Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on June 17, 2024 | 32 Comments
The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it.
It’s not that, for the most part, I object to a lot of the practical activities that are done in the name of rewilding by conservationists, land managers, farmers, ecologists and so on. In that sense, I agree with most of what Ian Carter says in this recent article, except for his concluding remarks endorsing the term.
I got to thinking about this when I gave a Q&A talk recently and made a flippantly negative reference to the term while making the case for low-impact, peopled, agrarian landscapes. A young woman in the audience took me to task, saying that among her peer group nobody saw any contradiction between farming and rewilding.
I’m glad that she pulled me up about this and made me think. (One reason I don’t really like giving Q&A talks – I find it too easy to make unguarded and oversimplified remarks. One reason I do like giving them, at least in long retrospect – people’s responses make me think).
Still, on reflection I can’t honestly say that this has been my experience of how the term is used, at least within the more generalised public narratives about global futures in which I’m often embroiled. In those, I find it all too commonly claimed that farming and nature or wildness are mutually exclusive. Farming in this context is the clear referent of the ‘re’ in ‘rewilding’ – instead of farming, a return to wildness.
I don’t even entirely disagree with that. As I argued in Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, there is significant agricultural overproduction globally, and there’s a case in many places for trimming the agricultural land-take – principally by overcoming the C-wrecking of rural landscapes that I discussed in a recent post.
The sticking point is that I believe this must be done by putting local rural and farming people at the centre of discussions about food, wildness, community and culture, while not assuming that a reduced agricultural land-take is always an unalloyed good. Too often, the sentiment I see behind the word ‘rewilding’ is colonial, what some call ‘clearance rewilding’ – the removal of farming and farmers from the landscape in favour of so-called ‘self-willed’ nature. In Saying NO… I show the continuities of this with ideologies of agricultural ‘improvement’ that have long been used by the politically powerful to clear the less powerful from access to land. The language around this is often guarded, and presented in the form of win-wins: better for wildlife, better for poor farming communities, better for the economy, and so on. Usually, it evades the issue of what farming people will do once their landscapes and livelihoods have been rewilded away. But benign neglect can be a form of colonialism too.
I mentioned Carwyn Graves’s book Tir: the Story of the Welsh Landscape in a recent post. In it, he makes a powerful argument in the Welsh case for what people are now calling ‘agri-rewilding’ to distinguish it from clearance rewilding. No doubt this resonates with the point that my questioner was making. Agri-rewilding, based on a sensitive understanding of local place and its dynamics, instead of borrowing from global discourse around things like forestry for carbon sequestration (Tir, p.172). I think this distinction that Carwyn makes between global discourse and local context is important. Rewilding has become a contentious and sometimes even toxic idea in Wales perhaps more than in most places because the rewilding movement has done such a bad job of understanding local context there, as Carwyn documents.
The clearance rewilding approach has affinities with rich, large-scale landowners engaging in big rewilding projects often of iconic large species in the substantial absence of people working the land. I’m not suggesting all such projects are without sensitivity or merit, but for trees, food, wildlife and human culture the better approach in general is distributed access for numerous small farmers and growers within mosaic farmed landscapes, in addition to large blocks of unfarmed wild land (I found Dave Goulson’s book Silent Earth pretty good on this, by the way).
There are problems in creating both these kinds of landscape out of our C-wrecked modern political geographies and I don’t think the word ‘rewilding’ helps address them. So I’d like to suggest an alternative: re-farming.
The ‘re’ part of it suggests we need not to abandon farming but often to do it differently, which I suspect many farmers would agree with. We need to farm as if diverse local foods, rather than edible commodities, matter. If we do that well, it will benefit people and wildlife – and will probably reduce the land-take and some of the wider toll farming takes upon nature too. As Carwyn documents, in many ways this kind of re-farming would look more like the farming that was done in the past, when there was more wildlife (though not necessarily more enlightened attitudes about wildlife – it’s more a case of what Carwyn nicely calls the “unintended fruitfulness of judicious human stewardship on the natural world” – p.147). It’s funny how people can be so nostalgic nowadays for the wildlife of bygone farmscapes, while lambasting as nostalgic any advocacy for the styles of farming that enabled it.
