C-wrecked: agrarian transition as politics, Part 2

The end of my last post left a few threads hanging, not least a promise to say something about Carwyn Graves’s wonderful book, Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape (2024, Calon). But let me approach obliquely from a more personal angle.

Sometimes I make the mistake of reading negative online comments about my writing. A comment I read under a YouTube interview I did a while ago went something along the lines of “what Smaje didn’t mention is that he keeps sheep, which have a brutal ecological impact”.

Now, it’s true that for about six of the twenty years I’ve worked these 18 acres, I’ve kept sheep – currently to the tune of three breeding ewes. I concede that sheep can have a brutal ecological impact, but I don’t think they especially have done in our case. Indeed, we recently had a visit from an avowedly sheep-hating professional ecologist who was in raptures about the ecological riches of our holding.

In other words, the answer to the question of whether sheep have a brutal ecological impact is, as to many other ecological questions, “it depends” (I’m not going to get into the issue here of whether sheep have a brutal climate impact, but I think the answers lie somewhere on the continuum between ‘it depends’ and ‘no’).

Unfortunately, far too much public debate about farming and ecology involves recycling over-generalised nostrums of this sort about what’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at a global level. Increasingly, not only sheep or livestock farming (on which note, Cat Frampton’s impassioned critique of DEFRA’s latest on scrub creation is worth a read), but farming in its entirety gets banished to the naughty step in this way. I even heard a young man in an interview recently stating “Farming needs to stop. It’s the single biggest driver of climate change”. I can’t honestly blame him for this confusion given the journalistic narratives that are swirling around these days, but we somehow need to raise the level of the discussion.

Into this dismal world, Carwyn’s book Tir enters like a breath of fresh air. I can’t even begin to convey the riches of the book or the astonishing amount of complexity Carwyn somehow manages to cram into its few pages – perhaps I’ll write a lengthier appreciation another time – but the book is an invitation into a different way of seeing. Not an overgeneralized screed about the evils of farming or human impacts worldwide, but a close look at the intertwined culture history and landscape history of a place, or in fact a set of places, enabling a long and local view of how their human and more-than-human ecologies have played out in the past, and may play out in the future.

The place(s) in question, of course, is Wales, which has been in the frontline of the ‘rewilding’ and anti-livestock media wars in Britain. These have centred on upland sheep farming, which is so often indicted for its inherently brutal ecological – well, you get the picture.

Carwyn navigates this issue skilfully in his book. For one thing, he de-centres sheep in Welsh agricultural history, uncovering a more varied past that included arable farming and mixed farming using cattle more than sheep, as well as smallholding and orcharding. At the same time, he doesn’t ignore the sheep issue or dodge its impact – but the long historical view he takes is informative.

People were resident in what’s now Wales, he points out, almost as soon as the Ice Age loosened its grip. There never was an unpeopled wilderness of ‘self-willed’ nature there, but instead a deep history of upland open grazing stretching back into the Neolithic, with sheep in evidence over the last 6,000 years. Carwyn readily identifies the problems caused by sheep in the uplands today, but these are problems caused by 20^th century government policies familiar from agricultural ‘improvement’ worldwide – an emphasis on increased productivity of the few crops where there’s local comparative advantage, increased high-energy inputs, increased global market connection, increased farm size, decreased labour inputs and decreased agricultural and natural diversity.

And so we come to the present situation – overstocked monocultural upland sheep farms clinging to financial viability via government subsidies in the face of desperate global commodity prices, and the argument that it would therefore be better to ‘rewild’ them.

Carwyn points out that the word for culture in Welsh, diwylliant, has a more direct connotation of ‘unwilding’ than its English counterpart, and that Welsh concepts of culture reference a collective endeavour to which everyone contributes. Fundamentally they’re keyed to a knowledge of a richly enculturated and cultivated landscape, which he examines with reference to some of its key terms: cloddiau, cae, ffridd, rhos and perllan among others.

In this context, talk of ‘rewilding’ must sound “very much like ‘killing [a] culture’” (p.12), especially when it’s mouthed by privileged English environmentalists and heard in Welsh-speaking rural communities who didn’t ask for the high input, low food price, subsidy-fuelled agricultural ‘improvement’ that emptied the villages and filled the hills with sheep. Carwyn shows with great subtlety throughout his book how peopled local farmscapes producing diverse food for mostly local consumption can represent a win-win for both local communities and wildlife. The crisis we now face, he says, “stems from our abuse of nature – not our use of it in the first place” (p.187). He estimates that sheep stocking rates of about half current levels could be sustainable in parts of Wales like Ceredigion.

