Britain’s grouse moors have been ablaze this week. Every year, between 1 October and 15 April, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fires are set across North Yorkshire and the Pennines, as well as in Scotland and Wales, to promote the new growth of heather and thus boost the numbers of grouse on shooting estates. The images are striking. Grey smoke rising angularly from the burning ground, like missile trails from some destroyed village. People in nearby communities complain of being smoked out. They worry about the effect of smoke pollution on their health. Environmentalists point to the damage done to peatlands, which become drier because of the burning, causing significant losses of carbon in the soil, turning them from carbon stores to carbon emitters. They warn of the increased risk of wildfires and flooding. Proponents of the practice claim to be protecting a precious habitat in which several bird species, including grouse (yes, the same ones they are shooting at!), thrive, though, of course, it erases the nesting habitats of other bird species (and many other species of bird and mammal have been driven off the moors to accommodate grouse farming). However, as a 2014 study by the University of Leeds showed, these benefits, such as they are, must be weighed against ‘significant negative impacts on peat hydrology, peat chemistry and physical properties, river water chemistry and river ecology’. Despite such alarms, the moors continue to burn. In fact, the practice is on the increase, notwithstanding the warnings of the government’s own Committee on Climate Change.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of burning grouse moors (and the practice is not short of its supporters, mostly from the country sport set), the act is a profound and brutal expression of ownership and privilege. There is something powerfully symbolic about a landowner choosing to set fire to moors that are part of everyone’s natural environment, that help shape every local resident’s sense of who they are and their relation to nature and their natural environment. There is something telling too about the government’s permissive – not to say supportive – approach to a practice that supports the ‘sport’ of a wealthy few yet degrades the natural environment of everyone else. Grouse shooting was even excluded from COVID-19 lockdown rules, at a moment when police were breaking up family picnics and halting kids’ football games. These vast areas of moorland could be put to any number of uses, many of which could benefit the wider community and the natural environment, yet they are maintained for a single use: hunting.
The scale of the enterprise is remarkable. Grouse moors account for around 8 per cent of total land in England, Scotland and Wales, including 852,000 acres inside Britain’s national parks. Grouse moors cover 44 per cent of the Cairngorms national park, 28 per cent of the North York Moors, 25 per cent of the Yorkshire Dales and a fifth of the Peak District. Yet while some people enjoy untrammelled private access to this land, Britain’s national parks remain out of reach for most people in Britain’s most socially deprived areas. Many are accessible only by car. But, when it comes to access to green spaces, the situation is far worse than that. In fact, one in eight families in the UK – 3.3 million in total – have no access even to a private or shared garden. The poorer you are the less likely you are to have access to public parks and other protected green spaces. Few of these people will ever point a shotgun at a grouse.
‘All nature has a feeling,’ wrote poet John Clare, but too few of us get to experience it (and, as Clare suggests, we can only really understand it through direct experience). It is not surprising that Britain ranks bottom in Europe for ‘nature connectedness’, a psychological concept that ‘measures the closeness of an individual’s relationship with other species and the wild world’. High levels of nature connectedness have been linked to better mental health and greater environmental awareness. The study on which this finding is based found a strong correlation between biodiversity and nature connectedness, with people living in countries where wild species and landscapes are still intact having a closer relationship with nature. In this respect, Britain is falling further and further behind. A staggering 97 per cent of all Britain’s wildflower meadows have disappeared since the Second World War, while, according to the 2016 State of Nature report, 56 per cent of UK species declined between 1970 and 2013, with 15 per cent threatened with extinction. Nearly half of Britain’s natural biodiversity has gone since the industrial revolution, more than anywhere else in western Europe or among the G7 nations. Britain is rated among the worst countries in the world for ‘biodiversity intactness’.
The decline in biodiversity is related to the privatisation of much of Britain’s natural landscape. The public has no right to roam over 92 per cent of land in England. What should be a ‘common treasury for all’ is instead hidden behind stone walls, hedgerows, and barbed wire. Much of the land beyond these barriers is, like the grouse moors, nature-impoverished, depleted and in decline. Centuries of gazing on enclosed land – once common or communally administered open land gifted by act of parliament to a wealthy private landowner, usually to be developed for single-use purposes – has destroyed natural habitats, while deforestation has given Britain’s uplands a distinctively barren, featureless appearance. As Guy Shrubsole argues in his beautiful new book, Britain’s countryside could look very different. Temperate rainforest once covered a fifth of Britain – places, like the bits of British rainforest that remain, ‘exuberant with life… [d]ripping with mosses, festooned with lichens, liverworts and polypody ferns’. Yet, thanks to deforestation, Britain now has less tree coverage (13 per cent) than pretty much any country in Europe (for example, 33 per cent of Germany is covered by forest and 31 per cent of France).
