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…
