The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 178

not want to see their history erased or their culture blotted out, to
witness a hushing: a sweeping away of the accumulated strata of their
lives, a silencing of their voices.
I did have responses to some of the specific points Dafydd raised.
The land and its economy have changed drastically over the past
half-century. Much of the public money which would once have sup-
ported people like Dafydd and Delyth is now taken by ranchers,
people who don't live on the land they farm and visit only when they
have to. You can see abundant evidence of this long-distance farming
on the roads of mid-Wales: Land Rovers driving this way and that,
towing quad bikes in their trailers. The people who have bought this
land are likely to have less interest in its history and culture. They are
piggybacking on the moral capital of the Dafydds and Delyths, whose
survival, for many taxpayers, is the only remaining justification for
the extravagance of subsidies.
As absentee ranching spreads and mechanization advances, employ-
ment on the farms declines, as it is doing worldwide. Farming in Wales
now produces less than a quarter of the income generated by wildlife,
despite the fact that it occupies a much greater area than the land set
aside for nature. I have yet to see any plan for hill farming which pre-
dicts that sheep raising will provide a growing or even stable share of
national employment. The remaining farmers, like Dafydd, survive by
making much of their income from activities other than farming.
Rewilding, on the other hand, has great potential to attract walkers
and nature-lovers. Though the Cambrian Mountains are close to the
conurbations of the West Midlands, they are scarcely visited today.
In the early years, rewilding requires plenty of labour: planting
trees, reintroducing lost plants and animals, removing fences and con-
trolling exotic invasive species, such as rhododendron and Sitka
spruce, and stray sheep. As the ecosystem recovered, the rewilding
workforce would decline, but the potential for generating money
from tourism would rise. Banishing the sheep and banishing the
people are not the same thing. It is possible to envisage a thriving
community of former farmers acting as wardens and guides, provid-
ing bed and breakfast, farm shops, clay-pigeon shooting, bicycle hire,
horse riding, fishing lakes, falconry, archery and all the other services
that now help rural communities to survive.