The pitfalls of planting

Winter is upon us, and in forestry, that means planting season. As with last year, there are Higher Level Stewardship-funded tree and scrub planting schemes to deliver on farms, whereby farmers get a higher level of payment for planting trees and shrubs on their land than if they just grazed it with livestock.

Firstly, this is a fine example of a perverse policy incentive. As raised by Miles King in British Wildlife recently, basic farm subsidies (based on area farmed) incentivise environmentally destructive behaviour (i.e. pervasive sheep grazing), and higher level subsidy payments then bribe farmers to stop this behaviour. So why pay the basic payment in the first place?

But beyond this, the practicalities of delivering these schemes even further exemplify ingrained cultural ideas that we must enforce our will on nature. Our pre-concieved ideas of what scrub and woodland 'should' look like can be seen in the delivery of these planting schemes.

Instead of (taxpayer) money being used to fund deer fencing in an area and letting it regenerate, the money is spent on planting often common scrub and tree species in plastic tubes, with treated timber stakes, at prescribed densities and proportions. So, instead of allowing nature to do the work for free, as long as deer are excluded (or controlled), Natural England spend this money on significant effort, introducing plastic into the environment, moving nursery stock around the country in these days of biosecurity awareness (and paying so little per tree that most schemes force the beneficiaries to source the cheapest trees), only to often plant what would naturally spring up anyway, given half a chance. And such schemes are so rigid that any creativity to see alternative species, for example, or allowing species proportions to be decided by the site rather than by the hand of a human, are often quickly quashed.

The farmer then gets ten years of extra payments for not doing what he's paid a basic payment to do - ca-ching.

Plastic tubes blow around the countryside and a legacy of treated timber needs dealing with.

Deer can still potentially enter and eat anything not in a high-enough tube - in the Lake District, that often means using 1.8m tubes with adverse effects on tree growth form, not to mention price. It's also pretty much unaffordable in most schemes, so in go the 1.2m tubes and out come the red deer to nibble off the tops. A false economy, in other words.

Of course, planted woodland and scrub is at least better than a sheep-wrecked wasteland deficit of near enough any habitat value, and in some areas environmental degradation really is so poor that planting is needed to kickstart the process. But, in many of the bracken beds and hillsides on which trees are planted, there are plenty of birch, hawthorn and rowan around to start the process. One can see 'pulses' of hawthorn regeneration all over the landscape, although from when I am not sure - perhaps the First World War and rural depopulation, or another event before then, that allowed them to regenerate? Nature is more resilient than we give it credit for; just because we don't plant trees, it doesn't mean trees won't grow.

Is this really the best that our Government agency tasked with nature conservation can come up with? Surely it is not beyond the many intelligent conservationists at Natural England, who are overworked and have their hands tied by bureaucracy, to push back and enable a more creative, natural, and efficient way of achieving increased tree and woodland cover.

For whom are our national parks?

It's funny what image the term 'national park' conjures up - an area of thriving nature, of protected ecosystems perhaps? Look beneath the aesthetics of a landscape, and think about the ecology, and suddenly our national parks look a lot less worthy of that title.

Browsed oak seedling on Loughrigg Fell.

Is this what we want from our national parks? An oak seedling, a struggling reminder of the ancient woodland that once covered the hills - in this instance, Loughrigg in the Lake District - being browsed repeatedly and doomed never to become a tree. Consider the ancient woodland flowers earlier in the year, which manage to persist only because of bracken providing a surrogate canopy - they tell you all about what the natural ecosystem was before sheep prevented the forest from regenerating.

Lesser celandine on Loughrigg Fell, indicating the previously wooded landscape.

It's interesting how in our national parks, the landscape is generally devoid of wildlife and instead dominated by a single species of non-native, destructive animal called 'sheep'. That's no exaggeration - the only other 'wildlife' I saw on a walk up Loughrigg last month was a raven. Is this what a national park should be like?

Our national parks, arguably our most cherished areas and supposedly most protected, are far removed from the "thriving natural environments" Defra claims they are. I wonder what John Muir, one of the founders of the national parks as an idea, would think of ours dominated by what he termed "hoofed locusts"? Would they even be considered worthy of the title?

These areas, supposedly for everyone, are actually managed by, and for, a tiny minority of land-owners and farmers who bear no-one's interests in mind except their own. Lets look at the facts. Sheep farming is uneconomical and entirely supported by taxpayer money - the average upland farm actually loses £10,000 farming sheep before managing to gain £30,000 in taxpayer-funded subsidy. Yes, that's right, in a time of austerity our tax money is the only thing keeping sheep farming continuing, unlike most other industries that became unprofitable.

