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

to produce vast amounts of cheap food, and to use whatever tools were required. Many farmers wanted to hear this and embraced the changes. Others were swept along behind them in an attempt to survive. This new culture told ‘consumers’ that food was little more than fuel, and that it should cost less and less of their income. If nature was thought about at all, it was assumed to be robust enough to manage somehow.

It was almost as if Carson had never existed. The environmental movement around the world grew massively as a result of her rallying call, but the intensification and industrialization of farming persisted in defiance of her warnings for decades after her death in 1964.

~

The light across the fields was dying. We were leading the last of that year’s hay bales into the barn because the weather forecast had predicted a downpour overnight. The curlews over the brow of the field seemed agitated as if they were seeing off a crow. I looked at the fields and wondered what harm my father and I had done, and whether our land was now degraded. I knew that across the farming landscape some birds were no longer there that once had been. The corncrake had quickly vanished when farmers adopted mechanical mowers and tractors in the early twentieth century, but curlews throve on farmland in large numbers for decades after the transition to tractors and machinery. They seemed to love the way we farmed. In spring they would appear, back from the winter mudflats to their ancient breeding grounds on our fields. They would wheel around our farm in giant fairground-ride loops, calling for their mates. Or they would walk through the grass not far from where I sat – all stilt-like legs and elegant curved beaks. They would hunt for worms on the ploughing, and in the pastures. And soon they would be paired up and would nest. In the weeks that followed they would fill the skies with their calls. As my grandfather had taught me, I enjoyed discovering where their nests were, and then, if I was mowing the grass for silage, I would try to ensure that the chicks escaped, even if I had to leave a strip of grass unmown for an hour or two and come back later. There were three or four pairs in our silage fields, and every summer they would rear a handful of chicks. It was hard to reconcile this abundance of birds with the reports we were starting to hear about ground-nesting farmland birds disappearing, though I’d sometimes wonder whether we had slightly fewer than we used to.

How many curlews had there been twenty years ago? No one seemed to know, when I asked. And no one was worried. There were curlews all around us. But I could sense a change when I went to help out at my friends’ farms further down the valley, on better, more ‘improved’ and more intensively farmed land. I was aware, when we climbed off the big tractors for meals, that the skies above us were empty except for the odd passing crow or seagull.

~

One of the hardest aspects to understand in how farming affects nature is that there is often a time lag between cause and effect. We find it easy to comprehend the immediate destruction caused by a sudden catastrophic event: miles of ocean spoiled by an oil slick; the life in rivers killed by chemicals that have been dumped; elephants butchered for their tusks in the red African dust; and huge-trunked trees crashing down to the soundtrack of chainsaws in the forests. Everyone with an ounce of conscience and intelligence knows that such sudden destruction as a result of human behaviour is wrong. But in reality the world doesn’t fall apart on one day. It is much harder to see and appreciate the gradual changes that destroy things over ten, thirty or a hundred years. The tools or practices that radically changed our farmed landscapes emerged decades ago. There was a considerable time lag before the science began to show devastating declines in certain species. This is because it took time for new technologies to be adopted by farmers and scaled up to use on their land, to bring about their full effect. Nature can hang on for years, even decades, before it is beaten in any particular place, and then vanishes.

~

In my father’s last year or two we often spoke about what had changed and why. He was sad that the curlews, once the commonest of farmland birds, had become vanishingly rare. We both knew that it wasn’t modern farming, or even making silage, that did for the curlew, but a particular level of intensity being reached in those activities. From the 1990s onwards, super-big, super-fast mowers emerged and were used on fields all around us for making silage earlier and earlier in the year. The grass could be ready then because of changes to grassland management, powered by artificial fertilizers, and faster growing grass seeds, and encouraged by the trend to feed younger grass for peak nutrition to dairy cattle. This combination of practices sent curlews into a disastrous decline. They couldn’t lay eggs and rear chicks in fields that were mowed three or four times each summer, starting as early as May and ending in October. The fields where they had once lived became a killing zone for their chicks. A driver on a huge new tractor (often young, working for a contractor, with the radio on and the windows closed to keep his expensive machine clean and tidy) had no time to stop and lift a curlew chick out of the grass, even if he had spotted it and recognized it. Adult curlews tended to linger in the fields long after the changes were introduced to the way the fields were managed, because they can live up to twenty or thirty years of age and faithfully cling to old nesting grounds, trying over and over