Farmers vs rewilders: can they find their common ground?

Our age isn’t the first to set an English landscape of our dreams against the one which actually exists, or see earning a living from the land as something base and destructive. The tension has always been there between people who work the land and the utopian dreamers for whom every mark of the plough is a scar.

Farmers bristle at talk of countryside utopias and rewilding, and passionate wilders can’t see why land managers do things which they think are harmful to the land. Both groups complain about being misunderstood by the other, all the while failing to spot that the much more profound threat to the countryside comes from those who don’t care about what happens to it at all.

The National Forest in the Midlands, like the Knepp estate in Sussex, which has become renowned as the birthplace of British rewilding, has come to stand as an icon for the positive possibilities of change. Having spent time in both, and met the people who have shaped them, I think that’s fair.

The most profound threat to the countryside comes from those who don’t care what happens to it at all

But we can’t use them as easy answers for every difficulty to do with state of our countryside. There are good farmers and bad farmers, and bad farmers have often been the product of bad public policy and the pressure to produce cheap food. That can change – and is changing.

Take Lee Schofield’s heartfelt new book Wild Fell. The strapline on the front cover, ‘Fighting for nature on a Lake District hill farm’, sums it up. Not all farming is toxic. Even rewilders should be able to admire the survival of the cultural tradition of Herdwick sheep farming in the Cumbrian uplands.