Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside

by Dieter Helm

William Collins, £20

Review by Brian Morton

“Imagine bright colourful hay meadows, full of wild flowers, birdsong and butterflies. . . . Imagine the sounds of uplands, of golden plovers and curlews . . . “ Ah! Publishing gold. We love this kind of thing at the moment. Anything that evokes an idyllic rural past, pre-monoculture and factory farming, a world innocent of glyphosate and neonicotinoids, a way of life that is either slipping away apocalyptically fast or else still just precariously within reach. We sense from the subtitle that the latter is Dieter Helm’s belief, but then our eyes slide back to “blueprint” and “prosperous” and narrow in suspicion. For this isn’t one of those dull Cider With Rosie retreads that fill the bookshop shelves. This is a tough-minded and eminently practical plan for the recovery of our natural capital (we might flinch at that word, too) and the protection of our renewables.

Dieter Helm is not a naturalist, nor even a conservationist. He is professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford and independent chair of the Natural Capital Committee. As an exponent of the dismal science, we might expect a certain dearth of poetry from him, but he also remembers the rural Essex of his childhood with an unmistakable fondness, so it isn’t all econometrics and Malthusian projections. What it is, and this is what might put off more casual readers of nature books, is a genuine plan, a policy “green paper” that might just make the Britain of 2050 a success story (in both fiscal and aesthetic terms) instead of a waste land. No better month to read it than the one that is supposed to signal our largest constitutional change since Scottish devolution.

Helm comes up with some disturbing figures. Given how marginal and how subsidy-dependent farming now is, it is perfectly possible that the net worth of British agriculture is zero, or, if other hidden costs are factored, in negative numbers. That is considerably more disturbing than the food miles on an avocado or winter strawberries. By 2050, the country should have a highly integrated telecommunications system and a railway network that answers our actual, rather than Victorian, demographic needs. Even so, the cost benefit of the latter will be so small in reality that the expenditure still remains questionable. If only a proportion of it were to be redirected into the preservation of natural capital, the commonweal of safe and naturally self-regulating river systems, healthy uplands, and unpolluted coastlines, the country and its human economy could be transformed.

One of Helm’s major practical proposals is a simple and logical one: the polluters should pay for their pollution, instead of being subsidised further. When last year Farmers Weekly ran a listicle on the most important advances in arable farming since the 1960s the catwalk shortlist was: glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world; self-propelled sprayers, which offer “high capacity” spraying; azole fungicides; oilseed rape, combined with “huge subsidies”; GM crops; and a voluntary initiative on pesticide use, an unpoliceable tactic to head off a pesticide tax. Of this list, all but GM (which hasn’t yet made much impact) have made a direct contribution to the decline of natural habitats and species in the countryside.

Helm’s approach begins, quite naturally, with the rivers, which are now artificially restrained instead of autonomous networks of meanders, oxbows and flood meadows and plains. These last are so called for a reason. They are meant to flood. Allowing pustular blocks of “executive housing” to emerge on them and then whining because carpets are ruined is a bit perverse. Expecting the public purse to hold the rivers back yet further is bordering on the criminally stupid. Instead of a Prince Charles view of housing evolution, which speaks more of the heir’s attachment to a vanished past than of any realism, Helm recommends high-density urban accommodation, with the countryside preserved for leisure and refreshment. This cuts private transport emissions and leaves open the possibility of green corridors for the natural movement of wildlife. As Helm says, even apparently well-intentioned initiatives like the practice of not mowing field borders do not work. They create environments no more natural than the space gardens in Silent Running, spots of green surrounded by emptiness, and they have the perverse effect of putting predators and their prey species in the same narrow corridors.

We used to laugh at New Zealand for having more people than sheep, but even in our relatively crowded islands there are 25 million of the blighters (sheep, not New Zealanders), which makes no economic sense at all and is destroying the upland ecology at an accelerating rate. We also release some 45 million pheasants and other game birds into the landscape, stupid, greedy creatures who when they aren’t eating the insects and seeds required by native birds are throwing themselves in front of cars. Those that survive are shot – or more often wounded – by stupid, greedy creatures down from the City for a bit of “sport”. The pricked birds, and the shot they contain, are then eaten by scavengers and the lead, tonnes of it annually, goes into the food chain. We have too many crows and buzzards, and as a result of other factors, far too many deer. Farmers in Kintyre are currently bleating about a proposal to reintroduce lynx into the peninsula, arguing that the cats will favour slow-moving sheep over deer. There is, of course, an obvious retort.

Helm gets his facts right for the most part, but now and again he leans on skewed headlines and cliches rather than actual research. When looking at the viability of British agriculture, he repeats the sad statistic that the average age of a farmer is now 60. This is misleading. While the majority of farm deeds may well be held by an older generation, one often finds that the actual farming is being done by sons and daughters, who may only be in their 20s and 30s. Whether they remain on the land long enough to turn 60 themselves is another matter. Helm makes other questionable statements, as when he says that hen harriers in Britain are down to a “few pairs”. This is probably the case in much of England, but there are a few pairs active and visible within five miles of my house; the reason, perhaps, is the local disappearance of that other persecuted species and the harrier’s traditional enemy, the gamekeeper. He also trots out the familiar factoid about nowhere in Britain being more than 50 miles from the sea, forgetting that while while some inland areas offer fast access to open waters, in others the infrastructure is so unhelpful the distance might as well be twice that.

But these are quibbles and shouldn’t be allowed, any more than a preference for more romantic approaches should be allowed, to get in the way of serious attention to Helm’s plan. He is too much of a realist to recommend wholesale “rewilding” and too wise to fall into the trap of believing that there is a square inch of the British Isles, perhaps a few uninviting mountaintops and uninhabited skerries, that represent true “wildnerness”. We live in a thoroughly man-managed environment, and at the moment we are making a royal mess of managing it. It will take government and large landowners (including some royal ones, so the adjective isn’t entirely empty of meaning) to effect a change. Local and small-scale initiative is welcome and should be examined by the policy-makers. If economics is the only game in town (whether the town in London or Edinburgh) then there is an overwhelming economic argument in favour of Helm’s blueprint. It’s possible to view the landscape with steely pragmatism and still deliver something close to the idyll he sets out in his opening chapter “The Prize”. In fact, it may only be possible to save our natural capital by treating it as if it were any other kind of investment. Futures used to be a big draw for the money boys. These days, they ought to be putting their money into the future.