The landscape must live its own life
Landscape functions
Humankind are not the centre of cosmos. Not the pinnacle of evolution. Not the driving force of progress. White westerners, supremacists or not, are not superior in their intelligence, behaviour, productivity, empathy. Of course, privilege defends its undeserved advantage, but that is kids’ stuff. It is precisely our confident prejudices that produce the catastrophic failures that are catching up with us. The notion of superiority of any sort is a category error, an oxymoron, and obviously so, as soon as the relevant system comes into view.
We have laboured here that we are part of ecosystems that can only work in their own terms. It is the closely meshed and interdependent ecosystems that have evolved. When they are disrupted, many, many things no longer work the way we always assumed they did. And the view that most clearly shows this is to be landscape-centric. We need to see, to feel, to be in awe of the way the landscape supports the whole of terrestrial life and, increasingly, the way it no longer can support life because it has been compromised.
A colleague’s strapline on their email says “The answer is soil. The question is irrelevant”. We could equally say that the answer is the functioning of the landscape and the question is irrelevant. These things are simply different scales of the same overwhelming issue. Does the land still work? Can it work again? What is our role?
The long introduction to landscape function is in a long book called The Call of the Reed Warbler, about the Australian experience. Of course, the book needs updating now that its understandings have led to a continental inferno. Australia at 50 degrees and parched is not Wales at 0 degrees and drenched. I am unlikely to experience a bush fire, but the landscape functions are every bit as critical here as they are in Australia.
Let’s list the five functions:
Capturing the maximum solar energy to store as carbon in the soil and to feed the massive soil microbiome
Cycling and recycling the necessary minerals to support plant life and, through plants, everything else
Controlling the local water cycle through plant transpiration and back into the soil. Acting as a gigantic reservoir of water to even out the effects of weather
Hosting the most diverse ecosystem across all the different types of life and development of diverse niches to support species diversity. This is the ultimate source of stability in the functions.
Supporting a social system that is integrated into the other four functions. A social system that understands its place in the world, a place that is defined for it by the unavoidable necessity of the other landscape functions.
That social function
We are completely bereft of understanding of this last, the social function. There are some people, individuals, families, small businesses, that have some understanding of stewardship. But these are not social systems. How can we understand how this might work when we cannot see it? Many of the permaculture books mention finding out how to support local economic activity from what is happening on your own land.
The poet of this sort of topic is Wendell Berry, a man steeped in understanding the land and the animals on his farm. A colleague recommended I read his novel Hannah Coulter, and indeed, therein is a lyrical description of what it means for a community to serve a landscape as much as the landscape serves and supports the community. You can feel in the novel how it is impossible, literally impossible, to invite yourself in to such a place. You have to belong.
From this place you can feel how it might be to be responsible, to be responsible over multiple generations, for the wellbeing of the land and the landscape. I now live amongst a community that has some of this feeling. People who one way or another end up owning a small hill farm or doing skilled work for people who do. This is not a “living”: people need conventional jobs to support families and they need income from tourist visitors. Everyone is mixing and matching and making do, but in the context of at least some understanding of what makes this place special and how it needs to be maintained.
Part of the context is agricultural subsidies. There are policies that support doing some things right and a lot of things wrong. I think of the subsidy regime as a piece of bullying that distorts people’s sense of responsibility for the landscape. People here can’t live without them and are bent out of shape living with them. FYI subsidies are currently concentrated into a Single Farm Payment scheme across the EU. This scheme has been extended in the UK for a year after it expired in 2019; no-one here knows where their income comes from next year.
Policy aside, levels of income matter. As I understand it, maintaining landscape function properly, better than is currently done, requires more labour than there is income to support. The land could be much healthier and much more productive, but you can’t get there easily from here. It is that equation I am looking at.
The distortion of a deep relationship of stewardship for a landscape by an economic framework and a set of piecemeal policies allows us to see the real value of the underlying relationship. Not farmers producing value by promoting wildlife or some other such nonsense, but a deep belonging to the place and how it must function to stay alive. And that belonging can only be social, can only be a network of community, a mutual belonging with some common understanding of what the landscape is.
