Two pictures that seem, to me, to express a parting of the ways that’s so important the future of the earth depends on us taking the right direction. The first was taken in Portscathoe, Cornwall in October 2014. A green lane and bridleway that we often used, and which had ancient hedges on either side was flailed, presumably to make space for farm equipment to travel up and down. The second was our organic hotbed, taken this afternoon. Notwithstanding the difference in the seasons, the lane will never properly recover, and the displaced small mammals, insects and birds may never return. The hotbed, in its various iterations will go on providing good food and spent manure to the soil for as long as we are able to tend it.
Last time we went to Heligan I took with me Wendell Berry’s collection of essays “The world ending fire” and it lit me up. So too this last visit when I read Isabella Tree’s book “Wilding” and followed that with my latest read – “Green and Prosperous Land” by the economist Dieter Helm. It’s so easy to get despairing and cynical about the state of the earth and it’s vital the we don’t get sucked into a mindset that plays into the hands of the agrichemical industry and the climate change deniers. I spend a lot of time trying to make connections between what’s possible for an individual or a couple like us and the sort of global change that’s needed. It’s no accident that the isolated individualism of our culture plays into the sense of helplessness.
Yesterday I was talking to a leading light in our neighbouring community garden -with which we share an ugly boundary of Cupressus. When I explained a plan to replace it with a more natural hedgerow he agreed completely and then spent the next five minutes explaining why it would be difficult, the Parks Department would never agree and they’d make us pay for it all anyway. He was probably correct in every sense and yet …… ?
I know I quoted the old management saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast” only last week, and it’s still true – but that’s not a reason for giving up. It just means that we need to go about it in a different way, by changing hearts and minds.
There was a warm southeasterly wind today. It was so strong it pulled out all the pegs on one side of a net guarding our chard from the pigeons, and left it flapping helplessly. We fixed it and moved on to other jobs. We don’t talk much on the allotment, we both know what needs doing and we seem to divide the work without much discussion, each according to our preferences and abilities. It is a place of sanity and re-enchantment, and a place where our 250 square metres can represent the whole earth in our experiment in low impact living. It is, in truth, a culture of its own and the truly radical thing about new cultures is that they’re caught and not taught, and they don’t care a fig about power, wealth, gender or age. Individually the choices we make don’t change the world much. But collectively? that’s a different matter altogther. Collectively we can change things if we can only believe that it’s possible.
Coming home from Indy on Saturday, I took a wandering route to avoid the interstate construction, and was dismayed to see yet another dozen tree lines/hedgerows being bulldozed to make fields even larger. Even worse, it appears they are just burning the entire lot rather than cutting it for firewood or planking! Won’t we ever learn that fast is rarely best?
I don’t know the first thing about the economics of US farming, so forgive me if I get this wrong – but certainly UK farmng economics have been so distorted by post-war subsidies and the the Common Agricultural Policy that it’s difficult to see that many UK farms make any sort of profit. The EU baseline subsidy is based on land holdings and that’s distorted the cost of agricultural land because it’s been factored into the price. The subsidy economy is what’s driving intensive farming and until we sort that out we’ll continue to see intensification and all the problems that it brings. Making the polluters pay seems like a good place to start – they’ll howl of course but actually the small mixed farmers have little to fear and much to gain from subsidies directed at increasing natural wealth because they’re halfway there already, and the massive farms are driving pollution and climate change. I could go on, but the main thing is that this is an absolute crisis, a moment of choice and if we allow the wrong choice to be made we’ll all be suffering the consequences – including the polluters who’ll have nowhere to run.