The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it.
It’s not that, for the most part, I object to a lot of the practical activities that are done in the name of rewilding by conservationists, land managers, farmers, ecologists and so on. In that sense, I agree with most of what Ian Carter says in this recent article, except for his concluding remarks endorsing the term.
I got to thinking about this when I gave a Q&A talk recently and made a flippantly negative reference to the term while making the case for low-impact, peopled, agrarian landscapes. A young woman in the audience took me to task, saying that among her peer group nobody saw any contradiction between farming and rewilding.
I’m glad that she pulled me up about this and made me think. (One reason I don’t really like giving Q&A talks – I find it too easy to make unguarded and oversimplified remarks. One reason I do like giving them, at least in long retrospect – people’s responses make me think).
Still, on reflection I can’t honestly say that this has been my experience of how the term is used, at least within the more generalised public narratives about global futures in which I’m often embroiled. In those, I find it all too commonly claimed that farming and nature or wildness are mutually exclusive. Farming in this context is the clear referent of the ‘re’ in ‘rewilding’ – instead of farming, a return to wildness.
I don’t even entirely disagree with that. As I argued in Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, there is significant agricultural overproduction globally, and there’s a case in many places for trimming the agricultural land-take – principally by overcoming the C-wrecking of rural landscapes that I discussed in a recent post.
The sticking point is that I believe this must be done by putting local rural and farming people at the centre of discussions about food, wildness, community and culture, while not assuming that a reduced agricultural land-take is always an unalloyed good. Too often, the sentiment I see behind the word ‘rewilding’ is colonial, what some call ‘clearance rewilding’ – the removal of farming and farmers from the landscape in favour of so-called ‘self-willed’ nature. In Saying NO… I show the continuities of this with ideologies of agricultural ‘improvement’ that have long been used by the politically powerful to clear the less powerful from access to land. The language around this is often guarded, and presented in the form of win-wins: better for wildlife, better for poor farming communities, better for the economy, and so on. Usually, it evades the issue of what farming people will do once their landscapes and livelihoods have been rewilded away. But benign neglect can be a form of colonialism too.
I mentioned Carwyn Graves’s book Tir: the Story of the Welsh Landscape in a recent post. In it, he makes a powerful argument in the Welsh case for what people are now calling ‘agri-rewilding’ to distinguish it from clearance rewilding. No doubt this resonates with the point that my questioner was making. Agri-rewilding, based on a sensitive understanding of local place and its dynamics, instead of borrowing from global discourse around things like forestry for carbon sequestration (Tir, p.172). I think this distinction that Carwyn makes between global discourse and local context is important. Rewilding has become a contentious and sometimes even toxic idea in Wales perhaps more than in most places because the rewilding movement has done such a bad job of understanding local context there, as Carwyn documents.
The clearance rewilding approach has affinities with rich, large-scale landowners engaging in big rewilding projects often of iconic large species in the substantial absence of people working the land. I’m not suggesting all such projects are without sensitivity or merit, but for trees, food, wildlife and human culture the better approach in general is distributed access for numerous small farmers and growers within mosaic farmed landscapes, in addition to large blocks of unfarmed wild land (I found Dave Goulson’s book Silent Earth pretty good on this, by the way).
There are problems in creating both these kinds of landscape out of our C-wrecked modern political geographies and I don’t think the word ‘rewilding’ helps address them. So I’d like to suggest an alternative: re-farming.
The ‘re’ part of it suggests we need not to abandon farming but often to do it differently, which I suspect many farmers would agree with. We need to farm as if diverse local foods, rather than edible commodities, matter. If we do that well, it will benefit people and wildlife – and will probably reduce the land-take and some of the wider toll farming takes upon nature too. As Carwyn documents, in many ways this kind of re-farming would look more like the farming that was done in the past, when there was more wildlife (though not necessarily more enlightened attitudes about wildlife – it’s more a case of what Carwyn nicely calls the “unintended fruitfulness of judicious human stewardship on the natural world” – p.147). It’s funny how people can be so nostalgic nowadays for the wildlife of bygone farmscapes, while lambasting as nostalgic any advocacy for the styles of farming that enabled it.