My late, great permaculture teacher Patrick Whitefield spoke of how he would ‘farm’ as he travelled – meaning that he would look at the passing landscape and try to read its signs, figuring out its soils and water, pondering what might grow well there, what shouldn’t be grown there, and how people might live lightly upon it. Maybe the first step towards ‘rewilding’ the landscape is to re-farm it in that way.
Various recent conversations I’ve had with farmers and with people connected to farming suggest to me that there’s quite an appetite within the sector for smaller-scale, more diverse, more locally-oriented, more nature-friendly and agroecological forms of farming. The main sticking point is money. I don’t think it can be said too often that farmers need increased food prices that make doing the right thing affordable to them, and consumers need housing prices and economic justice that make such food prices affordable in turn to them.
Unfortunately, this cuts against the dominant forces of contemporary global politics that emphasize maximizing net present value and monopoly rent, leaving farmed landscapes in their current C-wrecked state, and food system reformers of a less radical bent grasping at sticking plasters like cellular/manufactured food and tougher regulation to try to patch up a fundamentally broken system.
Of course, not all farmers embrace greener, more nature-friendly practices and, as outlined in my previous post, there’s a lot of bad behaviour in the sector. But, as I also suggested therein, countries basically get the farmers they deserve, or are willing to pay for.
Which brings me to the other bit of phrasing I want to suggest. There’s a lot of discussion in the UK these days about the public’s ‘right to roam’ over the countryside. Again, I’m sympathetic to the general idea, yet something about the conduct of this debate leaves me uneasy. Partly, it’s the connotations of the term. To ‘roam’ is to be a carefree wanderer, a rural flaneur enjoying the passing landscape, but not implicated in it, not ‘farming’ it even in Patrick Whitefield’s sense, let alone in the sense of an actual farmer trying to make ends meet.
I’ve done my fair share of this kind of roaming over the years, and I’m happy that Britain has a good network of public footpaths and a history of gritty activism dedicated to retaining and improving public recreational access to the land. But I can’t help feeling that there’s an overemphasis on recreational access and an underemphasis on livelihood access in this debate. I’m happy if members of the public want to make a point about access rights by trespassing on Lord Bigacre’s estate, though not quite so happy when I see them helping themselves to the tomatoes in Ms Smallacre’s market garden. But ultimately, this kind of right to roam thinking can too easily buy into the cheap food narrative and the C-wrecked landscapes that the clearance rewilders rightly want to protect, though in the wrong way. It can too easily abdicate responsibility for the hard work of producing food – the implicit logic is that somebody else can worry about producing cheap but wildlife-friendly food that enables others’ right to freely roam, and ideally they can do it somewhere else where the roamer doesn’t have to see them.
Of course, in the case of scrumping Ms Smallacre’s tomatoes, this kind of rights-based thinking doesn’t ‘buy into’ the cheap food narrative at all. It summarily institutes its own free food narrative. Hey, the Earth should be a common treasury for all.
My suggestion is to internalise the externality here. Yes, the Earth should be a common treasury for all, but treasure doesn’t just grow on trees. Okay, that’s not quite true – treasure does grow on trees, but there’s no ‘just’ about it. Somebody has to develop and propagate the varieties, and plant and tend the tree. So, especially in view of the multiple crises upon us, I’d like to suggest that the right to plant needs more emphasis than the right to roam. Let’s hear it for a movement of latter-day Diggers, trespassing with spades and forks, and staying around for the harvest.
Ultimately, this would involve negotiating with Lord Bigacre and Ms Smallacre, seeing them as real people, and not just as villains against whom rights can be freely asserted. Alternatively, it might involve expropriating their land. But those who advocate going that way have to be very careful lest they or the institutions they establish merely become the next Lord Bigacre. Anyway, as I’ll recount in my next post, the nature of this kind of spade-and-fork trespassing, the right to plant and not the right to roam, could be very consequential for the future of society.
