I’m sorry if rewilding hurts farmers, but we need it | Nick Cohen
Apart from crags and pockets of ancient woodland, the British uplands are manmade. Three thousand years before Christ, neolithic farmers felled the trees and gave us a landscape stripped to grassland by grazing sheep we take as “natural” today. Two thousand years after Christ, new forces are moulding the British uplands. They will bring back at least a part of what stone age men destroyed.
It’s hard to believe in an unequal country, where wealth and land are so unevenly distributed, but the ecology of the hills depends on popular approval. When public opinion moves, the hills move with it. However solid their drystone walls are, they will not be strong enough to hold back political change, climate change and changes in fashion, which affect the countryside as surely as they affect clothes and music.
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A writer in the Spectator, who accused the trust of wanting to turn the Lake District into Disneyland, could not have been more wrong. Keswick and Cockermouth have been flooded repeatedly. Flood defences are unable to spare them as global warming intensifies. The same is true for Scottish, Lancashire and Yorkshire towns downstream of the Highlands and Pennines. A part of the answer is to expel sheep and plant trees that might hold up the water on their old grazing lands. You don’t need to cloak the landscape, just to forest about 20% of the hills to slow run off and create natural dams in mountain streams. It’s not that sheep farming cannot coexist with flood management, but it will have to be restricted. The monoculture of the uplands must change, in other words, and the public, whose representatives will soon have exclusive power to decide agricultural policy and whose taxes will keep the farmer in business, will want it to change.
...
I have walked the Lake District since I was a child. As I tramped the hills above Borrowdale and Buttermere this spring, I noticed the absence of trees for the first time and found it disconcerting, almost shocking. All my life I thought I’d want to see the landscape the Romantic poets saw stay the way it was. All of a sudden, I wanted something new – and better.
(Somebody wrote not so long ago that the National Parks in England were marginally better then car parks)
Apart from crags and pockets of ancient woodland, the British uplands are manmade. Three thousand years before Christ, neolithic farmers felled the trees and gave us a landscape stripped to grassland by grazing sheep we take as “natural” today. Two thousand years after Christ, new forces are moulding the British uplands. They will bring back at least a part of what stone age men destroyed.
It’s hard to believe in an unequal country, where wealth and land are so unevenly distributed, but the ecology of the hills depends on popular approval. When public opinion moves, the hills move with it. However solid their drystone walls are, they will not be strong enough to hold back political change, climate change and changes in fashion, which affect the countryside as surely as they affect clothes and music.
...
A writer in the Spectator, who accused the trust of wanting to turn the Lake District into Disneyland, could not have been more wrong. Keswick and Cockermouth have been flooded repeatedly. Flood defences are unable to spare them as global warming intensifies. The same is true for Scottish, Lancashire and Yorkshire towns downstream of the Highlands and Pennines. A part of the answer is to expel sheep and plant trees that might hold up the water on their old grazing lands. You don’t need to cloak the landscape, just to forest about 20% of the hills to slow run off and create natural dams in mountain streams. It’s not that sheep farming cannot coexist with flood management, but it will have to be restricted. The monoculture of the uplands must change, in other words, and the public, whose representatives will soon have exclusive power to decide agricultural policy and whose taxes will keep the farmer in business, will want it to change.
...
I have walked the Lake District since I was a child. As I tramped the hills above Borrowdale and Buttermere this spring, I noticed the absence of trees for the first time and found it disconcerting, almost shocking. All my life I thought I’d want to see the landscape the Romantic poets saw stay the way it was. All of a sudden, I wanted something new – and better.
(Somebody wrote not so long ago that the National Parks in England were marginally better then car parks)
