RIVERS OF POWER
BOOK OF THE MONTH by Laurence C. Smith
‘As a child, my sole ambition was to farm and raise livestock like my family had before me.’ And so, after studying literature and language at university, followed by stints pulling pints, felling trees and going to sea aboard a Hebridean fishing boat, Patrick Laurie returns to his native Galloway in southwest Scotland, a region that ‘has been overlooked for so long we have fallen off the map’.
He and his wife buy a farmhouse and begin stocking a few of his family’s fields with the region’s traditional cattle breed, whose ‘reputation for superb beef is countered by rumours of violence and awkwardness’. Haunted by nature’s declining fortunes (‘My generation has arrived at a party which seems to be ending’), he hopes that by bringing back ‘the old ways’ – mixed farming instead of monocultures, slow-growing rare-breed cattle instead of modern European beef breeds, a sickle and a scythe instead of a combine harvester – he can also bring back the wildlife that once thrived on Galloway’s farmland.
Philosophical and romantic, but also deeply pragmatic – farming forces you to be – Laurie is clear-eyed about the rather quixotic nature of his endeavour. His progress is marked by the thickening of the calluses on his fingers, his slow mastery of tractor mechanics, his growing grasp of animal husbandry, but also in the return of wild birds to his fields, in love for our planet radiates clearly, for he is but ‘the beneficiary of the clean air welling up from the greenery below’. Displaying an in-depth knowledge of ancient peoples, Hanbury-Tenison encounters remarkable parallels with modern humans. The Maya Civilisation reached a peak population density that rivals the highest of today’s nations, yet they overharvested the natural resources on which they depended. Hanbury-Tenison retraces the demise of these early human societies to proffer an urgent warning: we must learn from history, and mobilise what they did not have – modern technology. particular his beloved curlews. He details the many trials and tribulations of a farmer’s life – ‘I was starting to find that farming is a steady, draining slog’ – but also finds great joy in the small victories and in the everchanging environment around him. He’s a keen observer, of nature and of the general ebb and flow of the world, and he writes with a seemingly effortless lyricism about what he sees. The book itself moves at the pace of traditional farming and a certain profundity slowly accretes among the mundane details. In truth, not much happens, but the sheer poetry of Laurie’s writing carries the tendency to veer into inconsequentiality. A charming evocation of the harsh realities of farming in the modern world, and the difficulties of marrying food production and conservation.
In a run-down of some of the latest innovations humanity has to offer, he offers radical (and sometimes controversial) solutions. A microbedriven revolution can economise food production and empower modern medicine; the ability to engineer weather systems can save droughtstricken regions; and by making renewable technologies economically sound, we can forge a sustainable world. Yet, beneath it all is a simple message: humanity must re-educate its relationship with the natural world and accept our dependence on the biosphere.