Brett Christophers The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save The Planet
Jo Guldi The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights
Anna Jones The Divide: The Relationship Crisis Between Town and Country
William Langland Piers Plowman
C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity
…and finally, if you’re hungry for more from the office of chrissmaje.com (or at least from a witch’s cottage nestling in the neighbouring woods), take a look at my conversation with Geoff Graham on his Yeoman podcast.
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I wonder whether re-commoning might also be a helpful term.
Re-commoning.
I like it.
Well, I live in a country where there is a right to roam (Sweden), and it doesn’t involve eating the tomatoes that someone is growing! That is right out. You’re not allowed to trample or eat someone’s crops, or walk into someone’s garden near a house, or hunt/fish freely, but you are allowed to walk on other people’s land, pick wild berries and mushrooms, and set up your tent for a night. I think it works pretty well.
The principle seems to make sense but there are other complexities in building policy around this in a UK context. Some factors like:
Population 10M versus 70M
Density/Land Size 178M sM versus 98M sM
Resource management and land use
Concentration spots
Visitor management (and rules)
That all said we need more people engaging with nature and environment, roaming policy really needs thinking through.
NB: I have lived in Sweden and Norway for 7 years, my wife and kids are Swedish amazing country with many positive attributes and policies.
To be quite honest, in absence of expropriating Lord Bigacre, this all sounds to me as if the landless masses are supposed to agitate to pay higher food prices so that Mr. and Ms. Acre get to do a more satisfying kind of agriculture. I just don’t see many takers.
And in absence of expropriation, the ‘right to plant’ sounds like paying rent to the Acre family for the pleasure of a garden allotment and for one thing, this arrangement already exists, and also most of us already pay enough rent, not to mention do enough work as is.
Both of this just don’t sound like the kind of thing a huge political movement would be motivated about. A lot of fighting for little gain and importantly, little inspiration. At least rewilded landscapes with roaming bison and wolves are an inspiring image to dream of.
I’m struck by the convergence between your thinking about the right to roam and the questions Adam Wilson and his friend Sam brought to a recent conference on the “Right to Food”:
https://peasantryschool.substack.com/p/guilt-grief-gratitude
https://peasantryschool.substack.com/p/the-gift-isnt-free
The language of rights is the closest thing modernity has to a language of the sacred. To question it is experienced as deeply alarming. Yet in presenting the world to us as a set of entitlements we possess as individuals, rather than a weave of relationships and a call to show up to these relationships, it sets us up for a disastrous misunderstanding of what it would take (and has taken) to inhabit the world in a way that makes for good lives and ongoing viability.
I see Dugald has already touched on the the issue of the contemporary cultural prominence of “rights”, but I’d like to go further.
One conceptualisation of a “right” is that, for it to a have full definitional force, it has to come paired with a “duty”. Otherwise it is just a powerful way of saying “ought”. I find thinking of “right-duty” pairs to be more fruitful.
In nineteenth century novels they seem to talk a lot about “duty” – in particular, characters in the naturalistic writer Trollope seem to behave in ways which cause pain to both themselves and loved ones, because they feel it to be their “duty”. It looks wildly perverse to us now, but perhaps we are equally unbalanced, with so many competing and newly coined “rights”? Do we have any “duties” that we are neglecting?
Further, perhaps every “right” imposes on the owner of that right a sort of a shadow “duty” – the duty to call upon that right with discernment (take some care for the farmland you roam through). And the equivalent: in allowing the right to cross your farm, you have a right expect care to be taken.
I guess one of the “by-products” of modernity is “The Individual” and “Individual Rights”.
It’s a fine balance between autonomy and “restrictive responsibilities/roles/expectations”.
Modernity, and in particular, fossil fuels, have allowed people to escape some of the expectations/constraints/roles people have been born into. I’m thinking of the roles of women in particular.
But then again, we all have responsibilities to eachother. How to balance out the two is a constant tussle.
