Feral

by George Monbiot

  To abandon is to forsake or desert. Abandonment is one of those terms–such as improvement, stewardship, neglect and undergrazing–which create the impression that the ecosystem cannot survive without us. But we do not improve the ecosystem by managing it; we merely change it. Across Europe, these rules have turned complex, diverse and fecund ecosystems into simple and largely empty ones. They have helped precipitate an ecological catastrophe.

  There is a second tranche of subsidies that pays farmers to undo some of the damage inflicted by this system. It is a crazy use of public funds. First farmers are forced to destroy almost everything; then they can apply for a smaller amount of money to put some of it back.

  But only a little. The ‘green’ subsidies (known as Pillar 2 payments) reward farmers for making marginal changes, and only in certain places. National governments disburse this money, using the European rules as their guidelines. The Welsh government assures farmers that these payments ‘will require at most minor modifications to farming systems’.34 In fact it expressly forbids them to restore more than a few tiny corners of their land. For example, the payment for allowing land ‘to revert to rough grassland or scrub’ applies only to areas of one-third of a hectare or less.35 While the scheme provides subsidies for everything from the removal of coarse fish to the erection of kissing-gates,36 there are no payments for planting native trees in most of the upland areas of Wales: tree-planting grants, on the whole, can be issued only for the lowlands and valleys, where the farmland is most productive and farmers are least inclined to use them.*5

  Farmers are supposed to prove that they have taken the measures for which they are receiving these ‘green’ payments. But enforcement falls somewhere on the spectrum between weak and hopeless. A friend whose job involved checking that farmers who are being paid to keep their sheep out of the woods are doing so tells me that ‘the vast majority of farming schemes I checked failed, and represented what were basically fraudulent claims’. He routinely found woods from which sheep were supposed to have been excluded full of the white plague, but when he recommended that the grant be stopped, the senior official at the time told him he must be mistaken, and that if there were a problem he should try merely to persuade the farmer to meet the conditions.

  It seems puzzling, when subsidies have been removed from almost every other industry, that farming continues, despite the financial crisis, to receive so much support from taxpayers. I struggle to understand why there is not more public protest around this issue. Perhaps these payments–and the rules which govern them–reflect a deep-rooted fear of losing control over nature. We have not wholly shed our sense of a sacred duty to proclaim ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’.38 But that may not be the only explanation.

  ‘Charlemagne’, writing in the Economist, has coined what he or she calls the ‘Richard Scarry rule’: ‘Politicians will rarely challenge interests that feature in children’s books.’39 It is an appealing idea, though it does not seem to apply to other sectors: they willingly do battle with train drivers, for example. But perhaps it is relevant to farming. A large proportion of the books produced for very young children concern this industry. They tell a story of quaint and charming farmyards in which one cow and her calf, one sheep and her lamb, one hen and her chicks, one pony, one pig, one dog, one duck and one cat range freely. The farmers have broad smiles and rosy cheeks and live in arcadian peace with the animals they keep. Understandably, the issues of slaughter, butchery, consumption, castration, tusking, separation, battery production, farrowing crates, pesticides, waste disposal and other such industrial realities never feature. Unintentionally these books might implant, at the very onset of consciousness, a deep, unquestioned faith in the virtue and beauty of the farm economy and the importance of sustaining it, regardless of demand.

  I spent several months pursuing an explanation for the subsidy rules, and the way they are interpreted by national governments, during which I was passed from one agency to another. After a long and exasperating correspondence with her civil servants, I secured an audience with the Welsh minister then in charge of rural affairs, Elin Jones. I began to understand the nature of the problem when she put down her file of notes on the table, and placed beside it a National Farmers’ Union pen.

  I was keen to discover why the Forestry Commission in Wales, a branch of the Welsh government, had issued a blanket ban on tree planting grants across almost all the uplands.*6 The explanation she gave astonished me: she claimed that allowing trees to return to the uplands would exacerbate global warming, as carbon dioxide would be released from the soil. When I asked her officials how this statement could be justified, they sent me two long scientific reports. I read them and discovered that they said the opposite of what the minister and her department had claimed. One of them revealed that it is not tree planting but overgrazing by sheep which has reduced the amount of carbon in the soil in the Welsh uplands.†7 Even plantation forestry, which creates much greater disturbance of the soil than allowing native trees to spread, causes no demonstrable carbon loss.42 The other told me that in all the situations it modelled, planting trees on grasslands increased the amount of carbon in the soil.43

  Yet Elin’s argument is used across the European Union to prevent reforestation of the uplands. The European Commission claims that less farming would cause the ‘loss of possibilities to contribute to the mitigation of climate change’.44 It provides no evidence to support this statement. It would be highly surprising to discover that forest and scrub have a worse impact on the atmosphere than sheep or cattle farming.*8

  Subsidies are not the only means by which we pay for grazing in the hills. In England and Wales, floods cause around £1.25 billion of damage a year.†9 Protecting land and homes from possible impacts costs a further £570 million a year. The immediate reason for the summer floods that struck the region in which I live in 2012, flushing through houses, forcing the evacuation of the village of Pennal and the rescue by helicopter and lifeboat of campers and caravanners on the coast, drowning roads, railways and the electricity substation, was an Atlantic gale that dumped a very heavy load of rain on the hills.47 But the floods must have been exacerbated–and might have been caused–by the reduced capacity of the hills to absorb this rain. Instead of percolating away slowly, it now sluices almost immediately into the valleys.

