ECOS EXCHANGE Home Counties Wildland: new nature, old continuities?

(An abridged version of this exchange appears in ECOS 28 (1))

David Bangs responds to Peter Taylor’s article in ECOS 27 (3/4) on the wilding project at the Knepp Estate ...

Peter Taylor’s eulogy on the re-wilding experiment at the Knepp Estate intrigued me. I have known that countryside intimately for over 40 years. So we rushed to return there to look at some of these changes. What we saw depressed us at least as much as it excited us. To be sure, we, like Peter, had ‘The Tamworth Pig Experience’. We came across them in a park woodland where they nuzzled us and let us scratch them and won our hearts. Their welcome, though, was not replicated by the park’s human inhabitants. We were challenged by two separate people for straying from the footpath, though we were in the open park on improved pasture in full view, where we could not possibly have been up to harm. The Exmoor ponies did not seem to mind our presence. We left with a vivid impression of kilometres of high deer fencing around the boundaries and within the woodlands.

Just four miles to the west of this estate another square kilometer of attractive Low Wealden oak-and-pasture countryside has been recently enclosed and a new stately home built to grace a new deer park. And four miles to the east the most intact relic of the old healthy wood pasture of St Leonard’s Forest is surrounded by similar excluding deer fencing, though it was a candidate open access site. You have to pay proper money to visit that place unless you are prepared to do risky fence climbing. To the south east you cannot now enjoy the ordinary woods-and-hedgerows countryside round Glyndebourne because the same two meter excluding fences keep us out and exotic llamas and alpacas in.

I share Peter Taylor’s passion for ending our alienation from nature. I think, though, that his piece misses a whole other dimension of our alienation. That is, our social and economic alienation from access to resources which should be our ‘common treasury’. And unless that alienation, too, is addressed squarely by us wildlifers, then the crisis of the countryside and of nature’s survival will be resolved – yet again – at the expense of ordinary working people and the poor. The countryside and nature will continue to be re-made in the image of capital’s needs, not of the needs of capital’s servants.

Knepp’s core business – wildlife or property?

The example of the Knepp Estate shows this plainly. The loss of farming’s profitability was resolved by the sacking of existing farm staff. Like any other capitalist enterprise this estate solves its problems by sacking the ordinary foot soldiers, not the generals. The estate had previously laid the groundwork for this straightforward solution by widespread conversion of its tenanted farms to in-hand management. The estate has taken full advantage of the Countryside Stewardship scheme and Single Farm Payments. They are, after all, not means tested, though every poor pensioner or benefits claimant has their paltry earnings and savings means tested and monitored up to the hilt. Charlie Burrell is entitled to state support to staunch the failing profitability of his landed property on a scale that no ordinary poor family could dream of, except by a lottery win.

And, in any case, as Peter himself puts it, “the estate’s core business is now property management”. Indeed so. Its website advertises a three bedroom village cottage for rent for £3,500 per calendar month (for god’s sake!), and a lovely old farmhouse with dressage square, 37 acres of paddocks and all posh mod cons for a rental to be revealed, modestly, on application.

Playground for the rich

Peter on his visit will have seen what is happening to this wider local countryside. It is a landscape which is being transformed into a playground for the rich. Mostly you cannot live there unless you are already well-off or (for a minority) servicing the needs of the well-off. Public housing has largely disappeared, though it was always inadequate. And those attractive cottages, villas and farmhouses smell far more of money than they do of woodsmoke and chickens.

Most of the folk of London, Crawley and Brighton who are Knepp Estate’s real neighbours do not visit this countryside, would mostly not imagine that such visits were a rewarding option, and would not have the cultural or financial resources to enjoy it if they did. That is the real alienation from nature that we must address.

This estate’s choices are traditional ones. They choose to continue shooting and polo-ing (sorry about the hunting!) and enjoying nature as their pleasure ground as their forebears did. Whilst this land – low-grade though it may be – could still make a significant contribution to local food needs and provide honourable work in its production, we are invited, instead, to collude (and dig into our pockets to do so) in the re-wilding fantasies of its owners, though we get precious little public benefit from it. (We did not even bother to visit the few acres licensed for public access around the paltry remains of the Norman castle – the noise pollution from the A24 made that anything but a tranquil piece of re-wilded wilderness).

Meanwhile, Peter’s way forward suggests no real challenge to the main motors which drive the profit or loss of our countryside – the shifting fortunes of different capitalist blocs and sectors, currently dominated by the madness of global free trade and the yawning inequalities between rich and poor countries. His article is about a very tame re-wilding indeed – one that offers no fight against the existing global madness of GATT and our very own EU.

Sadly, though, there is no way round these big tasks that history dumps on us all. If Peter is to see the revolutionary ending of our alienation from wild nature that he so plainly yearns for then we will all have to help get that revolutionary inversion of the present relationship between the excluded majority (both locally and globally) and the owners of capital in land and elsewhere. Without that we will all just have to put up with the horrible dawning global reality - one in which a major part of the world’s population will be living in gigantic slum cities, in a sea of ecological desolation, whilst the rich live in their fortresses of relatively-preserved nature.

