Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
management than wilderness; and so too does the establishment of predator-free deer and
cattle parks, linked by wildlife corridors. For all the talk of 'seeing what happens' and 'self-
willed land', the option of doing nothing doesn't appear to exist - short of rebuilding Had-
rian's Wall somewhere to the north of Stirling and evacuating the Highlands and Islands
of the remainder of their inhabitants. Human beings, much as they might like to, cannot
abdicate from decisions about how land should be managed; and the crucial decision, the
fulcrum upon which every other scale within the ecosystem pivots, is the level of livestock
grazing - whether it should be unlimited, controlled by predators, culled, husbanded or for-
bidden.
At one end of this scale we will get the heavily grazed landscape that is obtained by run-
ning a national flock of 45 million sheep, or the equivalent amount of wild grazing animals.
At the other extreme we have wildwood. In between lies the Vera-esque blend, something
close to the landscape in the New Forest. The vast majority of the public have never heard
of Frans Vera, and are not preoccupied with what constitutes genuine wilderness or indi-
genous habitat, but they do like to experience a landscape that feels wild and is varied.
People are fed up with seeing their natural world divided into a chessboard of monocul-
tures, which in the UK's less populated areas often consists of heavily grazed sheep pas-
ture and dense Sitka spruce. That is why the subsidies available for both these activities
have been lowered in recent years; why the New Forest, the UK's largest silvo-pastoral
commons, attracts nine million visitors a year; why treeplanting policy has done a U-turn
and focussed on native broadleaves; and why there is a revival of interest in coppicing and
woodland crafts, and in the maintenance of heathland and wild flower meadows.
What is needed is a philosophy of land use which pulls all these activities and aspirations
together and shows how they can be made productive and viable in the event that we find
ourselves having to feed and support 60 million people on quite a small island. Permacul-
ture is an obvious candidate for this role, but there may be a need to reassess the view that
'wild woodland is the natural vegetation of this country' - not because we can be certain
that it wasn't, but because 'it is too simple an explanation'. A permacultural approach, post
Vera, will not be one that favours trees on the grounds that they have a superior indigenous
pedigree; it will be one that juggles with the dynamic between light and shade to produce
landscapes that are rich, biodiverse and convivial for humans.
1
Ingalls, J J (1872), 'In Praise of Blue Grass', reprinted in USDA,
Grass
, Yearbook of Agriculture, 1948.
2
There are some interesting exceptions to this. The argan tree in Morocco is browsed by goats, but they relish its fruit.
In dry
garrigue
landscape in the South of France, the leaves of scrubby holm oak are the staple diet of goats in the winter
- but they hardly touch the leaves in the summer, when there are grasses and other foods around, allowing the holm oak
to put on growth.
3
Agnes, Chase,
First Book of Grasses
; Evan Eisenberg,
Back to Eden
, cited in Harvey, Graham (2001),
The Forgive-
ness of Nature
, Jonathan Cape.
