The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Britain is underwater amid ‘rewilding’ idiocy
From where I’m sitting it is positively Noachian. The rain continues to pelt the skylight and Cyrus gets a walk not when it stops raining, but when the downpours lessen. The rail at the front of the Aga is constantly draped with the trousers we all wore the last time we went out, and the fields are a mush of what Uncle Monty would call “beastly mud and oomska”.
At night the wind howls and the rain becomes ferocious, lashing against the window panes. When I pop out with Cyrus for a final breath of air before bed, the wood of Willet Hill on the other side of the valley seems to roar as the winds pummel the trees. Each morning there’s a trail of destruction with the paths of Bitter Cleave Copse, on our side of the valley, strewn with branches if they’re not blocked by whole trees that have come down in the night.
I saw this afternoon that at least two have fallen and collapsed a fence, and as for the water: the barn where I hold my events has revealed a natural spring. I’ve bought a second pump so we can avoid the floor of the tent where we dine in winter being under six inches of water.
The water runs into the sump we dug for the pump like a stream and we can just about pump water out at the same rate as it flows in. The water looks clear and clean. Sitwell’s Spring could surely rival that of Harrogate or Buxton. And I’m only half joking.
There’s less novelty in the water flooding the roads around us – take a trip to London from Taunton and the Somerset Levels are becoming the Great Lakes. You can hear an intake of breath as passengers stop what they’re doing and stare out of the windows.
But the rising waters are a salient lesson as we hurtle through the countryside. Nature is making her presence felt. Her waters defy the constructs of man, drawn by gravity and the paths of least resistance.
And they are, of course, constructs. Every hedge was built and every wood, if not controlled, is at least allowed to exist between fields and, when it’s affordable, is managed. Fields are farmed for arable or livestock and moorland habitats are managed, which helps to conserve bird species – and that includes controlling predators.
Thus the modern rural landscape is as much a construct as the town. Which is why urbanites and people who don’t quite understand the countryside believe in a concept called “rewilding”. I hear the word uttered breathlessly on Radio 4 with as much frequency as “wild swimming”.
And it’s a term bandied about as if it’s some wholly virtuous, holistic and natural concept. Those who proselytise for rewilding believe that if the land is simply left alone, then nature will take her course and claw back from the dreaded work all those farmers have done (trying to feed people). Except, I’m afraid it’s a bit late. Rewilding would only work if it were constantly and carefully managed, which doesn’t seem very wild does it? And to which era are you hoping to take the land back to? To pre-Industrial? Pleistocene? Eocene? Whoops, the latter era of the past being a period of both catastrophic warming and then ruinous cooling.
One person’s rewilding is another’s denial of the right to roam, a righteous form of eco-fascism
Leave the land to rewild by itself now on what one scholar has described as “a romantic pursuit of Eden”, and, because of mankind’s interventions, you’ll see a rapid rise in predators and a growth in invasive species.
And whose land is it to rewild anyway? One person’s rewilding is another’s denial of the right to roam, a righteous form of eco-fascism.
Right now what we need is to intervene in nature, to protect homes and livelihoods with the same zeal as property developers in cities. And with the Somerset Levels that means proper river dredging, to let flood waters flow to the sea, to build more pumping stations, to raise the roads and railways, to build washlands to take excess water and maintain the rhynes; those man-made ditches built over the centuries to control water.
Meanwhile, the rain overhead has intensified and we might need a boat rather than a second car. In every respect, this is no dry January.