  I am told by a senior civil servant that an insurance company recently investigated the possibility of buying and reforesting Pumlumon–the largest mountain in the Cambrians, on whose slopes both the Severn and the Wye arise. It had worked out that this would be cheaper than paying out for carpets in Gloucester. It abandoned the plan because of the likely political difficulties.

  Strong as the case for change may be, agricultural hegemony is so potent that to challenge farmers and landowners is almost taboo. In Wales, farmers (both full- and part-time) account for 1.5 per cent of the total population and 5 per cent of the population of the countryside: 44,000 out of 960,000 rural people.48 Yet the countryside is governed and managed almost exclusively for their benefit. Many of the ideas and perspectives which dominate rural policy arise with farmers’ unions, which are often governed by the biggest and richest landowners. The views of the majority of rural people who are not farmers–95 per cent in Wales–are marginalized. Elin Jones was minister for rural affairs, not minister for farming, but the pen she brought to our discussion was a cipher for her department’s policies. Rural politics throughout Europe and in much of North America suffer from the same blight: their primary purpose appears to be to keep the farmers (or foresters or fisherfolk) happy, though everywhere they are a small minority.

  I am convinced that this can change, that if people were more aware of how their money is being used, the needless destruction, the monomania, driven by farm subsidies–across Europe and in several other parts of the world–would come to an end. This, mor
e than any other measure, would permit the trees to grow, bring the songbirds back, prompt the gradual recolonization of nature, release the ecological processes that have been suppressed for so long. In other words, it would allow a partial rewilding of the land.

  10

  The Hushings

  . . . the smashed faces

  Of the farms with the stone trickle

  Of their tears down the hills’ side.

  R. S. Thomas

  Reservoirs

  Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in the greatest need of rewilding are our children. The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed has gone. Since the 1970s the area in which children may roam without supervision in the UK has decreased by almost 90 per cent, while the proportion of children regularly playing in wild places has fallen from over half to fewer than one in ten.1

  Parents are wrongly terrified of strangers and rightly terrified of traffic. The ecosystem of the indoor world has become ever richer and more engaging. In some countries, children are now demonized and harried when they gather in public places; their games forbidden, their very presence perceived as a threat.2 But as Jay Griffiths records in her remarkable book Kith, they have also been excluded from the fortifying commons by the enclosure and destruction of the natural world.

  The commons was home for boy or bird but the Enclosures*1 stole the nests of both, reaved children of the site of their childhood, robbed them of animal-tutors and river-mentors and stole their deep dream-shelters. The great outdoors was fenced off and marked ‘Trespassers Will be Prosecuted.’ Over the generations, as the outdoors shrank, the indoor world enlarged in importance.3

  As Griffiths shows, enclosure, accompanied by a rapid replacement of the commoners’ polyculture with a landlord’s monoculture, destroyed much of what made the land delightful to children–the ancient trees and unploughed dells, the ponds and rushy meadows, the woods, heath and scrub–and banned them from what it failed to destroy. Destruction and exclusion have continued long beyond the nineteenth century. So many fences are raised to shut us out that eventually they shut us in.

  Enclosure, Griffiths notes, also terminated the long cycle of festivals and carnivals through which people celebrated their marriage to the land, when authority was subverted and mischief made. The places where the festivals had been held were closed, fenced and policed.

  In the early 1990s, I saw this excision performed with shocking speed in Maasailand. I watched the warriors of the community with which I worked perform their people’s last ceremonies–last rites–as the commons in which these had been held were privatized and wired up.4 This process of enclosure and closure shut the people out of their land almost overnight, shattered their communities, dispersed their peculiar culture and drove the young people, many of whom were now destitute, into the cities, where their contact with the natural world was permanently severed. I watched, in other words, the recapitulation of the story of my own land, and witnessed the bewilderment, dewilderment and grief it caused.

  The commons belonged, inasmuch as they belonged to anyone, to children. Their trees and topography provided, uncommissioned and unbuilt, the slides and climbing frames, sandpits and ramps, seesaws and swings, Wendy houses and hiding places which must now be constructed and tested and assessed and inspected, at great expense and (being planned and tidy, fenced and supervised) one-tenth of the fun. Their sticks and flowers and insects and frogs were all the toys that children needed to fill their world with stories. ‘Childhood,’ Griffiths tells us, ‘was to be enclosed as surely as the land.’

  The impacts have been pernicious, but they are so familiar that we scarcely see them any more. The indoor world is far more dangerous than the outdoor world of which parents are so frightened, the almost non-existent stranger danger replaced by a real and insidious estrangement danger. Children, confined to their homes, become estranged from each other and from nature. Obesity, rickets, asthma, myopia, the decline in heart and lung function all appear to be associated with the sedentary indoor life.

