want anything to change, the sort of view you expect and understand from a member of a ‘traditional’ community. And I would instinctively sympathise, were it not that the state of the planet is such that change has to happen and no-one should be exempt. Whatever solutions are hammered out by the Welsh government and the Welsh farmers, they need to include space for biodiversity, and change towards an economy less dependent on perversely-subsidised sheep farming keeping the uplands in a state of dereliction. And whatever solutions are found, change has to happen, because farming in Wales as currently practiced, like farming everywhere, is a major driver of biodiversity loss and climate change. This is not just my opinion, it is the simple truth. Farming will continue but it has to change. No good being struthonian about it!
Another session that I enjoyed was George Monbiot talking about his new book ‘Regenesis’. He made a powerful case that farming as currently practiced is a major driver of climate change and of loss of biodiversity, something I have been arguing for ages though not as well as George. He suggested that we had all been influenced by children’s books about nice cuddly young animals on idyllic old-fashioned farms. In my case I was actually brought up on or around farms like that and have early memories of puppies and threshing machines and following the binder round. It is easy to see the superficial beauty of this landscape and not realise that it is hollowed out by farming, a place where they have left the hedges just to fool us. It’s a prairie disguised by hedges. If you are a farmer it is even more difficult to hear what George is saying, because, like the rest of us, farmers don’t want to change and they don’t feel comfortable with my last ‘words of the week’, cognitive dissonance. They don’t like to admit that George is right, because that inevitably leads them to the desperate conclusion that everything they’ve been doing on the farm is harmful to the planet and needs to change. You can change to become a regenerative farmer and hope that will bring you to the happier state of cognitive assonance, or you can achieve it by deciding that George is wrong, and probably from some city, and swearing about him in the manner of a Welsh sheep farmer, desperate not to believe him.
We all find change difficult. I have many friends and acquaintances who are concerned about the state of biodiversity and the climate crisis, many who are comfortably off, retired on reliable pensions and with savings in the bank. And most of them are doing sod all. I know one who doesn’t fly anymore. My son has an electric car, and there are two Teslas in the village as well as my electric van. Some houses round here have solar panels because Cameron’s government cut them a really juicy deal, a form of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) financed out of everyone else’s electricity bills. Some of them say they eat less meat, or only eat meat that is ethically produced, whatever that means, but if you were to stay with them for a day or two you would find that they are eating just as much meat as before.
As for becoming vegan or vegetarian, most people think that is way too far to go, although it is actually the simplest and most effective way do something towards saving the planet, because meat production is hugely wasteful of land and fodder crops as well as producing lots of greenhouse gases. When you vote you rarely feel you have made a difference, but every time you buy organic food your vote against the use of biocides in nature is registered and makes a difference, just as every time you don’t buy a beefy burger a little pressure on the rainforests is eased. So why do people find it so hard? To be a vegan or vegetarian, for example, you could pretty much carry on as before but eat Linda McCartney burgers instead of the meaty ones. Sure you might eventually tire of this, but as you did so you could start gently to explore meat-free cooking. Get an Ottolenghi cookbook. I knew someone who called veggies ‘wierdos’ but nevertheless cooked wonderful vegetarian dishes from his cookbooks all the time because they were so good. You might find that it was much more interesting than traditional cookery, which is all too often a matter of frying or roasting or boiling some meat and veg and then pouring gravy on it. Next time you are looking at a menu have a look at the vegan options – chances are they are tastier and more interesting than that same old same old steak and chips and mushrooms.
I’m not sure how fast we will change to a vegan diet, but as for the farmers I’m more hopeful. Experience tells us they will do whatever we pay them to do. They’ve been happily despoiling the planet and pocketing the infamous European single farm payments for years now, but pay them to look after the planet and they’ll go along with that too. If you want someone to promote biodiversity ideally you wouldn’t choose a farmer, but they are what we have to deal with.
Until the 18th century in the UK there was no appreciation of the natural scenery. It was viewed as horrid wildness that just had to be endured until you reached your urban destination. It took Wordsworth et al (and several decades) to suggest a new way of looking at nature in order to appreciate its beauties. It's no wonder the audience member at Hay enjoys her sheepy uplands while a Welsh farmer whose Youtube interview I saw this week expressed complete dismay at being expected to change his ways which his farming ancestors had sworn by and which, up to that point, he had taken pride in. I'm not sure that money and subsidies encouragement is necessarily the answer as you suggest. Perhaps George & friends just need to polish up some empathy...