Only Reconnect - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 116

to be dislocated from local rural cultures. Sustainable agriculture, with its
need for increased knowledge, management skills and labour, offers new
upstream and downstream job opportunities for businesses and people
in rural areas. This suggests a logical need to emphasize agriculture's
connections to local ecologies and communities.
In this modern world, those of us who are not farmers express our
connections with nature in combinations of three ways - by visiting it,
by joining organizations, and by eating the food. Firstly, we visit and
observe it, walk in it, bathe in it, occasionally at weekends or on annual
holidays, sometimes daily while walking the dog. 35 Each year in the UK,
we make more than 550 million day and overnight visits to the countryside
and seaside, spending a total of UK£14 billion in local economies. This
is more than four times as great an input to rural areas as subsidies to
farmers from government. The choices that we make on these visits thus
make a big difference to the supply of goods and services, whether directly
in the form of food, or indirectly in the form of landscapes. 36
We also join organizations which we feel are engaged in activities to
protect, conserve or regenerate those aspects of nature or countryside that
we value. Environmental, heritage and countryside organizations have now
become some of the largest membership organizations in industrialized
countries. In aggregate, they have overtaken political party membership,
and are second only to trades unions. These represent a wide range of
different voices, pulling in many different directions. 37 Many began as
protest movements, and then later evolved to take on a more positive
'solutions-oriented' agenda. The economic and political powers of these
organizations come from the membership base. In the UK, both the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds (with more than 1 million members)
and the Wildlife Trusts (more than 300,000 members) now own large
amounts of land, both reserves and farms, and are demonstrating that
positive management can make a difference. The largest landowner in the
UK after the crown is the National Trust, which owns 275,000 hectares
and has 2.5 million members. In the US, the Sierra Club has 600,000
members, the National Audubon Society 550,000 members, and the
Wilderness Society 200,000 members.
Perhaps most importantly, because it is a daily activity, we eat the food
produced from the farms that shape nature on a daily basis. We vote once
every two, three or four years, yet we shop every week, or even every day.
We must have food, and in having it we also encourage the system of
production that brought it from land to larder. This means that the food
system as a whole deserves to be described as another commons. It is
something that belongs to us all. Yet, in an unrestrained or unregulated
context, the tragedy is that we over-consume and under-invest in this
commons. Worse, we appear not to appreciate the consequences.