  Some studies, summarized in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, appear to link a lack of contact with the natural world to an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.5 Research conducted at the University of Illinois suggests that playing among trees and grass is associated with a reduction in indications of ADHD, while playing indoors or on tarmac appears to increase them.6 One paper suggests that playing out of doors improves children’s reasoning and observation,7 another that outdoor education enhances their reading, writing, science and maths.8 Perhaps children would do better at school if they spent less time in the classroom.

  Missing from children’s lives more than almost anything else is time in the woods. Watching my child and others, it seems to me that deep cover encourages deep play, that big trees, an understorey mazed by fallen trunks and shrubs which conceal dells and banks and holes and overhangs, draw children out of the known world and into others. Almost immediately the woods become peopled with other beings, become the setting for rhapsodic myth and saga, translate the children into characters in an ageless epic, always new, always the same. Here, genetic memories reawaken, ancient impulses are unearthed, age-old patterns of play and discovery recited.

  One difference between indoor entertainment and outdoor play is that the outdoors has an endless capacity to surprise. Its joys are unscripted, its discoveries your own. The thought that most of our children will never be startled by a dolphin breaching, a nightingale simging, the explosive flight of a woodcock, the rustle of an adder is almost as sad as the disappearance of such species from many of the places in which we once played.

  I would like to see every school take its pupils, for one afternoon a week, to run wild in the woods. But there is a major hindrance: not enough woods. Many urban children live so far from the nearest woodland that this simple venture would entail a major expedition. Could every new housing development include some self-willed land in which children can freely play?

  Even beyond the cities, in many parts of the world the woods have been erased. But now that farming, in the absence of subsidies, has become unviable in certain places, we could be about to witness the reversal of some of the enclosures which have excluded children and adults, and the wildlife in which we once exulted.

  I recognize that there are conflicts here, that the vision I have begun to adumbrate in this book collides with other people’s visions. The details differ in every nation, but the story is more or less the same: forms of farming or fishing or forestry which suppress the natural world are seen by those who pursue them as essential to maintaining the economy, culture and traditions of their communities. I have seen such struggles ignite loggers and fisherfolk in Canada, farmers in Norway, whalers in Japan. The conflicts are real and cannot be lightly dismissed. What I am about to describe is particular to Wales, but in essence almost universal. It is a clash between the valid concerns of those who now own or use the land and the valid concerns of those who would like to re-engage with it, but currently find no purchase there.

  St David’s Day. Dydd Gŵyl Dewi. The buds of the sallows were about to break. The silk straining at the bracts was stretched so fine that they gleamed like beads of mercury. The twigs of the birches had turned mauve as the sap rose into them. Daffodils had risen from the ground on the verges, and now their pregnant buds swayed on stiff stems as the lorries swept past. Otherwise, from the road, there was no sign that spring was soon to break out of winter’s prison. The pastures still slumbered in their hibernal colours, yellow and tan. Last year’s bracken, now a deep, snow-trampled russet, clung to the mountains. The higher peaks–Cadair Idris, Aran Fawddwy, Tarren Hendre–were still dressed in skewbald motley: the dead grass appeared browner and darker beside the patches of glaring white.

  The low sun was so bright and the shadows so crisp that the lan
d looked as if it had been lit for a film. This would be the fourth consecutive year in which the customary British weather had been reversed: easterly winds, warm days and crisp nights in the spring, smeary, rain-lashed summers, still, warm autumns.

  In the heart of the Cambrian Mountains, I drove up a bumpy track to a small stone farmhouse. In the green fields around it grazed Welsh speckle-faced sheep, with panda bear eyes and comical black noses. Clear water poured over a sill into a raised pool beside the tidy farmyard. A white and caramel sheepdog lunged and barked on the end of its chain.

  Dafydd Morris-Jones and his mother, Delyth, came out to greet me. I had expected a much older man: he was still in his twenties. He had blue eyes, a handsome, open face, two earrings in the top of one ear and–appropriately for a sheep farmer–mutton-chop sideburns. Delyth had the same bright eyes. Her white hair came down to her shoulders. She looked fit and strong.

  I had found Dafydd after writing to the Cambrian Mountains Society, to express my concern about its portrayal of the ecology and landscape of the plateau. It had passed my letter to him. Though I disagreed with some of what he wrote, I had been impressed by his clear reasoning and the breadth of his knowledge, so I had asked to meet him.

  Delyth herded me into the house and sat me down in her little parlour. A Welsh dresser displaying her best crockery filled one wall. It had been nailed up by Dafydd’s great-grandfather, she told me, after his son–Dafydd’s grandfather–had, as a small boy, tried to climb it and had brought it down, smashing all the plates.

  Their family had taken the tenancy of this farm in 1885, and had bought the land in 1942. Dafydd had just replaced the roof of one of his barns–that had held since the beginning of his great-grandfather’s tenancy–using the original slate. ‘It should do for the next 150 years,’ he told me.