Sheepwrecked - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 165

ates much greater disturbance of the soil than allowing native trees to
spread, causes no demonstrable carbon loss. 42 The other told me that in
all the situations it modelled, planting trees on grasslands increased the
amount of carbon in the soil. 43
Yet Elin's argument is used across the European Union to prevent
reforestation of the uplands. The European Commission claims that less
farming would cause the 'loss of possibilities to contribute to the mitiga-
tion of climate change'. 44 It provides no evidence to support this
statement. It would be highly surprising to discover that forest and scrub
have a worse impact on the atmosphere than sheep or cattle farming.*
Subsidies are not the only means by which we pay for grazing in the
hills. In England and Wales, floods cause around £1.25 billion of dam-
age a year.† Protecting land and homes from possible impacts costs a
further £570 million a year. The immediate reason for the summer
floods that struck the region in which I live in 2012, flushing through
houses, forcing the evacuation of the village of Pennal and the rescue by
helicopter and lifeboat of campers and caravanners on the coast,
drowning roads, railways and the electricity substation, was an Atlantic
gale that dumped a very heavy load of rain on the hills. 47 But the floods
must have been exacerbated - and might have been caused - by the
reduced capacity of the hills to absorb this rain. Instead of percolating
away slowly, it now sluices almost immediately into the valleys.
I am told by a senior civil servant that an insurance company
recently investigated the possibility of buying and reforesting Pumlu-
mon - the largest mountain in the Cambrians, on whose slopes both
the Severn and the Wye arise. It had worked out that this would be
cheaper than paying out for carpets in Gloucester. It abandoned the
plan because of the likely political difficulties.
* Not only does the soil beneath woodland lock up more carbon than the soil beneath
grass, but the trees also store more carbon above the surface: broadly speaking, trees are
pillars of wet carbon. Sheep and cattle produce large quantities of methane, which is a
powerful greenhouse gas. The tractors and quad bikes farmers use consume fossil fuels.
† 'The average annual cost of damage from flooding in England is estimated at more
than £1 billion.' 45 The figure for Wales is, or was, £262 million. This is likely to have
risen as a result of the floods in 2012. 46