English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

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One night I took an old paperback with me, scrunched into my pocket, and read with my back to an old oak tree. In our local town there was a little bookshop, and I would go there for stuff to read. The guy that ran it was a bit of an old hippy. He sorted out books about nature on to a table to greet people entering the shop. In among books about otters and peregrine falcons were some books that were angrier and political – books about ecological decline in the countryside. I had been brought up to steer clear of such stuff. My family’s exposure to the early messages of ecological doom on TV led us to think that the environmentalists were bonkers. My dad despised being preached at by people who clearly had more comfortable lives than he did. After one such news report, Dad turned the TV off and declared, ‘If them cunts get their way, we’ll be running a fucking butterfly farm.’

The book in my hands under the tree was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I feared it was going to be an anti-farming rant. But instead in its pages I found a well-argued confirmation of what I had suspected for some time: the new farming technologies and practices weren’t benign tools of progress. They were an arsenal of chemical and mechanical weapons which had profoundly altered the natural farmed environment by overturning its biological rules. After reading for half an hour, I lifted my eyes from the page to the fields in front of me, and I knew she was right.

Rachel Carson is known as the woman that woke the world up to the dangers of pesticides – particularly DDT. Silent Spring came out in 1962 and said something remarkable – that the industrial dream of farming progress was flawed. She revealed that pesticides were poisoning whole ecosystems, and the more farmers used any chemical or medicine, the quicker they would become obsolete. It was a biological certainty that weeds, bugs and bacteria would soon become resistant to the sprays. (Carson, an American marine scientist and conservationist, is often mistakenly believed to have been against all pesticide use, but in her book she actually argues for highly targeted use of pesticides where necessary and biological solutions wherever possible.) She saw that farming’s answer (provided by corporate chemists) was always to escalate, to apply more and more, ever-stronger chemical solutions, creating a desperate race between agricultural chemists and plant and animal DNA to maintain their control. This led to even more destructive chemicals being used in delicate ecosystems that, Carson argued, human beings still barely understood. Farming was trying to break out of the cast-iron rules of biology, rather than work with natural processes. Farmers, egged on by politicians, economists and big business, were trashing the very systems on which life on earth depended, and barely knew they were doing it until it was too late. They had become too powerful in their fields and no one had noticed what that meant for nature. Could citizens trust such farmers, chemical companies or even the government to do the right thing?

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That book, under that tree, changed everything for me. The landscapes falling apart (including ours) were not, as Schumpeter saw it, ‘creative destruction’ but plain old-fashioned destruction.

I felt as if I had woken up from a long coma. I had almost conditioned myself to exclude nature from how we thought about the farm. I had begun to view my grandfather’s farming with contempt, to pity my father’s reluctance to modernize. And now I felt like a bloody fool, because my grandfather had been right to try to resist, and my father was right to instinctively distrust it all. I had been editing the world in my head to make it seem OK. But now the awkward memories elbowed themselves to the front of my mind.

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The morning after I had sprayed my first field of thistles, I went down the lane to check on a robin’s nest that I’d found a few days earlier. It was close to where the thistles had curled over from the chemical spray. The chicks were dead in the nest, cold bundles of pink skin and bone and scruffy feather stubs. I knew this was my fault. A tiny voice inside me had said it was wrong. I think I told myself that three or four chicks were a one-off cost to get a big problem sorted, that they might have been killed by us mowing thistles in some other way. I’m not sure I believed it, because when I remembered those dead chicks, I felt ashamed. And now, after reading Silent Spring, I knew we had been sleepwalking. So I began to read more and more about Carson and the critics of farming.

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Silent Spring unleashed a storm of controversy. The corporations making and selling the sprays, and the big-farming lobby, fought back savagely, but Carson wouldn’t be beaten, and DDT was eventually banned. The problem was that the campaigning focused on DDT. Her more significant insight – that farming had broken out of its old constraints – was largely ignored or forgotten.

Intoxicated with technological change, governments and farmers preferred to believe that DDT alone was a hiccup, rather than a symptom of something more troubling concerning human beings and their power over nature. And so, despite Carson’s challenge, by the 1970s the brutal pursuit of industrial efficiency on farms to deliver more and cheaper food became ingrained in agricultural policy across the developed world. There was almost no acceptance in farming or in the political sphere that the insatiable pursuit of industrial efficiency on the land might itself be the problem. Instead, the processes changing farming were increasingly championed as ‘progress’. Post-war societies were telling farmers that their job was