You can see that tattered edges of this. The fields that get ploughed to deal with “weeds”, the valley bottoms with flooded maize fields, the vast chicken sheds. You can see the pheasants and the holiday parks. And when you look closely there are no sapling trees apart from those planted as hedges, no diversity in the sward, land that readily becomes a quagmire for cattle and horses late in the year. And I suspect there is some, but not much, community understanding of how to take responsibility for restoring landscape function.
One area that received some press was flooding downstream and the role of trees and hedges in the landscape of slowing runoff into the rivers. There are grants for restoring hedgerows at the moment.
In Wendell Berry’s novel, the central group of characters understand themselves as “the membership”. Little money changes hands, but everyone understands that if something needs doing then the necessary other will turn up to get it done. That means that the question of “what needs doing” become pivotal and must eventually be understood by all. Also in the novel is an insight that, with hindsight, it was buying a tractor on Hannah Coulter’s farm that allowed big companies to sell things to them that were ultimately destructive: of land and of community.
We must recognise too that things that need doing include things that should be done as little as possible. In 1950 there was already an understanding that ploughing damages the soil and that as little land as possible should be ploughed each year. Any notion of maximisation here is absolutely and categorically absent. More is often worse.
Connections
Who in the policy space in any western nation could understand that community relationships and healthy soil were inseparable? We push ourselves to think that this is about method, about best practice, about planting trees or using cover crops, and it is: and yet any policy that ends up driving wedges between people will destroy the land. We can already see that the land is almost completely destroyed and that local ecosystems are collapsing, and that is from 50 years of policy that focused on production and on “meeting consumer needs”, and that set aside maintaining the countryside.
What is missing as I tried in vain to get heard on the RSA’s Food Farming and Countryside Commission is that we need to understand who we are as stewards within a community that inhabits and manages the land. “What needs to be done” is not something that can ever be understood from the outside: by an academic study, by a technology development push, by a policy unit, by the commentariat. The level of observation and the timescales of that observation mean that only people walking the land on a daily basis will see what needs to be seen to get a proper understanding.
My experience is this. I read the how-to books about running a smallholding. I read them at first because we had not yet moved here; I felt I needed to get ahead. What I saw on my visits here before we moved is not what I see now. The gap between those views is so large as to make me doubt my mind. The books say that you need a year at least to observe, before you can make your moves. I hear that intellectually and then I say: but we haven’t got a year. We need to be producing.
And if you reflect that back into the community space then I know I am getting a reputation of a certain sort by the moves that I make. What sort of a person puts up a polytunnel and where do they put it? What sort of a person has their own hens when the birds and eggs out of the sheds all around are always going to be a tenth of the price? What sort of a person buys meat at the butcher’s shop when the meat is wandering around all the fields locally? What sort of a person spends time planting flowers when there is never time to do the work? My reputation is the basis of how community can and will step up to questions of membership of the land: it can’t be otherwise.
None of which means that I haven’t understood some things about fungi and about volcanic rock dust and about tree communities and other things that my neighbours might benefit from knowing. By that is not the axis of action. My neighbours will find me a lorry-load of compost or a tractor-trailer-load of manure. And they will watch what happens. People work incredibly hard here, physical labour in all weathers, including the kids and, maybe because of that, any work that can be done by machinery they will do that way. We don’t have machinery, only a 4x4 truck that can’t get on steep wet land in the winter months. The question about what community interpretations of “what needs to be done” lives there, in what is feasible physically and how it works out.
As I understand it, the sort of farms in the US mid-west where you see formations of combine harvesters moving across the land, probably under satellite navigation control, belong to essentially absentee farmers who spend half their lives in Florida. No community, no observation, just profit maximisation and destruction of the soil, not to mention destruction of the health of consumers. The connection questions are about how to understand deeply enough, how to be sensitive to the soil, how to live the stewardship issues.
Outcomes
The commentariat tend to believe that the outcomes of what is done speak for themselves. And so they do, but that is to elide the questions of observation. When I visited this place and walked the land, I saw some things and drew my conclusions. When for instance, I scythed some bracken, I saw something else and I experienced the steepness and the wetness. When I build a polytunnel into a slope and try to get it straight, I realise how complex the landforms are and how what looks straight or horizontal or whatever is infinitely misleading. When the hens learn to scratch and dig, I learn what plants are growing and what they will eat and what they will leave. Nothing is fixed or can be understood as understood.
