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

wane and lose its wild power. As I walked back to the village between the crooked silver limestone walls I met one of our neighbours. Her husband was the head teacher at a local school, and she had a smallholding of a couple of fields around her house. She seemed agitated and looked wild and emotional. She asked what had happened. Then, before I could answer, she said she had called the fire brigade. I told her there was no need. The fire was under control. My dad had lit it. It was his fire on his land. She seemed puzzled and a little angry. But she was also confused because she was a friend of ours. She was trying to understand what was happening to a hillside near her house which she clearly loved as it was – before my dad turned it to ash. She had only lived here for five years, and had no idea that this was part of a traditional cycle. She thought the way this field was now was how it had always been and how it must always be. I could see she was trying to balance her anger and her usual respect for us. She wanted me to explain.

Why is your father burning it?

Why is he destroying the birds’ habitat?

What will happen to the wildlife that lives in the gorse?

Her tone said, why is your father being like this now, when usually he is such a decent man? What is wrong with you people?

I didn’t have all the answers. I’m not sure she was in a mood to listen anyway. I was embarrassed. I saw that two different ways of seeing our world were clashing. My dad only rarely explained in words why he did things. Behind me on the hillside he was acting a bit heathen and wild; the wind was beginning to catch the fire in a new patch of gorse and it was roaring upwards into the sky, crackling loudly.

Had Dad thought about the bird nests? I had no idea.

I felt a bit like the PR man for the Apocalypse. But I also felt a kind of defiance and a sense of loyalty to him. I wanted to defend him and explain why he would do something that seemed so wrong to her. So I tried to say that fire was how we had always dealt with the gorse, part of a very old cycle of managing it, knocking it back when it spread too far, and then letting it recover for a few years. Dad didn’t burn all the gorse. He burned some patches and left others. The birds weren’t entirely robbed of their habitat. The gorse is a farming nuisance; it ruins the sheep’s fleeces. It would, if unchecked, take over the field completely, making it fit for little more than rabbits. I think I said other things as well, some of which even made sense, but perhaps I also said some things that were close to lies. I was powerfully aware of the widening gulf that existed between people that thought it natural and necessary to shape the landscape, and those who were troubled by it; between people that farmed and those who didn’t.

~

After my father’s death I remembered that night of burning gorse and realized that many people who cared about nature were drawing the conclusion that all farming and all land management was now to be distrusted. But to reject farming wholesale is a mistake: the field is the base layer on which our entire civilization is built. We all depend for our survival on those bits of wild land that have been cleared by means of fire or using an axe, or by grazing animals over time, or by using a plough. The fact that this clearance probably occurred so long ago means we forget this harsh ecological truth and almost think of fields as a natural phenomenon. But a field is not a natural thing (though some fields like species-rich hay meadows, or carefully grazed prairie, or woodland pastures, can closely resemble wild habitats) and whether it is used to grow plants or animals, it ultimately comes into being as a result of killing some of the original species. Many of the creatures that would have lived in that space now cannot, as they are excluded and no longer have spaces and food that sustained them. The creation and sustaining of a field can mean life for some things and death for others, and always did.

The truth is we are quite brutal ecosystem engineers and change the world for our own use. Once, we cleared our own fields in order to grow food, and had to harden our hearts and do this landscape engineering to produce the food to keep ourselves alive (as most people in the developing world still do). By the time I was an adult, barely any British people still worked on the land (less than 2 per cent of the population), so collectively we had begun to forget, or turn away from these difficult truths – just as the head teacher’s wife had done.

The enduring truth is that we all are – and will always be – complicit (directly or indirectly) in killing for our food, regardless of what we eat. It was a battle long before Virgil said it was. Farmers had to fight to come out on top of the countless things that would destroy their crops or kill their animals: they have always been killers, and whether they grew plants or kept animals made little difference to this reality. Farmers destroyed wild habitats to carve out fields for crops, just like my father did that night (and, in doing so, created new habitats and new ecosystems for other species). If you want to put this to the test, try living from a piece of wild land and see how long you can avoid killing anything (and don’t forget to count the small living things, because