Modernity has allowed some of us to “walk away” in the way that Graeber and Wengrow describe it.
The right to roam wouldn’t be such an issue if everyone had land. It has become very much an “us and them” situation.
If the vast majority of people farmed (as was the case, back in the day) then the issue probably wouldn’t exist.
As Kathryn points out, perhaps the commons is the key.
If everyone has access (or dare I say a right) to commons, then a discussion about how to manage those commons opens up all kinds of debates for everyone.
@sistersmith – I probably didn’t convey my intentions well enough. The key point isn’t that ordinary people should pay more for their food to the Acres so that the Acres can farm as they want. It’s that ordinary people should pay less rent (less economic/monopoly rent of all kinds) and more for food, and this would mean that more ordinary people would have the opportunity to be food producers, while doing less work of other kinds.
I agree that there isn’t much of a political movement around this … but I don’t agree that it’s uninspiring. Or if it is, I think that speaks to a cultural problem of our times, which largely supports and is promoted by elite interests. That problem is basically my target in this post – the notion that somebody other than me should take responsibility for producing my food, that they should be sure to produce it cheaply and take care of nature while they’re about it, and that this should produce wild landscapes full of big mammals in which I can roam as I please. No doubt some will find this an inspiring dream, but I don’t think it’s a realistic one. Hence the need to reframe it in terms of creating possibilities for more people to produce food for themselves.
I’m not averse in principle to expropriating Lord Bigacre. The problem I have with the way this is routinely talked about is that people often think the problems are over once the Lord has been expropriated, whereas the truth is that they’ve just begun.
@Elin – again, maybe I didn’t convey my intentions well enough. I’m generally supportive of right to roam principles along the lines you mention in Sweden. I’m just saying that we need to pay more attention to right to plant principles as well. But there’s potentially an issue inasmuch as the more that the right to plant is exercised, the more the landscape is likely to become garden-like and the right to roam becomes (literally) hedged with responsibilities upon the roamer. Perhaps classic right to roam ideas of the kind you outline work better in ‘emptier’ landscapes, like Scotland here in the UK … but, as in Scotland, there’s often a historical/political reason why they’re empty.
All of which I think underlines the points made by Dougald and Martin – indeed, rights imply duties and there’s a need to get into the details of who owes duties to who, and why. Dougald makes a good point about rights talk as modern sacredness … I’m in favour of sacredness of some kinds, but not so much in favour of modernism, because I think it has corrupting tendencies pretty much along the lines Martin identifies – all rights and no duties.
@Dougauld, thanks also for the links to Adam Wilson – very interesting. I’ve wrestled with questions of gifts, money & rights on this blog and in my life as a smallholder & local community member, without entirely resolving them … which no doubt is ultimately impossible. But I hope to keep discussing them here and enriching my understanding.
@Kathryn – yes, I agree this can be framed as a question of re-commoning. But the danger of that phrase is that it replicates the modern malaise I discussed earlier in this comment – a question of my rights & someone else’s duties. I prefer ‘re-farming’ or ‘the right to plant’ because they draw more attention to what I think is most significant about a common – not that the people own it, but that the people farm it.
Ah sorry John, I missed your second comment. Yes, exactly so.
I was assuming that re-commoning includes production of food, fuel or fibre on those commons — but I am probably overoptimistic if I think everyone will consider commons as productive resources rather than a quaint sort of parkland. The latter would indeed replicate the modern malaise you describe.
There is perhaps some overlap here between what I have previously described as a sort of human re-wilding (planting food trees in empty street tree beds, guerilla sowing of herbs, flowers and vegetables, grafting edible cherries onto the ornamental ones in the park, etc) and your “right to plant”. Another difficulty with re-wilding as a term, even applied to such urban measures, is that it assumes some dichotomy between an ideal wild state in which humans do not tend the landscape, and a lesser state in which we do; but it doesn’t look like human survival can actually be separated from human tending of the land.
