Devolution, climate change, and how we could learn a thing or two from the bees nd
Woman’s Wales? is a new book published this month which is packed full of essays about what devolution has really meant for women in Wales. Here, as part of a new Weekend series featuring edited versions of those essays, Rae Howells explores how best to n
IT IS spring 2018 and in a corner of a Gower meadow, a common carder bumblebee forages in the hedge. Her buzz is soothing, zigzagging with her as she meanders between owers. She’s a queen, not long emerged from hibernation. Her task is to make a nest of dried grass, round as a hurricane, in which to build a wax bowl and lay her eggs. is is how she gets her name, by combing and neatening a tangle of grass until she has sculpted it into a hollow ball, like a textile worker carding wool. From this chamber, she will raise the next generation of common carder bumblebees.
Later in the summer I will nd her nest, and she will become the subject of a poetry book. For now, she and I are here together in this small corner of Gower, tending to my lavender eld.
Until recently I was a journalist running a community newspaper in Port Talbot. But journalism is an unforgiving and underfunded industry, especially in Wales, and by 2017, after almost 20 years in the newsroom, I was burnt out by the demands of the (mostly bad) news cycle.
So I have disconnected myself from the frantic “OMG what happened?” of news, and am concerning myself with other timelines – the “right now this moment” of tending this eld, the “what might be” of its future. And in a moment of what I will call optimism, this new me coalesces around the idea of building a business from the land: I decide to become a lavender farmer on my native Gower.
Did devolution bring me here? A Welsh woman, Welsh-speaker, a mother, a writer, a journalist, a journalism academic, and lately a bee sympathiser and a climate worrier. ere’s no simple answer to that, I think. But a better question might be this: Will devolution help me get where I want to go? Can it help us tackle the grave challenge we now face, a global climate catastrophe with many of its causes far beyond our jurisdiction?
It turns out “lavender farming” is another way of saying “weeding”. At the beginning, when we rst started growing lavender, we took a “bare earth” approach, battling weeds, pulling them up, keeping the soil exposed, and uprooting any plants that took hold as they endangered our lavender crop. For the insects at our feet, we might as well have been tearing up centuries-old redwoods or the ancient trees of the Amazon rainforest.
Immediate problems became apparent. Soil eroded. Where we initially simply pulled up grasses to bare the earth, opportunistic (and much bigger) weeds quickly took hold. We learned a valuable lesson. Where we could have trimmed or cut the grass and kept the soil securely in place, we were now battling enormous dandelions that competed for light and water with our lavender, and thistles that pierced our gloves and spiked our legs. We had made the land inhospitable to the plants and insects that seemed to keep it healthy, and made things harder for ourselves.
I realised fairly quickly that it was in my direct interest to encourage this tiny soil-level Amazon to thrive. I am lucky that the lesson was so obvious. Not everybody will have such a direct and measurable connection between a thriving insect world and their own success. And many will actively hate insect pests and the damage they wreak to carefully sown crops, and be glad of their demise.
Either way, we are all tied to their fate. Ecosystems are nely balanced, but they can take a fair battering before they eventually fail. In the UK, we have been systematically “de-wilding” the landscape for millennia to suit our own purposes, for agriculture, food production, industry, construction, transport and even leisure. In particular since the Industrial Revolution, humans have become adept at changing the world to suit ourselves.
Our ingenuity in adapting our environment for our own needs is compounded by massive population growth, from one million of us 10,000 years ago, to 7.8 billion humans alive today, and we are taking up more and more room, deforesting, reshaping, moving waterways and mountains, building cities and factories, and pressing the land to produce ever more food in ever more e cient ways. Hunting animals to extinction, driving out “vermin” and “pests”.
In Wales, our familiar green countryside, far from being wild and unspoilt, is in reality a grazed green desert of compacted lawn resulting from widespread sheep grazing, largely devoid of nectar-rich wild owers, the necessary food of insects. e result is what the conservation writer Benedict Macdonald calls “the greatest wildlife silence of all”.
In his book Rebirding, a manifesto for rewilding Britain for the bene t of birds in order to rebalance the ecosystem and establish an ecotourism-focused economy, Macdonald notes that livestock farming (predominantly sheep farming) occupies 88% of the land surface in Wales, while up to 80% of its workforce’s salaries are subsidised by the Welsh Government. Meanwhile, livestock farming contributes only 0.7% of the nation’s economy and employs a mere 1.9% of its population.
Macdonald acknowledges a transition away from sheep farming in favour of ecotourism would not be easy, nor without controversy. Sheep farming is not just a means of making a living in Wales. Farming contributes £1.7bn to the Welsh economy, but it also underpins a culture, a community, and I would add, is a foundation stone of the Welsh language.
As he says: “Rural communities are the backbone of Wales. Far more than sheep, it is cohesion and common purpose that rural Welsh communities fear losing the most.”
But if devolution has shown any promise, it is its ability to work with the in-built strength of communities.