Ah, but we need it for food security. Or do we? According to Defra, lamb is a declining in popularity and makes up a mere 1% of our diets. Diets that, we are increasingly aware, should have less meat in them. So, our national parks are widely devoted to farming an animal that we don't actually need, hardly a 'staple crop'.

OK, well it's ecologically beneficial, right? Well, if you listen to the agricultural lobby, and their pawns like the National Park Authorities, you could be mistaken for thinking this. But it's simply not true. Read peer-reviewed, independent journals, or buy a pint for anyone working in conservation or land management and promise them anonymity, and you'll find no-one who believes that one iota. Look at the bracken, tormentil and foxgloves that are the only things that manage to survive among the grass of the grazed uplands, and tell me that's nature conservation. For those of us who want to plant trees, help peatbogs recover, well this needs bribery in the form of even more subsidy to achieve even modest gains, rather than being part and parcel of being a national park.

A single juniper bush on Loughrigg, shredded of lower foliage thanks to
sheep and deer, is the sole survivor of a previous patch of upland juniper scrub

So it's uneconomical, ecologically detrimental, and unnecessary - and yet agriculturalists successfully take the landscape as theirs in what should be the most highly protected of all areas. They're not naturally bare and devoid of woodland - they're like this because of farming, pure and simple. It's for no-one's benefit but theirs. If you believe that's an overstatement, consider this from the Farmers Guardian: "Despite farmer fears ‘extreme conservationists’ could reverse the work of the industry". Or statements that "if the land wasn't grazed by sheep it would be just scrub or woodland", without questioning why that is a bad thing or what wider society would like - an arrogant assumption that farming is doing the public a favour, despite surveys finding that the public would like to see wilder national parks with more trees and woodland. If this isn't not the industry considering the landscape 'theirs', I don't know what is. That's not to say there should be no farming in national parks, but should it be so dominant, from the valley bottoms to the top of the hills, at the detriment of nature? 

Wordsworth considered the Lake District "a sort of national property". In reality, it and other national parks belong to the agricultural lobby (or grouse-shooting landowners), regardless of the needs of both nature and the wider human society. What a betrayal of the idea behind national parks.

Once again, the Environment Agency is to blame

After two days of heavy rain in a week, the Lake District once again is under water. Whilst not a Storm Desmond, the streams have become rivers and the rivers spilled out to turn valley bottoms into lakes.

Listening to the radio, the blame was laid squarely at the door of Highways, for their roads becoming flooded, and the Environment Agency, for not wasting even more public money trying to block water and channel it even faster into even narrower drains.

Not once has anyone dared to challenge why the land around is not holding water. Not once has anyone questioned why the bare, overgrazed hills are deforested for the sake of unprofitable, unnecessary, non-native animals that roam everywhere and reduce the capacity of the landscape to slow and hold water, to allow the soil to absorb it (not to mention other functions, such as carbon storage and actually supporting biodiversity).

There was not one commentator questioning why water was not allowed to spill out into floodplains and slow down there, why the rivers were not allowed to meander and take their own course. Instead, there'll be the inevitable calls to dredge and build even bigger walls, whilst the necessity for farmers to accept water flooding the valley bottoms will go uncalled for. The necessity of land left to grow a longer sward, to scrub up, for clumps of trees to grow will not be realised, because no one dares challenge the hegemony of those so-called guardians of the countryside and their entirely unnecessary activity.

What's that definition of stupidity - doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results? The proof that the landscape is broken is right there in front of us - let's have a difficult conversation, not skirt the issue. 

A sort of national property?

On Sunday, UNESCO will make a decision about whether or not to make the Lake District a World Heritage Site (WHS). Not for the first time - two attempts to recognise it as a site with outstanding natural heritage failed because, well, ecologically it's pretty poor. So this bid is based instead of cultural heritage, pinned firmly and foremost on hill farming, the area's overwhelming land use.

Read the National Park Partnership's management plan and you'd be drawn into believing that our rosy-cheeked 'guardians of the countryside' live in harmony with nature, tending to their flocks amongst the wild flowers and with the utmost of sensitivity. They're responsible for looking after this beautiful landscape, with its 'naturally' open hills and smattering of copses of mature trees.

Hmmm. Dig a bit deeper. The agro-pastoral tradition celebrated by the plan and the bid is, in reality, ranching sheep in every last corner of the Lakes that isn't a town. Rosy-cheeked farmers are propped up by our tax money, because they make a loss on every sheep they own. But that's OK, because it's cultural heritage, right? Well, no doubt that hill farming has a long history in the Lakes - but so too does mining, quarrying, coppicing and even planting larch blocks. And they're not celebrated, and certainly not continued at public expense; perhaps they don't have as good links to the Conservative government as agricultural and land-owning lobbyists.

