It’s Tash talking (one half of And The Future).. in case you didn’t know, I am custodian of my grandparents’ farm in Wiltshire along with my siblings. It has been managed as a traditional arable farm since at least the 1940’s when the farming became pretty intense. There was a food shortage and the wheat and barley crops we grew were to feed the hungry British population. Fast forward 50+ years and it’s still intensively farmed, but the international markets govern the prices we get, and where the crops go. Mostly, I don’t know where the food goes, but it’s more likely to be Africa and America than here in this country. Turns out we have taken a liking to American wheat with the extra gluten to make soft white bread and they buy our less elastic wheat, which often just feeds cattle. Ridiculous if you ask me.
The system could scarcely have been better designed to ensure that farmers seek out the remaining corners of land where wildlife still resides, and destroy them.
A farmer can graze his land to the roots, run his sheep in the woods, grub up the last lone trees, poison the rivers and still get his money.
– George Monbiot, Feral
I have a vision and a dream and not a lot of knowledge about how to rewild my farm but I’m determined. Over the past decade or so, I’ve managed to implement some wild bird meadow strips and a couple of locations where wild flowers are allowed to grow and we get a little money from the government to do this. But it’s tiny in comparison to what I want it to be – a fully wild place with trees allowed to self-seed and wild, native flowers left to grow in places where fertilisers and pesticides are currently used to grow as much arable as possible without any so-called weeds, so that the big machines can come and get a ‘pure’ crop at harvest time.
So when George Monbiot talks about British people being consipé and embarrassé and British landowners doing very little to bring a bit of nature back to the country I felt chastised and ready to make a change. I also feel inept and like I don’t know enough to make the changes I want to make. I’m working on it though. I’m signed up to a few courses to learn about land management and the options available to me. If you know of a course I should go on, do let me know. I want the legacy that I leave behind to be a wild space with worms and flowers and insects and weeds and trees, where once there were fields full of mono-crops and no life. Thank you, Feral, for instilling this passion in me.
Check out this month’s community Notion document on the topic of nature conservation. And if you have something you would like to add to the document, please do, it’s open to everyone.
This month’s bookclub take aways: Feral by George Monbiot
Rewilding is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way. ‘Rewilding has no end points, no view about what a ‘right’ ecosystem or a ‘right’ assemblage of species looks like.’
We’re all suffering from ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’. When fish or other animals or plants are depleted, campaigners and scientists might call for them to be restored to the numbers that existed in their youth: their own ecological baseline. But they often appear to be unaware that what they considered normal when they were children was in fact a state of extreme depletion.
Sheep have caused more environmental damage in the UK than either climate change or industrial pollution. For example grazing prevents from regenerating and destroys the places where animals and plants might live.
Palaeocology is the study of past ecosystems. It is crucial to an understanding of our own.
The United Kingdom is ‘the largest country in Europe and almost the whole world which no longer possesses any of its big carnivores. This has, amongst other implications, lead to populations of red deer and sheep exploding causing detrimental damage to ecosystems.
There used to be elephants living in Europe! It was hunted to extinction around 40,000 years ago.
Politicians will rarely challenge interests that feature in children’s books. This is called the ‘Richard Scarry rule’ and explains why most politicians refrain from
Trophic cascades are an ecological phenomenon when the addition or removal of top predators cause changes in the populations of other creatures in a food chain, which often result in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling.
Next up: Future Sea by Deborah Rowan Wright
Join us for our 30th bookclub, where we read Future Sea – How to rescue and protect the world’s oceans by Deborah Rowan Wright and discuss our chosen topic for O in the Alphabet of Climate Solutions, Ocean Conservation.
About the book:
The world's oceans face multiple threats: the effects of climate change, pollution, overfishing, plastic waste, and more.
Future Sea is essentially concerned with the solutions and not the problems. Rowan Wright shines a light on existing international laws intended to keep marine environments safe that could underpin this new strategy. She gathers inspiring stories of communities and countries using ocean resources wisely, as well as of successful conservation projects, to build up a cautiously optimistic picture of the future for our oceans--counteracting all-too-prevalent reports of doom and gloom. A passionate, sweeping, and personal account, Future Sea not only argues for systemic change in how we manage what we do in the sea but also describes steps that anyone, from children to political leaders (or indeed, any reader of the book), can take toward safeguarding the oceans and their extraordinary wildlife.
Join us for the discussion on the 2nd of August at 7PM BST – all tickets are donation based.
Thank you for reading this month’s newsletter. If you want to join us for one of our upcoming events, make sure you follow us on Eventbrite or Meet Up. If you have any questions please add a comment to this post, DM or send us an email to hello@andthefuture.com
Lisa & Tash ✨