Stuck in the wilderness
THAT admirable global superstar, Ed Sheeran, has been voicing his concern at the inevitably unsustainable lifestyle of a performer travelling all over the world. His frankness about the realities of the international concert circuit was accompanied by a determination to make up for it by planting trees. It was an understandable suggestion from a countryman who still lives in rural Suffolk within a stone’s throw of where he was brought up. It was for him a natural proposal to ensure that his emissions were offset by the carbon sequestration that trees provide.
It is typical of our contrary world that even that simple proposal evoked criticism. The media dug up a spokesperson from a far-left organisation to complain that rich people shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions about land that they owned. Instead, she insisted, they ought to give land to the community and allow the comrades to choose where, when and what should be planted!
More serious was the way that the reports referred to Mr Sheeran’s simple proposal as ‘rewilding’, as if all Nature-based contributions to the battle against climate change should be classed in this way. It is perhaps a tribute to the public-relations skill of the rewilders that their solution has gained such currency. However, it won’t do much for the natural world if people begin to believe that this is the only way forward.
Much closer to the truth is the old story of the countryman working in his garden who was approached by the local vicar, who solemnly opined: ‘Isn’t it wonderful what God and the gardener can do together?’ ‘Yes,’ said the yokel, ‘but you should have seen the state it was in when He did it on His own!’
The story underlines the essential point about the countryside, the landscape and our gardens. They are all the product of Mankind working with Nature to make something that is not wild. That doesn’t mean that wilderness doesn’t have its place, but simply that, for 1,000 years, England has been primarily a cultivated land, from the simplest vegetable patch to the New Forest and the vast uplands kept in good shape by cattle and sheep.
Even today, when people enthusiastically set aside thousands of acres as a wilderness, it is a manufactured and protected wild—as authentic as an 18th-century grotto with attendant ‘hermit’. Rewilding is a pleasing diversion made possible by private wealth, tourism and, in Defra’s latest plan, by public subsidy. It can, however, only be a small element compared with the main event: our cultivated countryside.
Getting that right, growing the food that we need, rejuvenating the soil that we have depleted, stopping the erosion and the pollution, restoring the biodiversity and planting the trees and the hedges that have been lost— here is where the Nature-based solutions really lie. Husbanding bisons, bringing back sea eagles and protecting wilderness cannot be seen as anything other than a minority sport.
Why is it, then, that the ministry that has been given the task of restoring the land of England and thus pushing back against climate change has the time to make proposals on encouraging rewilding, but still has not produced a comprehensive, detailed programme for the farmed countryside?
The good intentions that Defra displays in general are still not expressed in particular. Farmers still don’t have the detailed information that enables them to plan for next year, let alone for 2050 and net zero. Can we please leave rewilding to argue about later and get down to the substance? We need an effective, costed, worked-through plan for food security, sustainable agriculture and a regenerated countryside—and we need it now.
It won’t do much for the natural world if people believe rewilding is the only way