Crossing the Internal Frontiers - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 177

process, we may discover new meanings in the world and in our commun-
ities. We may just be able to find a way to save this one planet of ours.
David Suzuki says: 'We are still settlers on this earth.' Settlers have enormous
responsibilities on the frontier. They have to bring the best of the past,
yet not allow old thinking to get in the way of new requirements.
Crossing these frontiers is tough. There is no simple cookbook or set
of instructions, as the process must be different for each of us and is,
therefore, adapted to local circumstance. We can, however, take heart from
those who have already begun to write a new story - in the coasts of
England, forests and fisheries of Japan, cotton communities of Australia,
drylands of India, mountains of Pakistan, hills of Kenya and gardens of
New York City.
The Environmental Designer
The low-lying fields and estuaries of eastern England are under a double
threat from the sea. The land has been sinking since the glaciers retreated
from northern Britain at the end of the last Ice Age, and thermal expansion
of the oceans resulting from climate change is pushing up sea levels. For
about 1000 years, local communities have actively protected their coasts
by building sea walls strong enough to repel the highest of tides and the
severest of storm surges. They have also relied on salt marshes to absorb
the energy of the sea. These salt marshes pay - a sea wall with no salting
in front of it costs UK£5 million per kilometre to construct, but only
one tenth of that if there is a salting. For a variety of reasons, though,
salt marshes are disappearing. They are squeezed against sea walls,
damaged by pollutants, and drained for farmland and housing. So, we are
faced with a difficult choice. Do we continue to invest in repelling the sea,
with costs likely to spiral, or do we step outside 50 generations of thinking
and look at the landscape in a radically different way?
John Hall of the Essex Wildlife Trust recently did exactly this, and he
has big plans for one branch of the Blackwater Estuary. This is a land and
seascape of massive skies that seem to stretch forever, whether you stand
on the sea wall by basking snakes on a summer's day, or cower behind it
in the teeth of a cold, steel-grey winter's gale. This coastline is home to
hundreds of thousands of wetland birds, including Brent geese, dunlin,
knot, shelduck and redshank. The fisheries amongst the marshes contain
important stocks of oysters, cockles, herring, bass, mullet and eels.
Fronting the north bank of the Blackwater Estuary in Essex is Abbotts
Hall farm, until recently a 280- hectare conventional arable farm. The
farmland is protected by a 2-metre seawall, on the river side of which are