The Lie of the Land is a provocative manifesto for sustainable land management, digging deep into the economics and politics of what can be a very emotive topic.
Campaigner and writer Guy Shrubsole offers a well-researched guide to farming practices, land ownership and hundreds of years of history, and comes up with some challenging proposals for improvement.
Land use is sometimes overlooked in the climate debate, but it currently accounts for 11 per cent of UK greenhouse gas emissions. Unlike energy, transport or other sectors, there’s no strategic plan for reform to help reach net zero emissions across the economy.
The Climate Change Committee has proposed a target that land use should be a net carbon sink (effectively providing negative emissions) by the mid-2030s. That needs an urgent programme of peat restoration and reforestation, which isn’t yet happening to any great degree.
The other big sustainability issue is around biodiversity. Great Britain is undeniably a crowded and nature-deprived island by the standards of most countries. But less than 9 per cent of England is built on, with just 5 per cent taken by private homes and gardens. The vast majority, 73 per cent, is farmland, much of which is of low productivity.
Despite worries about urban sprawl and scaremongering about green energy infrastructure destroying the natural countryside, the biggest drivers of biodiversity loss remain farming, forestry and bloodsports.
Upland top ranking
Living where I do, I was most interested in the parts of the book about upland moors, where centuries of peat formation have created the UK’s biggest carbon store. Peat bogs store some three billion tonnes of carbon across the country, but huge amounts are at risk from current management practices. And of course, those risks are exacerbated by climate change.
Shrubsole’s villain of the upland moors is the grouse shooting industry. Invented by an aspirational landowner in the 19th centry Peak District, driven grouse shooting became a fashion for the Victorian upper classes after it was embraced by the royal family.
This canned hunting remains part of the entertainment and hospitality industry along the Pennines and across Scotland. A few hundred grouse estates take up over 3 million acres of Britain’s environmentally sensitive moorland. Shrubsole, quoting The Spectator, calls them the ultimate trophy asset for the rich.
Management for grouse shooting involves regular burning of land and drying out the natural bogs. That devastates biodiversity, increases flood risks for the communities in the valleys below, and reduces the landscape’s ability to store carbon. Upland peat is now a source of greenhouse gas emissions, not a sink.
Hence the first of Shrubsole’s 10 proposals for reforming the lie of the land: ban moorland hunting and driven grouse shooting, and take back control of our most important carbon store.
The moral high ground
How you respond to that will probably reflect how you respond to the rest of the book. Even if you’re shaking your head, I’d recommend a read. It’s a consistently readable, provocative and enlightening book, digging into 400 years of history as well as recent politics.
The Lie of the Land does read more like a series of linked essays than a continuous narrative or argument, but there is likely to be something of interest to anyone. And there’s a fair balance between the inevitably depressing state-of-the-country analysis, and uplifting stories from individuals and groups who are making a change for the better.
Here’s a few examples from other parts of the country where I’ve lived or have family connections. The 17th century draining of the fens in the East of England created productive farmland, but devastated native wildlife and exposed huge quantities of peat to erosion – today, sinking land levels are leaving the region more exposed to flooding.
Along the Wye in Herefordshire, industrial chicken farming has posioned the river. In East London, the River Roding is almost hidden from public view, and chokes on rubbish and sewage. And invasive species from grey squirrels to Japanese knotweed, invariably introduced by Victorian landowners, are causing havoc to wildlife and property almost everywhere.
Shrubsole pins the blame for most of these problems on ownership. The vast majority of land is owned by private families (inherited or bought as investment) or business interests. Only 8.5 per cent of land is owned by the public sector, including the Ministry of Defence and the national park authorities.
Challenging tradition
Shrubsole argues, with a wealth of supporting evidence, that management is more often driven by profit than by consideration for the sustainability or long-term health of the countryside. It’s an explicit challenge to the old argument that private ownership of large tracts of land is essential for effective stewardship and avoiding the tragedy of the commons.
“Land needs to be owned if it’s to be looked after,” to quote former Conservative MP Matthew Parris in the more ironic of the book’s two epigraphs. The other is from Gerrard Winstanley, the levelling reformer of the 1600s, showing there’s a long tradition behind Shrubsole’s argument.
The proposals for sustainable economic reform – from a carbon land tax, to limiting the release of pheasants for shooting – aren’t particularly radical by international standards. Many are already in use or in progress in other countries. Most are likely to provoke a kneejerk reaction by many in the UK.
Farming is an especially emotive sector, as it is in European countries. That’s partly because farming seen as a traditional “proper” industry – one of those jobs pictured in Richard Scarry books which politicians are warned to mess with at their peril.
In the UK particularly, it’s also tied up with vague concepts of traditional rural life, the political and economic remnants of feudal history, and the oft-proclaimed divide between city and country. That is often weaponised by the defenders of the status quo.
As a kid, I lived in the Peak District (the most intensively farmed of the UK national parks) with farmland on three sides of the house. I don’t think I have many romantic illusions about farming or country life.
It’d be hard to maintain the line about effective stewardship – the titular lie of the land – when there’s so much evidence against it.
I’m always looking for interesting books on climate, sustainability and communications topics to read and review. Recommendations are welcome – email me at tim@othersfield.com