Next week, the nation’s leaders will head back to Westminster, to put the country back together again after lockdown. In preparation, we asked our contributors: what should be on the cabinet’s reading list? What book should our politicians bear in mind, in confronting the next term’s challenges? Tom Holland recommends Mark Cocker’s study of conservation, Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It is Is Too Late?
A book by an ornithologist may seem an odd recommendation to be giving the Cabinet. Britain’s brief love affair with hearing birdsong was a feature of the lockdown at its most unforgiving: a reminder of the economic deep-freeze that ministers are desperate now to put behind them. The country needs to get back to work. People need jobs and homes. The great engine of the economy needs to be set humming again. The Government will live or die by its ability to fill roads, and offices, and shops.
But this only renders my recommendation the more pressing. The solace that people over the course of this unsettling year are finding in the natural world will not have come as a surprise to Mark Cocker. As brilliant a stylist as he is a naturalist, he has a genius for articulating what is felt by many of us, when we take pleasure in the spectacle of wildlife, as something inchoate and unconsidered. In Crow Country, he explained and explored his fascination with the raucous corvids of a single Norfolk valley; in Birds and People, he provided a panoramic analysis of the hold that birds exert on the human imagination across the sweep of the entire globe. Neither book, though, is my recommendation to ministers.
Instead, I offer them Our Place. A study of the role played by conservation charities over the past century, it may — on the face of it — sound rather niche. The kick, though, comes in the subtitle: “Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it is too late?” The answer that Cocker gives to this question is precisely why ministers need to read the book so urgently: “Nature is slipping from these islands: slowly, steadily, inexorably, field by field, dyke by dyke. Not since the last ice age has Britain been so stripped bare of its natural inhabitants.”
Why, in a country that, measured statistically, is the most nature-obsessed on the planet, is this being allowed to happen? Cocker’s book is eye-opening in the way it zeroes in on a bleak irony: that the very obsession of the British with the natural world may have contributed to its degradation. An alphabet soup of charities committed to saving wildlife has served to frustrate any attempt at coherent campaigning — and to break up ecosystems into unsustainably tiny fragments.
Conservation organisations ranging from the Forestry Commission to the National Trust have destroyed swathes of deciduous trees and wild uplands by replacing them with “a loathsomeness of conifers”. The Common Agricultural Policy “effectively bound the country into a federal farming state, against which there was no redress, apart from internal reforms instigated by the EU itself.” The result, over the course of the past half century, has been the ecological equivalent of a doomsday machine.
Why should this matter to ministers grappling with a horrendous array of other challenges and crises? For two reasons. The first is that — with Britain’s departure from the EU — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has opened up to set environmental law on a wholly new track. Those suspicious of the Government’s green credentials may well be justified in fearing the worst — but there is cause for hope as well as pessimism.
As Michael Gove — during his tenure as Environment Secretary — efficiently demonstrated, there is political advantage for the Government in identifying itself with the conservation (or even the re-introduction) of wildlife. It is not only dread-locked activists who fret about extinction. So, too, do fly-fishermen in the Tory shires. And herein lies the second reason. Voters’ appreciation of what the natural world had to offer them during the lockdown will not have faded now that the lockdown itself has been eased. Ministers have a political as well as a moral responsibility not to let the “cold stains of absence” in the map of this country’s wildlife spread any further.
If they do want guidance on the sheer monstrous scale of the problem, and the possible solutions to it, then Cocker’s book — at once a hymn of love to our flora and fauna, and a sombre jeremiad — is the place to start.
Tom Holland is a writer, popular historian and cricketer. He is not an actor. His most recent book is PAX
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SubscribeI did appreciate the quietness caused by the lockdown, it was lovely to hear the birds so clearly.
However I also noticed the amount of money the government borrowed to pay people who could not work.
I do not believe that the government can keep borrowing such sums without any effect on inflation or the value of the pound.
When that effect takes off, food will become more expensive – perhaps too expensive?
In choosing between eating and listening to the birds, there is only one sensible answer – and it is not listening to the birds.
A very sound answer. We all enjoyed the peaceful rural areas without noise from the passing daily traffic, but the UK must go forward by returning to work and generating necessary income for families.
Are those the only options?
Food “too expensive”.?
If people spent a greater percentage of their income of better
quality food and had fewer holidays, smaller tv’s, and less “stuff” we
might make some progress towards better animal welfare standards.
Vegetables are not, and will not become “too expensive”…battery chickens are also unlikely to rise in price.
Too many people in this country are obsessed with buying the cheapest
possible food they can, without a second thought about it’s origin, or
how many miles it’s travelled.
