Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

"I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath".  

A statement by George Monbiot from his thought-provoking new work Feral that, like the book as a whole and the concept - rewilding - that it advocates, both resonates and slightly infuriates at the same time. 

'Rewilding' is certainly trending in environmental circles at the moment. However, its not so much the prospect of the return of the wolf, lynx, beaver and other predators and large herbivores to the uplands and wilder parts of the British Isles and Europe that is in my thoughts (though I do have some practical and intellectual problems with this idea that may be explored at another time). The above quote struck a chord with me because it also hints at a more basic, anthropocene concern when considering the future of landscapes and ecosystems; namely, perhaps before we rush headlong into facilitating the theoretical 're-introduction' of the straight-tusked elephant that roamed European forests and plains 40,000 years ago, we should address the more fundamental concern of land ownership, access and control. 

To be fair to Monbiot, rewilding is a useful and imaginative stalking horse for stimulating debate on this issue and future direction in the wider policy fields of agriculture, conservation, energy, housing, transport and land-use. My own ruminations on the bizarre situation that we in these islands find ourselves - an increasing population, in many ways more autonomous than ever before, excluded from living and working (or even visiting) the larger part of the land mass on which we dwell - have cooked up a righteous soup of thoughts around community food production, noble, peaceful trespass and the hidden history of the tyranny of enclosure. How can it be right that '...nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line' (Simon Fairlie)?

A number of recent readings and 'Twitter-leads' have helped to stimulate this well-spring. The most striking being Gerry Conley's blog post on The right to roam land and shore, 'but for the sky, no fences facing', which eruditely brings together many of the touch-stones of this subject: Norman land grabbing, eighteenth and nineteenth century Parliamentary Inclosure, John Clare, the Diggers of St George's Hill, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, Marion Shoard, Right to Roam legislation, corporate land ownership and the creeping privatisation of public space. These themes have also been essayed in articles by Peter Lazenby and, again, George Monbiot. 

The Diggers, a radical group of proto-socialists who occupied St George's Hill in Surrey in 1649 are fascinatingly chronicled in the 1975 film, Winstanley. In many ways, this doomed five month attempt to establish the concept of the 'Common Treasury' of the land for all, ruthlessly quashed by the reassertion of the primacy of private capital and ownership, occured during a pivotal period in history for the English landscape and society; a course was being set for the processes of enclosure and 'improvement' of the land, of successive agricultural, industrial and post-industrial revolutions that sculptured the environments and socio-economic realities of subsequent generations, and still resonate today: 'Winstanley had a dream of a wonderful, gentler, more just and happy world; a dream that came again to other people in succeeding centuries, but for whose realisation we are still waiting' (David Gardiner).  

The arc of this story is well rehearsed, and well written, ground that I am not going to retread. Instead, I am leaving the path, plunging into the undergrowth; exploring the concepts of access, private ownership and enclosure, and maybe rewilding of the self, head on and with the 'muddy boots' of empiricism. Taking, in Richard Mabey's words, '...the opportunity to experience it (nature) face to face, with its qualities of wildness and renewal intact'. So, rather than using an Ordnance Survey map to pleasingly link up the anarchic network of dashed lines indicating public rights of way, hill tracks and unmetalled lanes, I have devised a mildly subversive circuit through hill and dale that studiously avoids legally prescribed routeways: a Trespass Way. 

Sustainable transport v biodiversity and community food production: case study of a landscape dilemma

An interesting case currently bubbling up on my doorstep in East Bristol that highlights the difficulties created when competing demands, each with their own merits, are placed on the landscape.

For a city that prides itself on being progressively 'green', Bristol has been slow off the mark in addressing car dependency and the city council is seeking to address this with its Bus Rapid Transit Scheme, a major infrastructure project in partnership with adjoining local authorities to connect employment and transport hubs with residential districts via upgraded or new dedicated bus routes. The scheme includes a proposed new 'bus-only' junction at Stapleton giving access to the M32 motorway into the city centre. The council has put the plans out to consultation with a formal planning application later in the year.

This is a worthy and progressive scheme to try and put Bristol's transport infrastructure on a more sustainable footing. The problem is that the site adjacent to the motorway earmarked for the development is part of a 'green finger' of open land that extends well into the urban suburbs of the city. Under threat is a belt of overgrown but well-loved fields and old market-garden allotments, mostly held by local tenants; grade 1 agricultural land under-utilised in recent times but of high value in terms of potential productivity, biodiversity, habitat and the aesthetics of urban open space. Furthermore, the lands premature early retirement into ragged nature has been partially halted by a Lottery-funded Avon Wildlife Trust initiative called Feed Bristol, which has recently seen 7 acres at the heart of the area in question given over to a community food growing project. Many people, myself included, are now advocating that such traditionally overlooked and neglected edgelands should be utilised much more for crop and livestock production through community schemes like this with the multiple social and environmental advantages that accrue, rather than facing incremental loss at the hands of commercial development with often dubious local benefit.

And there is the rub. If this was a rapacious multi-national predator threatening green space then how much more straight-forward the case for opposition would be to construct, albeit not necessarily more likely to succeed. However, if you are concerned with environmental impact both locally and more widely (and there are many who do not see this as a concern, whether due to apathy or the perceived automatic primacy of 'the economy'), where does your support lie in a case like this? In defence of the local green space or the, perhaps, wider social good of the rapid transport scheme?

Manifesto for a working landscape

This article draws on and expands upon a number of posts recently written for the Landscapism blog and appears on the Save Our Woods website.

My rationale for starting up this blog was straightforward: as someone who is constantly immersed in the landscape, both physically (as we all in fact are) and conceptually (a more specialised pursuit) I am just as fascinated by theoretical concepts of cultural and physical landscapes as spending a day walking in a National Park or observing the natural history of an ancient woodland; or indeed looking at a collection of landscape paintings or photographs, experiencing an urban adventure in a new city or working to landscape my own modest garden. I could go on with further diverse examples of landscapism. To my mind these are all naturally linked activities and areas of interest, and I do not consider myself unusual in this regard.

The frustration that I, and many other like-minded souls, have felt is observing these landscape themes, which should be organically but messily inter-twined, grow further and further apart from each other as the individual professional, academic and organisational structures develop into their 21^st century maturity; this is the curse of specialisation, an evolving feature of Western society since the heyday of the Enlightenment and Victorian polymaths.

Yes, there are many examples of relatively modest inter-disciplinary exchange and collaboration in academic research or conservation projects, and some more enlightened local authorities have taken steps towards a more holistic approach to landscape planning. Maybe if a cultural geographer, a landscape art historian, a farmer, a landscape architect, a mountain-biker, an ecologist and a landscape archaeologist were put together in a room you would hope for a degree of common ground and certainly some lively discussion; but each would soon return to the familiarity of their divergent agendas and objectives back in the workplace.  Moreover, in responding professionally to a government policy proposal, a threat to a particular landscape or some other specific challenge (a hose-pipe ban for instance) they would narrow their focus to one of self-interest, because this is the received wisdom of how a pluralistic society operates.

Why does this matter? Well, I would argue that this segregation has contributed to the marginalisation of landscape in terms of both government policy and public opinion. Given the importance that many people attach to their local, regional and national environments and landscapes as an essential part of the bedrock of who they are and where they come from, should this not be a central motif of public policy, given the same weight as key elements of education, health and economic development? Instead landscape has been channeled into the comparative back-waters of the environment, planning, heritage and tourism, from where it modestly shouts to be heard but is often pushed back by more assertive beasts: ‘global warming!’, ‘jobs and growth!’, ‘housing targets!’.