A war is raging for the soul of the English countryside. Three different armies have drawn up their ranks upon our clouded hills, burning bows in hand and chariots of fire standing by. In the first camp — call it Team Pleasant Pastures — we have the farmers, rural voters, and old-fashioned conservatives who want to see traditional agriculture and land use continue. Challenging them are Team Mountains Green, led by George Monbiot, who wish to return to truly ancient times, bringing back temperate rainforests and ruthlessly purging the cows, sheep and ponies from our uplands and moors. And looming over both of them is Team Satanic Mills, with Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in the vanguard, and backed by hordes of bespectacled YIMBYs, looking to carpet the countryside in profitable new developments, solar farms and new towns.
The debate has been a slow burn in the background of a British politics gridlocked on issues of the economy, public spending, policing, Brexit and national identity. But as Net Zero looms, the housing crisis reaches its peak and the Labour government promises to clear the way for developers, it has finally burst into the fore of public consciousness. Long a winning issue in local elections, NIMBYism is now driving major national gains for the Liberals, Reform and the Greens, whilst Labour is gambling that it will achieve enough development-driven GDP growth to salvage its freefalling poll numbers and shaky fiscal framework. It’s a high stakes game for the nation’s future, the results of which could determine the shape of the English landscape for generations to come.
The sense of this struggle has entered the atmosphere, inflecting news, events and aesthetics with an air of simmering tension. In a typical example, the Labour Party posted an unintentionally menacing poster in the run-up to the local elections, reading “BRING CHANGE TO BRITAIN” in giant red letters alongside an image of green fields and rolling hills. No doubt it was intended to invoke patriotism alongside reformism, but it felt like a Freudian slip. It was shared all over social media, and it made concrete the fears of many voters.
Natural disasters and extreme temperatures have long been interpreted through the lens of climate change activism or scepticism, but in our new Druidical politics of weather interpretation, they have a still sharper application. A devastating fire in Dartmoor has turned into a battle over rewilding, with George Monbiot blaming it on the depredations of cattle, whilst locals cited the lack of grazing in a wild corner of the moorland as having allowed dense and flammable vegetation to build up. Monbiot, sickle in hand, proclaims that we have angered the climate gods by cutting down the sacred tree, whilst the clan chiefs say we must sacrifice a fatted calf.
There are costly trade-offs in this conflict, but also many unmet chances for reconciliation and compromise
All the sides have at least some good points. Starmer is surely correct in saying that we desperately need new housing and infrastructure. Nor is Monbiot wrong that our current agricultural model is degrading our soil, reducing biodiversity and standing in the way of restoring ancient and beautiful environments. And, of course, the farmers and locals are surely correct that livestock are important to our economy, traditional English landscape and way of life.
There are costly trade-offs in this conflict, but also many unmet chances for reconciliation and compromise. Everyone has their blinders on, pursuing dangerously narrow agendas, without consideration of other perspectives. Far too many environmentalists have become friends of the earth and foes of man, seeing human culture as alien, and untamed wilderness as natural. But humans are part of the landscape, and shepherds and farmers, and their livestock, belong in it as much as wild birds, flowers and trees. We need to create a politics that values traditional rural life, biodiversity, and economic growth, and intelligently balances them, aiming at policies that seek to advance all three at once.
This is not easy, but nor is it as irreconcilable as activists and ideologues pretend. New kinds of farming, often drawing on pre-industrial methods united with modern science, can use methods that can enhance soil quality, sequester carbon, and improve biodiversity. We hear a lot about the upland forests of millennia ago, but not enough about lost meadows and hedgerows, which were the homes of so much traditional English wildlife within living memory. Rewilding has an important part to play here: reclaiming marsh and peat bogs can prevent flooding and improve with carbon storage and biodiversity. All of this has economic costs, and will need state support. But there is opportunity as well as expense — a landscape that is both more “managed” as well as “wild” could produce new jobs, and bring more people to the countryside to visit and settle down. Rather than building giant ugly new developments, this could also be an “aesthetic” economy of beautiful homes and landscapes, developed towards a local vernacular.
This integrated approach to nature and culture could lead to a different kind of agricultural economy. Just as we have specialised towards higher tech, more knowledge-intensive industries, we could move to a more “high-end” rural economy. In the same way that France has built and monetised an international reputation for high quality, regionally specific, and traditionally produced food, drink and ingredients, Britain could leverage its extraordinary history and landscapes to at once preserve, enhance and profit from our traditional rural way of life.
The three temptations of unchanging stagnation, economic exploitation and environmental anti-humanism must all be rejected. We should look back instead to the extraordinary achievements of the 17th-19th century landscape gardeners, whose ecological engineering gave us some of the most famous and beautiful places in the world. Rather than tacking on new structures or ripping down traditional agriculture, we should seek to create new landscapes, new environments for life, leisure and contemplation. We must rediscover our gift for Arcadian artifice, and take up Alexander Pope’s great rallying cry:
Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th’ ambitious hill the heav’ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks, or now directs, th’ intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