I want to get theological here but as so often, my ideas aren’t fully developed and I don’t have time presently to sort them out into something useful, so have some tangential rambling instead… I should probably re-read the creation accounts in Genesis, and then the description of the ‘new Jerusalem’ in Revelation again. A wiser person than I am once pointed out that the story of God’s people begins in a garden and ends in a city. That’s as may be, but I don’t think the city described in the Christian apocalyptic literature actually matches our modern industrial cities very well at all, and perhaps a study of some of the differences could be instructive, though much of that apocalyptic literature is very much grounded in the political culture of the day (with Babylon representing the occupying Roman forces, and so on).
You have always been clear that your advocacy of agrarian localism is not a going back in time — that we cannot undo industrial modernity by playing at mediaevalism, but could still learn much from pre-modern cultures and ways of life in developing whatever human civilisation is to follow on from industrial modernity. I wonder if there is a human tendency to want to ‘go back’ — to yearn to live once again in the Garden of Eden, instead of learning what it might mean to truly dwell in the new Jerusalem. All very mythic stuff, but then one of the main projects of religion is to be in constant dialogue with the stories we have about our reality and what those stories mean for how we should live.
Further: that yearning is important whether people are restless to move forward or clinging to an idealised past. Both recognise the truth that the present is imperfect and dissonant.
The past was imperfect and dissonant; the future, too, will be imperfect and dissonant. But we can learn a lot about creating (constructing? midwifing?) a better world by examining that dissonance and, I think, eventually making some kind of peace with it. That peace is easier to find, at least for me, when I know that my distress is information about the way the world is now, and when I know that I am indeed working towards something better, but disquiet and dissatisfaction are part of the normal spectrum of human experience; I don’t expect to attain perfect and stable peace while I am alive. “Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee” also seems apt here.
Still all very tangential, sorry! I have been thinking about distress tolerance a bit recently.
I know people commonly call it “right to roam” but what we actually have in Scotland is a right to responsible access, which unfortunately isn’t such a snappy title, but it expresses the reality much more clearly and helpfully.
Thanks Mairi — I didn’t know that and it does have rather different implications.
A lot of what people view as rights, cheap food, a modern house , fast transport( anything faster than walking ) are in reality things made possible by fossil fuel energy. Food would not be cheap if it was all raised by horses or human labor, housing is derived from energy spent to harvest, process, and deliver the raw products into a form we call a house. Transport via fossil fuels is a big part that makes either cheap food or modern housing possible but cheap energy isn’t a right and everything it currently produces comes with terrible long term damage to whole system earth processes that keep all life possible.
Nobody would be that interested in wandering around aimlessly taking in nature and the beauty of it all if they were starving. To live within nature’s ability to maintain heathy carbon sinks and a balanced carbon cycle humans need to relearn that their own personal / physical labors are what put food on the table. We have a right to walk as far as our legs will carry us and breath healthy air. Housing is only a right if it is scaled to what energy is available in your immediate local.
This lesson will be a hard lesson but the alternative of everyone thinking fossil fuel energy is a right will be the failure of the largest commons, our atmosphere and oceans. Our values are twisted , virtues long held are forgotten but time has caught up now and it becomes ever more evident we are killing our host.
With the right to roam there must also be responsibility , many times each year people sue farmers after they were stomped by farm animals , if there is a right to roam there also should be ” at your own risk ” .
Here in TX if you paint fence posts in sight of each other purple that’s a no trespassing sign , anyone on my property has had to pass one of those posts and that clears me as the owner of any compensation for injury done by trespassing .
Here most city people are clueless about the countryside and environment / dangerous animals and plants , Darwin would be very
busy when morons roam at will .
I agree that the ubiqutous use of “rights” is very problematic, and rights seem to climb the Maslow pyramid and include a lot of non-material stuff these days such as the right to feel safe i.e. not to be upset or sad by something someone says or does.
Not sure that the solution is to couple rights to duties. As an example, I believe domestic livestock has some “rights” to exercise some behaviours, but I am not sure that they have any particular duty – unless you call it a duty to produce milk, eggs, lether, meat etc. Also children or people who are dependent on others would have some rights, but often no particular duty linked to that.