Our best allies in the preservation of nature are not those same rich folk. Our best allies are those who have little or nothing, and thus have nothing to lose in the task of re-working our damaged world.

David Bangs


An active example of positive change - Peter Taylor replies …

I find myself in a paradoxical position responding to Dave Bangs – having been further left than Mao Tse Tung as a young man, determined to bring some political as well as environmental enlightenment to the ordinary working people (and the poor) he also wishes to enfranchise, yet I also support Charlie Burrell’s private initiative, including the deer fences.

It is not that I have given up revolutionary yearnings, more that I have seen how change can come from unlikely quarters. Like the corporate executives I met in the power generation industry who were diverting profits to sequestrate carbon and regenerate degraded ecosystems in South America long before the public had heard of such schemes. The other side of the coin was my beloved RSPB becoming rich enough from its burgeoning mass membership to buy up the gem of mystery and isolation that was Leighton Moss and turn it into a visitor centre with hides and boardwalks through the reed beds – the birds did not mind, but the intimate contact with nature, including the teenage thrill of dodging the old gamekeepers, was lost.

Landowners are ahead of the game

I understand the unease with respect to wealthy landowners leading the dreams of rewilding – whether, as at Knepp, entirely for its own sake, or as in Paul Lister’s Alladale safari-enterprise with its equally high fences, but I do not see anyone else taking these steps. The National Trust and its alliance with the Forestry Commission and United Utilities in Ennerdale have chosen a fence-less middle road with tame herbivores and continued low-intensity farming, and the John Muir Trust, despite its wild image and wide-ranging popular support has no dreams of restoring ecological health to the degraded wildernesses it purchases, mainly in Scotland and Wales. Somehow, the more support an organisation gets from a broader public base, the less innovative it can become. It then falls to private individuals with some power to make decisions to engage in innovation. The introduction of beavers to Lower Mill Estate in Gloucestershire is a recent example.

It is one thing to be involved in mass access as a political issue – quite another to work for innovation on a rewilding that includes the human heart and imagination. Sadly, the masses and their representative organisations are not taking the lead and it is falling to private landowners who at least are spurning the diversification opportunities of mega-golf or the subsidised lure of GMO bio-fuels.

I agree entirely that a great madness faces us – with Third World city slums coupled with globalised food production continuing the process of alienation with the land and nature. And I am no advocate of a depopulated unproductive countryside in this country as a result, however many wolves and lynxes it might support, but when it comes to allies in the process of rewilding, where are the urban or rural activists that advocate organic production, wildlife corridors, eco-tourism, and a healing contact with the land? And how many farmers think beyond their role as another industrial concern in the general business economy? At least in these respects, Charlie Burrell offers an active example of change.

Peter Taylor


David Bangs’ follow-up response …

I’m sorry Peter is so despairing about the possibility of working people being the social agents of change to protect nature and end exploitation.

Yes, we are, indeed, in a period of deep defeat.

This period, though, is one of continuing possibility as well as continuing disaster. The Russian and Chinese revolutions blossomed out of the wreckage of two consecutive world wars. Venezuela may see a Chavez-inspired revolution flowering in this present neo-liberal desert.

I feel more than “unease with respect to wealthy landowners leading rewilding”, for they are part of the problem, not the solution. It is the irrationalities of capitalism (of competitive production for profit, of massive waste and duplication, of cyclical collapse, and of profound global and local inequalities) which power the destruction of nature and natural systems, create unsustainable consumerism, and foment wars.

Of course, there is an ongoing debate in the owning class between those that value nature as a locus of consumption of profit (such as, perhaps, Paul Lister of Alladale and all those rich folk who value preserved nature for their lifestyle) and those who emphasise nature as a locus for the production of profit (such as agribusinesses, other extractive industries and developers).

The problem with allying with the former is that it is so easy to forget that they, too, only enjoy their ownership of nature with profits gained from its exploitation and damage elsewhere.

Peter’s strategy will only blind him to those forces that do exist and which need leadership and victories to give them the confidence to rebuild a project for a world free of exploitation of both nature and humans.

He would do better to remember the model of the Green Bans movement in New South Wales, where building labourers’ unions led a huge movement against environmentally and socially destructive developments in alliance with middle class groups and inner city communities. For half of the 1970s they had the developers pinned to the wall. He is old enough, too, to remember the Lucas Aerospace trade unions ‘Combine Plan’ of the same period, which united a 14,000 strong national workforce in a plan for converting weapons production into socially useful products from kidney machines to low pollution cars and energy saving household goods.

Judi Bari the American socialist Earth First! activist fighting to preserve west coast old growth forests is a better model than a thousand landowner wildlife hobbyists. She did the hard slog of making the links with hostile logging communities, not wasting her time courting rich patrons.

Of course, most owning class people do not wish to commit collective ecocide (though there will always be Dr Strangelove’s and George Bush’s). They will make what environmental reforms are necessary to preserve their way of life and they will preserve sufficient of wild nature to enable their continued enjoyment of it.

But that will not be a world most of us can enjoy. It will be a world vastly reduced in biodiversity and wilderness.

Peter needs to choose some different friends if he wants to help us avoid that eventuality.

Dave Bangs


Links: http://www.knepp.co.uk/