Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Epping Forest suffered a similar fate. The Act which in 1878 saved it from enclosure re-
quires the Conservators of the Forest to:
protect the timber and other trees, pollards, shrubs, underwood, heather, gorse, turf
and herbage growing on the Forest … Unfortunately the early Conservators pursued
their duty of protecting timber trees with more enthusiasm than their duty of protect-
ing the other, more historic and precarious features of the Forest. They took a dis-
like to pollards, thought to be the 'maimed relics of neglect', and promptly terminated
the woodcutting rights. They disapproved of hornbeams and bogs, did nothing to pre-
vent trees from overrunning the heather and gorse, and demolished the medieval New
Lodge to save the cost of repair.
41
However, the pressure for enclosure coming from the forestry profession was probably
less pronounced in the UK than it was on the continent, partly because such a high propor-
tion had already been enclosed by the agricultural sector, and partly because much of Bri-
tain's timber was coming from abroad. Whilst France and Germany were developing sys-
tems of scientific forestry on their home ground, British experts were off enclosing forests
in Burma and press-ganging the local farmers into a forestry rotation compatible with slash
a strategic timber reserve in Britain resulted in the planting of millions of acres of conifers,
it was mainly on land that had already previously been taken over for sheep.
Vera suggests that 19th century natural historians were contaminated by a bias against
grazing animals that emanated from the forestry profession. Grazing animals were the en-
emy of trees, and vice versa: therefore there could be no prehistoric landscape where graz-
ing animals and trees had coexisted in equilibrium. Closed forest was the natural state of
wilderness, grazing animals were opportunists who found a temporary niche after fire or
some other disturbance, and had subsequently been replaced by the great disturber, man.
Nature, in their view, like forestry, aspired towards monoculture.
A compelling feature of Vera's theory is that his vision of our past natural history is in-
herently permacultural, if by that term we mean rich, anarchic and biodiverse. The view of
European ecology as a progression tending towards a monocultural blanket of beech trees,
disturbed only by fire or catastrophe, lends itself to a hierarchical interpretation, at odds
with permaculture's perception of nature as a web of complex relationships. By placing
grass on an equal footing with trees, and assigning herbivores as catalysts in a Manichaean
struggle between the forces of light and dark, Vera allows us to perceive nature as a spec-
trum of different species, none of which can claim precedence in a linear progression, be-
cause all play their role in myriad interwoven cycles of emergence and decay. The shifting
frontier between grass and woodland provides a maximum of 'edge' - a collective term for