My late, great permaculture teacher Patrick Whitefield spoke of how he would ‘farm’ as he travelled – meaning that he would look at the passing landscape and try to read its signs, figuring out its soils and water, pondering what might grow well there, what shouldn’t be grown there, and how people might live lightly upon it. Maybe the first step towards ‘rewilding’ the landscape is to re-farm it in that way.
Various recent conversations I’ve had with farmers and with people connected to farming suggest to me that there’s quite an appetite within the sector for smaller-scale, more diverse, more locally-oriented, more nature-friendly and agroecological forms of farming. The main sticking point is money. I don’t think it can be said too often that farmers need increased food prices that make doing the right thing affordable to them, and consumers need housing prices and economic justice that make such food prices affordable in turn to them.
Unfortunately, this cuts against the dominant forces of contemporary global politics that emphasize maximizing net present value and monopoly rent, leaving farmed landscapes in their current C-wrecked state, and food system reformers of a less radical bent grasping at sticking plasters like cellular/manufactured food and tougher regulation to try to patch up a fundamentally broken system.
Of course, not all farmers embrace greener, more nature-friendly practices and, as outlined in my previous post, there’s a lot of bad behaviour in the sector. But, as I also suggested therein, countries basically get the farmers they deserve, or are willing to pay for.
Which brings me to the other bit of phrasing I want to suggest. There’s a lot of discussion in the UK these days about the public’s ‘right to roam’ over the countryside. Again, I’m sympathetic to the general idea, yet something about the conduct of this debate leaves me uneasy. Partly, it’s the connotations of the term. To ‘roam’ is to be a carefree wanderer, a rural flaneur enjoying the passing landscape, but not implicated in it, not ‘farming’ it even in Patrick Whitefield’s sense, let alone in the sense of an actual farmer trying to make ends meet.
I’ve done my fair share of this kind of roaming over the years, and I’m happy that Britain has a good network of public footpaths and a history of gritty activism dedicated to retaining and improving public recreational access to the land. But I can’t help feeling that there’s an overemphasis on recreational access and an underemphasis on livelihood access in this debate. I’m happy if members of the public want to make a point about access rights by trespassing on Lord Bigacre’s estate, though not quite so happy when I see them helping themselves to the tomatoes in Ms Smallacre’s market garden. But ultimately, this kind of right to roam thinking can too easily buy into the cheap food narrative and the C-wrecked landscapes that the clearance rewilders rightly want to protect, though in the wrong way. It can too easily abdicate responsibility for the hard work of producing food – the implicit logic is that somebody else can worry about producing cheap but wildlife-friendly food that enables others’ right to freely roam, and ideally they can do it somewhere else where the roamer doesn’t have to see them.
Of course, in the case of scrumping Ms Smallacre’s tomatoes, this kind of rights-based thinking doesn’t ‘buy into’ the cheap food narrative at all. It summarily institutes its own free food narrative. Hey, the Earth should be a common treasury for all.
My suggestion is to internalise the externality here. Yes, the Earth should be a common treasury for all, but treasure doesn’t just grow on trees. Okay, that’s not quite true – treasure does grow on trees, but there’s no ‘just’ about it. Somebody has to develop and propagate the varieties, and plant and tend the tree. So, especially in view of the multiple crises upon us, I’d like to suggest that the right to plant needs more emphasis than the right to roam. Let’s hear it for a movement of latter-day Diggers, trespassing with spades and forks, and staying around for the harvest.
As I’ll recount in my next post, the nature of this kind of spade-and-fork trespassing, the right to plant and not the right to roam, could be very consequential for the future of society.
Current reading
Brett Christophers The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save The Planet
Jo Guldi The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights
Anna Jones The Divide: The Relationship Crisis Between Town and Country
William Langland Piers Plowman
C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity
…and finally, if you’re hungry for more from the office of chrissmaje.com (or at least from a witch’s cottage nestling in the neighbouring woods), take a look at my conversation with Geoff Graham on his Yeoman podcast.
