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

to avoid importing more from sterile, ruined landscapes like those of the American Midwest, or from land being cleared of pristine ecosystems in places like Indonesia and the Amazon. In such areas farming has less regulation, less control and less oversight by us.

Above all, we need farmed and wild landscapes that balance our complex needs better. We should gradually limit use of some of the technological tools that have been changing farming over the past half-century, so that methods based on mixed farming and rotation can be re-established. Take fossil fuel-based chemicals away (over time) and farmers won’t have to be told to be mixed or rotational, they will return to it themselves. If we can encourage more diverse farm habitats, rotational grazing and other practices that mimic natural processes, we will transform rural Britain. We don’t need governments to micromanage farms (there is a long history of failure of that, for example in the old Soviet Union), we simply need to create the right systems for farmers to do these things viably.

The old social contract between farmers and society is now stretched to breaking point. We need a new deal, a new understanding, a new system, that brings farming and ecology together. And that requires dialogue, realism, trust, and changing our behaviour as both farmers and consumers, and a willingness to pay the real price (in the shops or through our taxes) of food and good farming to make things as good as they should be. Some of the solutions are small and individual, but others require big political and structural changes. We have to flex our political muscles in our millions to create a politics that sees the land and what happens on it as being at the heart of building a more just and decent country.

~

Tom is fast asleep on my knee by the time we get home, heavily slumped in front of me on the quad bike, with my arm around him. Helen comes out of the house and rolls her eyes. She helps me lift him off and carries him in. There are a great many things that are unfair in our rather old-fashioned household, as I am rarely indoors to lend a hand or do my share, but every evening I put Tom to bed. He is a little bull of a boy, all will and determination and untamed energy. Going to sleep isn’t in his plan; he usually twists and turns and fights it. He loves to be read Jane Pilgrim’s stories of Blackberry Farm that were once mine and my father’s before me. But tonight he is out like a light. I stroke his hair and wonder what he will make of us years from now. I hope I will have done enough.

~

What will our descendants say of us, years from now? How will we be judged? Will they stand in the dust of a scorched and hostile world, surrounded by the ruins of all that exists today, and think that we, who could have saved the earth, were thoughtless vandals, too selfish or too stupid to turn back? Will the future know us as the generation who pushed everything too far, on whose watch the world began to fall apart, who had so little courage and wisdom that we turned away from our responsibilities? Or will they lie in the cool green light of the oak trees we planted and be proud of us, the generation that pulled things back from the abyss, the generation that was brave enough to face up to our own flaws, big enough to overlook our differences and work together, and wise enough to see that life was about more than shop-bought things, a generation that rose above itself to build a better and more just world.

This is our choice.

We are at a fork in the road.

A prudent gambler would not bet his house on our virtue, because the odds say we will fail. There are a million reasons to believe that we are not big enough, brave enough or wise enough to do anything so grand and idealistic as stop the damage we are doing. We are choking to death on our own freedoms. The merest mention that we might buy less, or give anything up, and we squeal like pigs pushed away from the trough. The world of human beings is often ugly, selfish and mean, and we are easily misled and divided. And yet, despite everything, I believe we, you and I, each in our own ways, can do the things that are necessary.

~

A few weeks ago, we planted the 12,000th sapling on our land. We have probably tripled the number of trees on our farm – and we hope to plant many more in the years to come, to run more strips of scrub and woodland through our land. I have challenged myself to plant, at least, a tree for every day until I die. That won’t create a forest, but it will be something. I want to create a farm full of shelter, and patchiness, and shade, with leaf matter everywhere returned to the soil. I want to make our farm even better for wintering birds to come to for berries and fruit. Our farm solves nothing on its own; it is just the little place where we make our start. But all of us together can transform our landscapes one little act at a time.

There is something about planting trees that feels good. If you have done it well, it will outlast you and leave the world a little richer and more beautiful because of your efforts. Planting a tree means you believe in, and care about, a world that will be there after you are gone. It means you have thought about more than yourself, and that you can imagine a future beyond your own lifespan, and you care about that future. My father mended the broken gates and walls before he died because he believed that this farm