The inflation in rights is often linked to “things” people see as a basic living standard as discussed by Bruce. But clearly, what is a reasonable living standard in OECD countries is not within reach for many of the poor in the world.
In order to be of any value, rights need to be guaranteed by society in some way, i.e. the individual has no rights unless they are recognized by society, which in most modern sense means “the government”. But if the government is poor it is hard for it even to ensure the most basic right, the right to food. And if we expand “rights” we will most likely have to expand government. But an expanded government will need a lot of resources, much more than neo-peasants can supply.
“Contemporary class and space in Great Britain’ is what comes to my mind when I read about re-wilding UK style. Especially when I read about Madame Bigacres of poster child re-wilders Knepp Estate grumbling about the right to roam movement; and then I find that the most expensive private schools in England, where a year’s fees (with full board) are 40,000 quid or more tend to be the ones with the most land; and then I find that re-wilding booster George Monbiot when to the school with the fifth largest amount of land (Stowe); and then I look up Knepp Estate to see how it makes its money and find that it seems to be through charging people for camping, glamping, safaris (sic), workshops, and sales from the on-site restaurant and shop; and then I remember what the previous generation’s ‘nature-saving’ poster child was (the Eden Project in Cornwall) and check out the money involved in that… and then I think “Is this the rich and powerful fiddling while the planet burns?”
I also go back to reading ‘Black Duck’ by Bruce Pascoe (author of the history of Aboriginal Australian food production practices ‘Dark Emu’) and ponder his statement on p 75 “The world is waiting for the news of how trade can be undertaken without wars and without the creation of both billionaires and slaves.” This was made in the context of the discovery that some 3 million stones for grinding grain were produced in a certain part of Australia (where the rocks were right) and taken across the country over the millennia, with only 1500 of them being kept for local use.
Then I listen to the headline RadioNZ 8 am news bulletin and find that global dairy prices have dropped, which may mean that we muggins eaters of cheese in NZ may be able to pay less than $20+ for a kilo of ordinary cheddar which is what it costs when global prices are high…
… and then I think – what excessively complicated and scary times and places to be alive in, eh?
I wonder what the farmers and cheese producers get out of that NZ $20 for cheese. I daresay not enough.
Here I only see prices below that (about £9.64/kg) on mass-produced supermarket cheddar, FWIW. I don’t mind paying more — my food bills have gone down as my growing skills have improved — but it would sure be nice to know for certain that the farmers are getting a fair share of what I spend. (And lest I get too confident, it looks like I’ve had nearly complete crop failure on garlic this year, after being self-sufficient in the stuff last year, so I am going to have to start purchasing it soon, or do without.)
Back to the topic at hand – i.e. how to get more people living on and working the land and producing good food in healthy ways while also creating and protecting habitats for a diversity of non-human species….
There are actually a lot of people who have been doing this for some time (including some commenters on this blog site), but the UK seems to be an outlier when it comes to this practice. (Could this be because it was where a national peasantry was first destroyed? Or the lack of republican political structures? And/or…? )
Whatever, the ‘neo-peasantry’ developments in France have now been going for at least three decades, and it seems that there are similar developments in other European countries, Turkey and North America. Or these are the places where it has been/is being studied, and you can find 5 pages of references to these studies in Vizuete et al – ‘Role of the neo-rural phenomenon and the new peasantry in agroecological transitions: a literature review’, in ‘Agriculture and Human Values’ , January 2024 (downloadable pdf at Research Gate). A lot of them are in Spanish. It seems to be a lot easier to (re) occupy land and houses which have been abandoned in the French and Spanish countrysides than it is in the UK (and Scandinavia?) A sort of de facto ‘right to plant’?
But rather than talking about ‘rights’ in the UK situation, it might be more useful to examine the practical barriers in the way of (re)occupation which differ from those elsewhere in Europe, and think about how they could be lowered.
