Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 72

birds and there's an increasing number of people who wouldn't even
notice.
'As we become more urban we're losing our attachment. Many of
our summer migrants could just slip away and most of us wouldn't
know it. To me that's shocking.'
When Ritchie was a small child, Dutch elm disease reached the land
around his village. 'We had 300-year-old sentinel elms which domi-
nated the landscape for miles. I remember the gangs of timber cutters
turning up and felling the trees and burning the roots. What I con-
sidered to be the permanence of the countryside suddenly wasn't.
'I managed to persuade myself that it was a natural tragedy. But
soon afterwards, in the 1970s and early 80s, something even worse
happened. The mixed farms started going down the pan, and agri-
business began to take over. The farmer next door was one of the last
to go, he still had cattle and sheep and arable crops in rotation. A
week after he sold up to a big pension fund this fleet of bulldozers
arrived. They completed the job that Dutch elm disease had begun.
They stripped the hedgerows, the remaining parkland trees, walnut
trees two or three hundred years old: the whole lot was gone in a day.
'That's where I got my environmental consciousness from. I was
about twelve at the time. Seeing how it can all disappear at our whim,
the shock of seeing this entire landscape being erased. The old farmer
probably had half a dozen full-time staff. You could see them every
morning walking across the fields. It all went almost overnight. From
then on everything was done in fleets of big tractors. As the combines
left the field, the subsoilers would move in, then the ploughs. It was
like a military operation.
'That was the worst of times in terms of habitat destruction, almost
the final nail in the coffin of what John Clare was writing about. He
was there at the beginning of the process, I was there at the end. It was
a permanent loss. It's all gone.'
As part of his first degree, Ritchie took a placement at the Centre
for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth.
'It all came together in my head: the care for the land and our
impact on it, the importance of minimizing it. After working in Lon-
don, I moved back to Wales in the early 90s and got a job as a carpenter
on the cliff railway at the Centre. I started working as a contractor