And if battery chickens, or supermarket ready meals do rise in price,
then oh dear – learn how to cook a meal and eat something that’s
cheaper.
It is possible for the birds to continue singing without the population starving to death.
We also noticed how much cleaner the air was and reflected that the problem our society has is that unless people work they do not have enough money to carry on with the existing way of life.
The issue is that continuing with this process is wrecking the planet and it is necessary to change both what we eat and how we give people enough money to live without them needing to work in ways that wreck the planet.
We have increased our productivity by a factor of 3X since I was a boy and it is time to realise the benefits of automation and improved technology by changing the way we live. We must take the opportunity of reducing working hours, consumption levels and the madness of GDP targets if our civilisation is to survive beyond 2050.
Perhaps if food became ‘more expensive’ we would not have a population where 62% of adults are overweight and 25% are obese.
525,000 NHS admissions were obesity related in 2015/16 and is responsible for 30,000 deaths a year, and that was before Covid 19.
There is only one sensible answer, and that is for people to learn to cook, and eat less. Then we can all still listen to the birds which are essential for a healthy environment.
It is remarkable how uninterested the Conservative party is in conserving anything. Can they be sued under the Trade Descriptions Act? Also alarmed to hear that the National Trust has been clearing swathes of deciduous woodlands and replacing with conifers. Can this be true?
Republicans in America too.
They would drill in Yellowstone if they could.
Andrew I think that is totally unfair – I would say the Tory Party is working very hard at conserving ineptitude, stupidity, misinformation, the suppression of freedoms, and the relentless drive to destroy the environment. Their latest policy Lockdown, I’m sure will go a long way to reducing investment in the environment and combating global warming as evidence of this.
LOL. Sadly true!
The ”Conservative” Govt.doesn’t Conserve Villages in Leicestershire,there are Plans for Massive housing sprawls,turning areas into ”Dormitory” towns and affecting drainage..The Standard of MP,Lords,Cabinet ministers have gone down over last 28 years since John Minor Major?….Before Ministers new their portfolios and civil servants Were Politically neutral,as per Judiciary,Police,BBC .mirrors decline..These Chumps Are in love with Bezos,Gates&Soros Mass immigration,low wage ‘Slave’ economy…Would people traffickers have been allowed under Wilson,Thatcher?…But Johnson unfortunately looks increasingly like A one term Pm,with idiot Starmer in the Wings for 2024!.
I believe swathes of deciduous woodland was replaced by the Forestry Commission with conifers in the 1950s and 60s but I am not aware of this happening in recent years. Planting loathsome conifers in some upland areas is fine, particularly if they are properly managed or used as a nurse crop for developing a more mixed and open woodland appropriate to the area but unfortunately in many instances they have just been left unmanaged.
However, I agree with the main tenet of the piece and I do not see why if the willingness is there, mixed farming systems cannot be used to rewild parts of the countryside. It would also help to develop a sensible land use policy in the UK so that the most productive parts of the country were not continually build upon.
“Why, in a country that, measured statistically, is the most nature-obsessed on the planet, is this being allowed to happen?”
What does that mean?
Germany has more forest (as % of land mass) and even apex predators (wolves). Italy has wolves and bears and more forests.
And let’s not talk about recycling.
It was a rather vague line – I’m guessing it’s from a survey on the lines of “how obsessed are you with nature”!
Bit unfair to compare us with Germany or even Italy. Even in the most remote parts of the Highlands there is some kind of farming like sheep or grouse moor. Some might say – let the farming give way to the wolves and bears, but that would remove the livelihood from those places.
I guess the tension for the govt if it focuses on the natural world is with the ambition to simplify the planning process. Whether the traditional Tories from the shire will win over the new Tories from the ‘red wall’ areas is a moot point.
It may be that we have more conservation charities than most countries, but I wonder if some of their supporters are really just people who want to preserve nature in aspic as a leisure resource, to give them somewhere to walk the dog. Are they really that bothered about the natural world and ecosystems? I don’t have a problem with creating wilderness and nature reserves far from where people live, but these places should be left to nature as much as possible. Don’t encourage people to get into the car, adding to traffic and congestion, and parking problems when they get there, take a picnic – and leave the inevitable rubbish. If they want to visit remote places, try to get there sustainably.
What we really need – and finally some of the conservation charities are recognising this – is local places for nature. Somewhere you can walk or cycle to, ideally along green corridors. Get to think and interact with the nature around them. And not just in the ‘countryside’, but in urban areas it’s even more important.
Are “fly fishermen in the Tory shires” a large part of the swing vote in the UK?
No, they are almost extinct.
It is depressing how “conservatives” in USA/UK are so opposed to protecting nature. Is anything more important than conserving the environment for future generations?