The author begins by explaining that, for centuries, we have been
sold the myth that owning land makes people good stewards of it. This
idea was used to justify the enclosure of common land and the
eviction of the people who lived and worked there in the past and it
is still dragged out to justify restricting access to the countryside
today. We are told that people who do not own the land will treat it
badly. However, ownership gives people the legal right to destroy
their property and large landowners have taken full advantage of that
to inflict enormous damage on our landscapes. As Guy Shrubsole says,
‘the greatest threat to the countryside comes from within it’.
Reading the first couple of chapters, I realised that I had
subconsciously absorbed this ‘lie of the land’ myself, but the
rest of the book will leave no-one in any doubt that there is
something profoundly wrong with the way land ownership works in this
country.
The following
chapters provide a series of examples of how large landowners, (often
the aristocracy, but also the newly rich, investors and
institutions), are abusing the land they own. Vast tracts of our
upland moors are managed as grouse shooting estates. Their deep peat
soils are the UK’s single most important carbon sink. However, when
managed for grouse, the land is drained and the vegetation is burned
to promote the fresh growth of heather, favoured food of the grouse.
This devastates the botanical diversity and turns a carbon sink into
a carbon source, as the peat dries out and releases long-trapped
carbon as it decomposes. The damaged peat is no longer able to absorb
the winter rains as effectively, causing flooding in the valleys
below. To add insult to injury, the gamekeepers on these large
estates systematically kill predators of the grouse, including
protected birds of prey. They are very rarely prosecuted. Grouse
moors are a sick landscape, all so that the very rich can shoot birds
for ‘sport’.
The fenlands of East
Anglia used to be common lands, ‘a vast wet wilderness’ where
people had an abundant source of food (fish) and a unique lifestyle.
However, marshy land is difficult to own and produces little profit
that can be counted in pounds and pence, so from the seventeenth to
the nineteenth centuries, a handful of investors bought the fens and
drained them, destroying an ecosystem and a way of life. This area of
Britain now produces most of our vegetables, but the drying peat is
sinking and blowing away and we desperately need to stop the soil
degrading further.
Another ‘sport’
introduced by the Victorians, driven pheasant shooting, is distorting
lowland ecosystems. On estates across the country, 50 million
pheasants are released for shoots every year. At the end of each
summer, pheasants constitute a greater biomass than all our wild
birds. 13 million are shot in the autumn. The rest provide an easy
source of prey, which ensures the survival of larger numbers of
generalist predators, to the detriment of more fragile bird and
mammal populations. Pheasants eat caterpillars and beetles, many
species of which are at risk of disappearing forever. They also prey
on young adders, which are now on the brink of extinction. One group
of trespassers found a pit of dead pheasants on an estate, behind the
‘Keep Out’ signs; after the ‘sport’ had finished, they
weren’t even being eaten.
Guy Shrubsole shares
various ideas about how things could be different. In Scotland, the
right for communities to buy land, with a legal pathway that makes it
possible, (albeit not easy), has led to a growing number of inspiring
projects. Langholm Moor was managed for grouse shooting for decades
but, since it was bought by the local community, it is now managed as
a nature reserve and the wildlife is starting to recover.
Unfortunately, we still don’t have the same rights for communities
to buy land in England.
The author proposes
returning to the vision of the government’s Nature Conservancy of
1949, which recognised the importance of state ownership and had the
power to compulsorily purchase land and restore it for nature.
Perhaps this right would be of most use in our national parks, which
are not ‘national’ in any true sense at the moment. The vast
majority of the land within them is privately owned, much of it by
the aristocracy, and nature is declining more rapidly within the UK’s
national parks than in the wider countryside.
Finally, the author
proposes a national land use framework. This was first attempted in
the 1930s but those who own the land have consistently resisted all
efforts to temper their control over it. It needs to cover land to be
reserved for nature, as well as agriculture, and require large
landowners to report on their management for carbon and nature. This
would restore some semblance of democracy to the management our land
and perhaps promote true stewardship.
As with Guy
Shrubsole’s previous book, our Green Book Group was impressed by
the enormous amount of research that must have gone into writing this
thorough and fascinating book. It was published just after the Labour
government came into power and expresses optimism throughout at the
changes they could make. We were left wondering how he feels now,
after a year of Labour’s dithering and inaction on nature…