No-one likes to talk about ownership in Britain. It’s awkward and embarrassing, and it exposes old wounds most people would rather forget or pretend didn’t exist. After all, the process whereby the current land settlement was arrived at was a bloody and coercive one, bitterly resisted and ruthlessly enforced. The consequences of enclosure were also dreadful, including mass starvation and impoverishment, the creation of urban slums and millions of landless workers, and the redrawing of power relationships, including social relationships, particularly those between men and women. The exploitation of nature has gone hand in hand with the exploitation of labour. They are two sides of the same coin. Nobody now wants to have a debate about land ownership, and no one wants to think about how half of England came to be owned by less than 1 per cent of the population (mostly aristocrats and corporations) or what this means for the rest of us. It is just one of those things that we can’t really do anything about, like the weather or Manchester City. But, of course, we can and should discuss it, and it can be changed. It seems indecent that the King of England gets to pontificate on climate change while being one of the main beneficiaries of the settlement that has driven it and that continues to do so.
Are these people the ones who should get to decide how Britain’s countryside looks and feels, what it produces and how it is cultivated? Haven’t we all had enough of the outcomes of decisions made for us by groups of privileged, entitled landowners (our voting habits suggest not)? Why should our experience of nature be tempered by the fear that some heavy-handed representative of the landowner will confront us? Why do landowners’ rights count for more? What place has the public good in all of this? We can’t address issues of climate change and the rewilding of parts of Britain without also thinking about who owns the land. At the very least we should stop pretending these things are unrelated. But we are too mealy-mouthed. We pretend we can repair our broken home by painting the doors and window frames when the foundations are rotten. Why should we continue to be bound by a settlement so demonstrably unfair? Rather than pretend that we can carry on as we are and not leave anyone behind, we need to challenge the capitalist consensus and find ways to re-establish and enlarge the commons, running the things on which we all depend – from the natural environment to public transport, water and energy – in a democratic way, with sustainability and equality, not profit, in mind. The biggest mistake we make is to think a compromise with capitalism is possible.
The physical enclosure of land has been accompanied by a kind of enclosure of the mind. We have come to regard as natural a settlement that is anything but. In the same way, when we look at our landscape, we suppose this is how it has always been or that its degradation and depletion is somehow unavoidable or necessary. Our capacity to imagine something different has been ground down, along with our resistance. In too many cases, anger is focused not on the powerful but on the weakest and most vulnerable. One reason I started this blog was that I thought education, and adult education, in particular, could offer a way out of this trap. I thought it could give people the resources to imagine something better and to do something about it. The challenges we face now, the climate crisis especially, demand of us new thinking, new ideas and new ways of doing things, from land ownership to education itself, but there seems little chance of our political systems delivering this. In fact, we are moving in the wrong direction, in so many ways. In education, for example, in England, spending per pupil in state schools has fallen by 10 per cent since 2009. At the same time, arts and the humanities have been marginalised, in schools, adult education and in universities, with enrolment in arts GCSEs in English state schools, for example, down 40 per cent since 2010. At the same time, in private schools, the value of arts education is increasingly recognised. Britain operates a sort of educational apartheid. If your parents are not wealthy enough to send you to an elite private school, your chances of receiving a rounded liberal education including art, history, philosophy, languages, and the humanities, are slim. Little wonder there is talk of a ‘creativity crisis’ in Britain. But that, in truth, is how the 1 per cent like us: small, defeated, scared and compliant. It is hard to convince someone beaten down with debt, knackered from work and the kids, with nothing to show for their hard work and barely enough to get by on, and with the stress of all that, to turn the world upside down.
The British countryside is full of ghosts. The peasants who farmed the open fields. The masters and the servants. The poets and the painters. The Diggers and the Levellers. The soldiers and the dead. Yet, for hundreds of years, much of it has been largely silent, fenced off for the few, a source of private wealth or a playground for the privileged. We have forgotten where we came from, where we belong, the life of which we are part; all the things that were taken away from us with such brutality. It all feels so remote, so alien, now, squeezed into our high rises and housing estates, the little plots for which we work so hard, incurring a lifetime of debt just so we can be. We appreciate nature from afar or from a position of moral detachment or superiority. We are its consumers, its smart-phone photographers, its WhatsApp-sharers. We have forgotten how to be awed by nature; how even to be with or in it. We are merely entertained by it. Physical detachment has made our view of it still more human-centric. We need, like John Clare, to see the moral value in the non-human world, to honour it. We must start to see nature not as something to consume, or as a backdrop for a selfie, or a source of private wealth, but as something of which we are part, to which we have a personal connection that must be continuously renewed. But how can we begin to rediscover ourselves in this way if we cannot stomp the heath or smell the wildflowers or ‘find a humble stall, [a] rest and lodging free’? Clare recognised that the suffering of the land and the suffering of the people are connected, and that damage done to one is damage to the other. Both are victims of the tyrannical prioritisation of economics over every other area of life, separate yet the same, and more, much more, together. We are equals in the question of rights, and our joint future – or otherwise – is indivisible. To paraphrase Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan, we are nature and we have to defend ourselves.