Well, OK, but we need sheep for nature conservation right? Maintaining vital semi-natural habitats? Wrong - that same old argument gets trotted out time after time, not only by National Park Authorities but also by those utterly unbiased landowner organisations like the Countryside Alliance. But it's a fallacy - biodiversity in the Lakes has fallen, water quality deteriorated, soils destroyed, habitats degraded. Why are there so many mature, lovely trees, but no young ones growing to replace them? Anything to do with sheep, perhaps?

Dig deeper into that management plan, find the stats buried under picture after picture of Herdwick sheep, and they paint a different picture. That 'natural' beauty? Completely unnatural. Have a walk up Loughrigg in spring and see the woodland wild flowers clinging on in what is now grazed common - it tells you all you need to know about the natural ecosystem that should be there. The "wealth of wildlife" lacks any predator bigger than a fox (and even they get shot), let alone creatures like pine martens, hen harriers, polecats, and even now golden eagles.

So it's back to the cultural heritage argument; it's worth subsidising a loss-making industry causing huge ecological problems because of our rosy-cheeked guardians of the countryside. But I see little shepherding out there in the Lakes, few hay meadows or mixed farming systems; I see bright-green, over-fertilised fields, farmers doing the bare minimum they can whilst claiming subsidy for every last square-metre, sheep chucked out on hills all year round. 

The fact that this bid exists is laughable; the fact it may become reality is frightening, legitimising continued, unprofitable, damaging sheep everywhere, as far as the eye can see. Paranoia? As the Federation of Cumbria Commoners said, WHS status would give hill farming "a powerful weapon" to fight for its continuation, whilst the Lakes floods again and again, woodlands become moribund and disappear, and wildlife in what is still technically an IUCN protected area remains a shadow of what it could be. Protected areas that should protect natural ecosystems, not areas where the land is completely managed by a non-native and arguably invasive woolly species and where little if any land is left to follow natural dynamics.

Ironically, the third "outstanding universal value" of the Lakes is the conservation movement that started with Wordsworth and Ruskin, fighting to protect what they perceived as a natural and wild landscape from industrial threats. Let's celebrate that conservation movement now... Oh, hang on, it's villified for buying land to farm more sensitively, for trying to re-naturalise rivers, for trying some form of land management other than sheep farming. What about industrial threats to the Lake District today? Well, come Monday we may be internationally celebrating the biggest one there is - sheep farming.

An otter... against the odds

Tonight, at the usual spot, I finally saw the otters I'd been told about.

Sitting on a silty 'beach' by the river, enjoying the peace, the birdsong, the absence of people, the occasional splash of a fish on the water. I was aware of, but not particularly expectant from, some splashing in the water. Seeing a lonely swallow flying earlier had heightened a sense of... I don't know really. It was kind of melancholic in a way.

Turns out that, having told myself it wouldn't be, the splashing was actually an otter. Or a pair of them, which proceeded to tumble their way across the far bank of the river in front of me over the next ten minutes or so. Otters are something magical, slightly other worldly, elusive; it feels like a privilege to see them, as if they are letting their guard down and inviting you to watch their secret show. I was scared to move so stood, rooted to the spot, as they constantly dove in one beautiful motion, with the back arching as they ducked and the tail slipping in after. At one point one of the pair half-climbed the bank as if exploring the land, whiskers glinting in the evening sun.

For some reason I felt tears in my eyes and my pulse quickening. In some respects, this was euphoria at seeing such wonderful creatures in what was already a peaceful, strangely 'real' evening after a day at a desk. A roe deer or two grazing the rough grass behind the otters added to the effect. But after thinking a lot recently about a wilder national park, one where nature comes first or at least equal, it also felt saddening watching the otters. I imagined the otter hounds that not long ago chased these beautiful beings, and why? Because humans seem unable to co-exist with anything moderately large. I thought about the pesticides, chemicals and litter that were no doubt in the river they swam in, simply because of greed, ignorance and selfishness. They seemed to me lonely, beautiful and enchanting yes, but only parts of what once was, a fully functioning, natural, wild ecosystem now stripped down and malfunctioning because of us.

Another roe deer, a young buck, watched me warily walk past on the way home. It's undeniable that they're handsome, with trembling eyes and smart antlers, but the pessimist in me saw even further evidence of what we've lost in the three nonchalant, quite unperturbed deer sharing the fields, safe in the knowledge we've removed all their predators.