In theory, at least, the Senedd is built on those pillars of community, cohesion, collaboration and cross-pollination that characterise Wales more widely through its strong social traditions, springing from workplaces, trade unions, chapels and sports clubs.
Devolved government is closer to us, better able to listen and respond, politicians closer to us when we review their policies. Like our native bees, our best selves are revealed when we listen to each other and work together.
As we all know, talking the environmental policy talk is easier than walking the walk. e Welsh
Government has certainly shown it can do the former.
A trio of legislation, all passed at around the same time – the Environment (Wales) Act 2016, the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 and the Planning (Wales) Act 2016 – has sought to go further than rural subsidies to create a joined-up legislative framework for sustainability in Wales, with the three acts intended to work in harmony across seven wellbeing targets, including biodiversity and environmental sustainability, as well as setting planning laws within a sustainability agenda, and enshrining those important zero carbon targets.
And so we come to that sticky second half of the phrase – the bit about “walking the walk”. Rural subsidy payments are currently going through post-brexit reform, and as recent protests have made clear, the plan for Wales is unpopular with farmers, who object to giving up valuable arable or grazing land for growing trees, and worry that the scheme risks drowning them in paperwork. Other “big ticket” policies like the 20mph limit have also been controversial, and there seems a growing misstep between policy and public opinion. e Welsh Government’s comms and PR could use some work.
What happens when aims straddle departments, requiring change, coordination, cooperation, spanning local, regional and national administrations, and/or cross the divide between big, unwieldy departments? is is also where the cracks can show.
Here’s a real example. I have become involved in a local campaign to protest against a housing development on a small piece of Gower common land, West Cross Common. It’s a stunning, scrubby little place, bursting with bees and butter ies (you had me at bees), with rare food plants and scores of birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals, from adders and polecats to bats and green nches. It has been joyously neglected and ignored for decades.
Neglect has made it wild. It is incredibly biodiverse, spilling over with rarities like devil’s bit scabious, tormentil, bog asphodel and waxcap mushrooms. is type of lowland wet heath, known o cially as “purple moorgrass and rush pasture”, is listed by Natural Resources Wales as a priority habitat with a target of “no loss”. If you go by the Welsh Government’s climate policies on peat alone, there’s no way it should be developed.
However West Cross Common is located on the edge of the existing settlement of West Cross. e Welsh Government planning policy on sustainable “placemaking” means this land can be put forward as an “exception” site, a slice of green belt that can be nibbled away for the purposes of a ordable housing. Planning permission has already been granted at local level by Swansea council, with the promised a ordability of the housing tipping the scale in its favour. However, as it is common land, the nal decision rests with the Welsh Government, which must be satis ed that the land’s importance for such things as rights of commoners, biodiversity, amenity value, or its carbon storing peat soil, can be outweighed by the provision of 56 a ordable rented homes and 70 parking spaces. We await their decision.
is kind of dilemma forces us to confront a bigger question: What sort of Wales do we want?
ese are di cult decisions. Roads that are needed, but shouldn’t be built. Speed limits that nobody is complaining about, but that ought to be lowered. Green-belt housing developments to keep up with a dire shortage, but which shouldn’t go here. Farmland given over to trees, which could be used to produce food. Decisions that can feel limiting, inhuman, bonkers, and perhaps worst of all u y. But which ultimately take us towards a cleaner, safer, greener Wales. Each di cult choice is another brick in the wall, if we can only have the courage to keep building.
Summer 2022. In my hands, I’m holding my new poetry book, e Language of Bees. rough writing the book I have come to appreciate how bees work together, not as individuals but as a colony, for the good of all – ideas I’ve tried to explore further in this essay.
As with any other crop, growing lavender successfully on Gower requires time and patience, to learn how to bend with the land’s moods and tendencies, to take the time to listen and discover how the ecosystem already works, and build from there.
I think this is how politics should work as well. It’s why I think the Welsh Government must keep going with its green agenda, but it needs to move much more quickly, and communicate better. It must work to nd solutions that work for people, but which put nature rst. It must stop tinkering around the edges, and truly rewild large areas of the country. It must rethink the way we use land in Wales and put trust in farmers as stewards and guardians of their land, who have a vested interest in the health of the ecosystem – and reward them for their e orts.
We are a small nation, but if we can get our little piece of the world right, then surely that’s got to be worth something.
Did devolution bring me here? A Welsh woman, Welsh-speaker, a mother, a writer, a journalist, a journalism academic, and lately a bee sympathiser and a climate worrier. ere’s no simple answer to that
Rae Howells is a poet, journalist and lavender farmer from Swansea. Her debut collection, e Language of Bees (Parthian), was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2023. She has previously won the Rialto Nature & Place and Welsh poetry competitions and been featured widely in journals including Magma, e Rialto, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Acumen and Poetry Ireland.
is Common Uncommon, Rae’s book about the ght to save West Cross Common, will be published in May.
Next Saturday in Weekend: Norena Shopland on showcasing Wales’ history of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Woman’s Wales?, published by Parthian Books at £10.99 a copy, can be ordered at www. parthianbooks.com/products/womans-waleshardback