Your mention of neo peasantry brought this Australian family to mind. For the last couple of decades they’ve been attempting to leave behind industrial food, medicine and energy, and the latest film (in production) looks at how far they’ve come. Here’s a trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lacma3WzApw
This is Artist As Family, who are presently hitchhiking to India, which links in in nicely with Dougalds latest post (on the kindness of strangers). I’ve had a rambling conversation with Patrick, year or so ago. They’re a great inspiration and have Neo Peasantry school, like Adam Wilson and are good friends with David Holmgren.
Isn’t the problem that sistersmith is pointing to really that wages have not kept up with prices or productivity ? In the US most people are earning half of what they did in 1950. That is something that that never gets discussed here. The middle class is being hollowed out and the disparity between the very rich and everyone else barely gets noticed in mainstream news.
Higher food prices would help with getting more people living and working on the land. The trick will be to keep corporations and their executives from from taking the increase. It happened with inflation after Covid.
According to the book, Post Capitalist Philanthropy:
‘For every dollar of new economic growth since 2008, about 93 cents ends up in the hands of the top 1%. And only about 5 cents of that dollar ends up in the hands of the world’s majority – 60% of humanity. Therefore, by definition, wealth creation actively creates inequality and poverty’ .
The Right to Roam lot are a canny bunch and are certainly aware of the bloody history that now disfigures the English landscape. Their new book ‘Wild Service’ is an answer to alot of the questions being asked, as I understand it – I haven’t read it.
Adam Calo’s interview of Bonnie Vandesteeg on the Peoples Land Policy describes a similar scepticism toward the Right to Roam crew which is tempered by a clear understanding that any change to land rights will be through a grass roots, bottom up swell of support. In this respect, Right to Roam are the first rung on the ladder to what Dougald rightly describes as a sacred relationship, or birthright to provision from and with the land, that can be owned, in the Roman sense of rights of abuse, by no man or corporation. In this way there is no need for conflict but a deepening realisation of duty, service and relationship.
Would love to know what the research Christinne is talking about is unearthing and agree that a clearer view of our own predicament here the UK (being one of the most entrenched) is worthwhile.
I like recommoning (of course I do), as it links to a very real history that can help move people on a visceral level – regards grass roots, and is a way of redistributing without cutting out Lord Bigacres – a way of sharing whilst preserving rights. It also allows for other and greater commons and commoning, in regards seas and air etc. to be understood through this lens – it telescopes from the gut biome to rivers and local textiles, all the way up to AMOC and the shared earth commons systems that allow us to breath.
Commons is also synonymous with farming, and allows community provisioning with a smaller land ‘ownership’. Recommoning as a term reaggregates the social context of the commons as well, the patch work of private and public discourses and duties and entitlements, more so than refarming.
Also like Kathryn’s sketch of the new Jerusalem, reminded me of the beloved William Blake – a wanderer of a merry and sacred English landscape. Perhaps your book could be called Jerusalem!
Right to Roam should be Right to Ramble, less flaneur, more cantankerous!
Some great & thought-provoking new comments here. Thanks very much, everyone!
I’m short on time to respond (gotta do some farming…) but I’ll return to some of the issues raised here … possibly in another post. The next post here is also relevant to these issues.
I might also do an open thread here soon along the lines of Christine’s remarks about examples of overcoming practical barriers to re-farming or re-commoning. Vital stuff.
I’m glad that people are mostly interpreting this post as it was intended – not against wildness, roaming or commoning and not in favour of big landownership. Glad also for Joel’s reminder about where economic growth mostly goes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nb4t0a9xtkQ
Worth watching , green washing with government subsidies at its best !
Clearly we are living in very different places. Rewilding here brings up reintroducing predators and establishing long wildlife corridors. See https://rewilding.org/ . It was started by Dave Foreman, the same guy who started Earth First!. They were different times back then. Prescient perhaps.
Who are the people pushing rewilding in the UK ? Are they advocating the reintroduction of brown bears and wolves to the UK ? Or are they just sorta fed up with Industrial Ag, Capitalism and Modernity and want to go for a walk ?
