Last week, a group of environmentalists wrote to the United Nations to demand that the Lake District lose its Unesco World Heritage Status. The object of their ire were Cumbrian sheep farmers, who the campaigners have decided are destroying the Lake District’s unique landscape by pursuing their livelihood.
They believe that sheep farming is destroying the landscape, and that the solution is rewilding and nature recovery: turfing farmers off the land they have farmed for generations, sometimes centuries.
They treated the idea that the sheep farming of the Lake District is central to the region’s — and indeed Britain’s — cultural heritage, as false and worthy of derision. “We’re in a biodiversity and a climate crisis. But as important as cultural heritage might be, we’re not in a cultural heritage crisis,” one of the campaigners said. The very opposite is true.
Putting aside the fact that one may dispute the notion that we are not in a cultural heritage crisis in this country, this campaign exposes the misanthropic side of rewilding. In many respects it represents the broader political and cultural tension around farming, Britain’s countryside, and how they interact with the sharp end of government policy.
Britain’s countryside is very beautiful and genuinely unique. It is not wild or untamed, however, and nor has it been for thousands of years. Whether it is sheep on the Cumbrian fells, hawthorn hedgerows crossing the Cotswolds, the deep black soil of the fens, or the rich, rolling pasture of the West Country, what our landscapes have in common is that they have all be crafted by the hands of British farmers over centuries.
The cultivated and crafted nature of the British countryside is central to its charm
The British countryside is manmade. The cultivated and crafted nature of the British countryside is central to its charm and beauty, and this includes the Lake District. Hedgerows and oaks did not come from the sky, they came from us. Hedge-laying is an act of land management and conservation simultaneously, for example, and it runs counter to the rewilding idea that the land must be left to manage itself as an independent organism. In a country as historically populated and farmed as ours, that is an impossible and an incongruous imposition. We are not a country of wilderness, and that is no bad thing in its own right.
Though it should not be an arbiter of world heritage — such a thing does not really exist — Unesco recognises this. It refers to the Lake District as a cultural landscape as well as a natural one. That is the point. The dry-stone walls are as much a part of the charm of the Lakes as the lakes themselves and the rich, rainforest-like vegetation. So indeed are whitewashed country pubs like the Kirkstile Inn — which sits below the Mellbreak between Loweswater and Crummock Water — which offer rest and nourishment to visitors and locals alike. This is central to British culture, made by the British people.
This, however, is not what the activists have in mind when they think about the Lake District. They want to drive away the British people who have been farming the land for centuries, and this is where we hit the sharp points of politics, regulation, and taxation.
The current Government has decided to turn its fiscal guns on farmers, introducing inheritance tax and now cutting the grants available to farmers. Only a few months ago it claimed that grants — for green initiatives like preserving peat bogs — would somehow compensate for the imposition of a new inheritance tax. Now they are cutting the grants too. The previous government was an explicit advocate of rewilding. It changed the legacy European subsidies, which were inefficient and wasteful, and replaced them with grants for environmental stewardship, nature recovery, tree planting and rewilding, instead of growing food.
Thanks to the attached subsidies, rewilding has become a business. Housing developers can purchase credits to ensure their urban developments provide a “net gain” in biodiversity, so rural landowners turn farmland over to nature for a fee. Various green groups have started buying farmland to take it out of farming entirely, allowing it to run wild. The Welsh government has been spending taxpayers’ money to do the same, and corporate giants like airlines and asset managers have been buying chunks of farmland to turn into forest to meet carbon-offsetting targets. There is an entire industry — driven by regulation and government policy — devoted to stopping farmers from producing food.
While some of this is motivated by genuine environmentalism — encouraging biodiversity, pollinators and clean rivers are no bad things — there is also a sinister, expropriative undercurrent to rewilding. Some activists look upon farmers as exploiters and hoarders of land, engines of climate change, deserving of punishment in the name of climate justice. It is as if the necessity of feeding a country has no bearing in these people’s worldviews. Unsurprisingly, there is a considerable overlap between this and the movement to end meat eating and rearing meat altogether, which should not be neglected.
Though this has the potential to turn into a new front in the town versus country culture war, it is evident that plenty of farmers are managing nature recovery and regeneration while running successful farming businesses. Many have held James Rebanks up as an example of this in the Lake District, as well as organisations like Fenland Soil which embeds regenerative principles into farming in East Anglia, home of some of the most productive agriculture in country, an area which some activists believe should be flooded entirely in the interests of the climate.
While achieving these initiatives at a national scale may prove difficult and costly, it is clear that experimentation and innovation do exist, and those who are attempting it should be rewarded. However, it is important to remember the fundamentals: the British countryside is the product of thousands of years of farming. The countryside is a place of work and enterprise as much as it is the natural environment. To separate farmers and sheep from the Lake District is to separate three things which have been enmeshed for much of our existence on the British Isles. Britain boasts a beautiful landscape, but the British nation is the British people as much as it is the ground beneath our feet, and their role in tilling the land for centuries should be cherished, rather than condemned.
