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

A farmer would only know the curlews were in trouble when they were no longer there at all, as the parent birds died off. By the time he understood there was a problem, it was already too late. But was it the farmer’s job to care for curlews? Or was the priority to make the best quality silage, to make milk available at prices demanded by the supermarkets? How much was a curlew worth?

The problem wasn’t necessarily that mechanical or chemical farming tools existed; it was that they were being used in such a way to bring about conditions in a landscape that made it impossible for wild things to live or breed. The intensity dial was turned just a touch too far, and most of the time it was impossible for the farmer to know how to read the effects. When does the speed of a mower become a problem? When does a combine harvester become so efficient that it leaves too little grain on the field for wintering birds?

Farmers often didn’t know enough to make informed ecological decisions effectively or couldn’t see how they could survive financially if they made themselves less efficient than other farmers by opting out of modernization. When machines were bought, the farmer was simply updating or upgrading his gear. He didn’t buy them with wildlife in mind. They weren’t designed, engineered or sold with wildlife in mind, either – the tractor designer, engineer or salesperson hadn’t a clue that what they were creating might have these unintended consequences. The supermarket that demanded food be produced in ways that required this degree of mechanical efficiency didn’t have a clue either. The whole system was so fragmented and specialized that most people working within it were either ignorant of its unintended effects or, worse, lost in a kind of magical optimism that somehow nature would be OK. There were profoundly important questions about the potential effects of each new technology which it was nobody’s job to ask or answer. There was no mechanism for farmers or ecologists to judge whether a technology or new farming practice was on balance a ‘good’ thing or a ‘bad’ thing, and we didn’t really know when we had crossed the invisible threshold from one to the other.

As I moved through my adult life I witnessed hundreds of little shifts that together added up to a transformation: the gateways widened for the new more efficient combine harvester, the slightly wider and faster mowing machine and the bigger, deeper cutting plough with more furrows. Slightly stronger pesticide was sprayed to protect the crops; new grain or grass seed that had been treated with some chemical or other was sown; the switch was made from spring-sown grain to winter-sown varieties that eliminated stubble where the birds used to glean in winter; slurry was spread instead of muck from a midden; and a top dressing of artificial fertilizer richer in nitrogen made the grass grow faster, in order to be mown earlier. These changes built on similar, relatively benign farming practices that had been used for centuries. The differences in these practices in my lifetime were gradual revolutions of scale, timing, uniformity, efficiency and speed.

Over thirty or so years, the poet Virgil’s farming tools for waging ‘war’ evolved from being the battlefield equivalent of spears and swords to something more comparable to tanks, jet fighters, and chemical and nuclear weapon systems. And, in turn, a culture war that began with Carson’s awakening grew increasingly polarized and toxic. On one side was a group that said farming was doing an indispensable job, becoming more efficient and making sensible use of the best new technologies, and that all was well. On the other side were those who believed that farming was trashing the earth. One encouraged a kind of naive faith that farming was ‘good’, the other a kind of activist anger that it was ‘bad’. One group acted as if the only thing that mattered was cheaper food, the other as if food didn’t matter at all. Everyone was compelled to take sides. It grew more and more vitriolic, the arguments more and more reductive, but it was largely a dialogue of the deaf, and it existed even in our village. My first brush with this culture war had come years earlier, not long after my return from Australia.

~

My father was setting the world on fire. Silhouetted against the skyline at the top of the sandy bank above the billowing gorse bushes, towering, flickering tongues of flame and sky-bound columns of smoke rose between us. The fire licked and hissed through the tinder-dry needles. The strongest branches and trunks were as thick as my wrist and they crackled as they began to glow. The whole bank on either side of the smoke was a mass of canary-yellow flowers. Dad climbed through the gorse, setting it alight as he went. He had in his hand a kind of torch made out of a branch, and an oil-soaked rag. The flames roared around him. Rabbits fled, their cotton-wool tails bobbing. A blackbird spluttered out of the undergrowth and away; small flocks of linnets and yellowhammers flittered down the field.

The gorse had been slowly creeping outwards, across the Quarry field, taking over about a third of the field. My grandmother had once kept hens there, and later my father kept pigs on it because they helped its sandy soil. Now it was a haven for rabbits. It was one of our worst fields and got overlooked for a few years between these periodic attempts to tame it. That night, the mood took Dad to do something about it. He marched out of the yard with a box of matches, a plastic bag full of straw and bale string, and a small jerry can of petrol. My mother sent me a few minutes later to see he didn’t ‘burn himself to death’.

After a while, the roaring, crackling firestorm began to