There are the beaver reintroduction people, and I think there is talk of wolves in Scotland, but a lot of re-wilding here is associated with a push to reduce the total amount of farmland being farmed, especially converting pasture to forest, and with having more people living in “efficient” cities and even fewer in rural areas. Monbiot is a big fan.
It has a whiff of waiting for farmers to go out of business (because producing food as cheaply as it is demanded of them is impossible), and then rich people buying the land for badly-managed afforestation projects that are both carbon credit investments and high density timber farms that somehow count as wildlife habitat so receive some kind of subsidy for that, and if that doesn’t work out, well, they can always sell the land in another 20 years, probably at profit. It’s often just another form of transferring property to the rich.
The silly part of it is that agroforestry, silvopasture and many other forms of deriving a living from land in a sustainable manner all have a long history here, and all probably allow for more diverse wildlife habitat than planting thousands of saplings on a few acres of pasture and then leaving nature to take its course, and expecting to end up with a fairytale forest.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical. As someone who will probably never be able to afford a mortgage I haven’t been following very closely; I’m sure there are afforestation and re-wilding projects that are done really, really well. But getting more people off the land and into big cities is not the One Weird Trick that is going to repair our environmental damage. The even more cynical part of me wonders what corporations can get up to in a depopulated countryside that they don’t want people to know about. They’re already dumping raw sewage into waterways.
For Kathryn’s info…
I just put 9.64 pounds into the ‘universal currency converter’ and it came out as 19.97 NZ dollars. So pretty much the same here – where the milk that made the cheese is produced – and there, on the other side of the world.
Only 5% of the milk produced in NZ is consumed here in any form; the rest is exported. Most of it is in the form of ‘Anhydrous Milk Solids’, aka milk powder, which are traded on a global market and set the price for cheese eaters in NZ , baby formula buyers in China and ice cream manufacturers and consumers wherever.
There are more dairy cows than people in NZ, and the water, soil and air pollution impact of industrial dairy is huge, and especially damaging to native fishes. water birds, and water invertebrates.
And Joel… the article I referred to is a literature review of 100+ studies of the links (or not) between the ‘new peasantry’ and agro-ecology over the past two decades. The authors are Spanish, and it looks like the subject is very salient in Spain, where there seems to be a reclamation of deserted villages and farms going on.
And Greg… if you want to check out what Bigacre’s re-wilding looks like in the UK just put ‘Knepp Estate’ into the search box. There are of course lots more humble and arguably better examples of what could be achieved if lots of smaller patches of land start ‘going wild’. I really like the examples given in Dave Goulson’s book ‘The Garden Jungle or Gardening to Save the Planet’ in which he shows how a city garden can also be a place for re-introducing and protecting native species of plants and invertebrates of all kinds. This is perfectly compatible with growing food – Goulson does both in his own garden.
What it looks like in other places can be very varied. In ‘Ecocene Politics’ (available as a download on line) Mihnea Tănăsescu describes what it looks like in Romania, where rare wild oxen are being reintroduced – but only after a careful process of planning and management involving the people whose lands they are being reintroduced to.
In NZ – where the only land-based endemic vertebrates are birds and bats – it looks like planting or restoring habitats and doing constant predator control.
One article on the subject I read recently said this:
“Many rewilding projects exist around the world and they all begin as moving companies—they work to remove unwanted animals, people, and nature’s actual chaos and then work to import native species to grow and run about within their prison yards of exclusion fences. To heal the rivers, they buy beavers. To heal the beavers, they buy rivers.”
This made me laugh – but I am not sure if it was meant to.
For the 99% who can’t afford beavers, let alone rivers – no worries. Healing starts at home…
I was daydreaming again looking at woodland for sale the other day. If I save up very hard and there aren’t any massive price spikes I might be able to afford to buy some in the next decade…
…but I wouldn’t be allowed to live on it, or at least not without going through a somewhat harrowing and lengthy process to acquire planning permission, first.
A simple change to planning law of allowing housing up to a certain size to be built on land that is for agricultural or forestry use would make the trajectory toward a small farm future a lot easier.