Here’s another parting of the ways from what I’ve heard described as the ‘clearance rewilding’ implied in the thinking of those who bandy around terms like ‘sheepwrecked’, and who believe – as one of my antagonists put it – that “nature does best without us”. I’m with Carwyn in his view that nature can do just fine with us, indeed that ‘doing without us’ is philosophically incoherent and denies the embodiment, animality, fragility and interdependence that I mentioned in my previous post. The alternative to clearance rewilding is what some are calling agri-rewilding, which in many places means choosing farming practices that are closer to those that preceded the yield-obsessed productivism of the postwar years. This doesn’t necessarily produce less food. It may even produce more. But it does produce less food commodities.

And so we come to the title of this post and my previous one. If we can speak of sheepwrecked landscapes, we must also speak of wheatwrecked, soywrecked, avocadowrecked, palmwrecked, coconutwrecked, vinewrecked, cottonwrecked, sprucewrecked and a whole other raft of x-wrecked landscapes. What unites them is food or fibre as commodity, abstracted as cheaply as possible from a local farmed landscape to serve other, mostly urban ones. Commodity-wrecked. C-wrecked. Making too big a deal about the specific commodity in a given place – such as sheep in upland Wales – risks missing the bigger picture of a general overproduction in the global agricultural and wider economy. But if we really want to name the culprits in these wider economies, pride of place would have to go to fossil fuels, cereal grains and grain legumes. Ultimately, it’s these that drive more local form of C-wrecking, including those in upland Wales.

There’s another kind of C-wrecking that Carwyn touches on briefly in his fascinating interview with a mountain shepherd called Erwyd as he discusses the abandoned mountain farmhouses of mid Wales.

It is sometimes lonely now in these places – I can go to them and remember the people who were there, and the voices and the busyness. They had a hard life, that is true, but yet again – they didn’t have the same pressure on them as today, and they had more leisure as well, and certainty, which a lot of people are missing now (p.108)

Certainty. I’ll want to come back to that in future writing. I think Erwyd is right. There’s a wrecked certainty in modernist culture, which it ironically broadcasts in the apparent certainty with which it deprecates the past and romanticises the present and the future.

Finally in relation to Wales, I had an interesting conversation with a farmer in Talgarth when I visited Black Mountains College recently. He said that a lot of farmers in the area were thinking of quitting commercial farming due to the desperate commodity prices and focusing instead on feeding their families and communities (referring back to my previous post, perhaps a straw in the wind for a new phase in the politics of agrarian transition, where the transition to a small farm future starts to fare a little better as farmers quit the global C-system). Other farmers, he told me, were thinking of selling up – at least the ones who had something to sell that wasn’t already owned by the bank.

High among the categories of buyers, he said, were corporations looking at tree-planting for carbon offsets. As per a recent debate on here, now that a certain kind of educated (but not necessarily well-informed) opinion has swung against farming (“farming needs to stop!”), it seems poised to repeat exactly the same mistakes as the earlier phase of agricultural C-wrecking in relation to its new enthusiasm for forestry monocultures devoted to carbon sequestration, to which the lifeless conifer plantations foisted on Welsh farmers in the previous era of landscape ‘improvement’ that Carwyn discusses in his book stand as a sombre warning. Hence, some other forms of C-wrecking to consider – carbon-wrecking, and culture-wrecking of landscapes and people.

All the same, Carwyn is quite upbeat about the future for both farming and wildlife in Wales. The present crisis, he says, is too urgent for us to spend time in large-scale landscape terraforming, but the good news is that the long evolution of small-scale, low-input mixed farming in Wales means that the key building blocks are already in place (pp.168-9).

I wonder how much you can say the same for places that have been more in the thick of colonial-modernist terraforming and the associated cultural remoulding – the soy, corn and wheat-growing areas of the USA, for example, or, well, most of my home country of England, just across the border from Carwyn. One of the criticisms I sometimes get for my vision of a small farm future is that the costs of reconstructing small farm landscapes within existing C-wrecked countrysides is too great. Which I fear could be true, although the costs would undoubtedly be less than persisting with our present C-wrecked urbanism. An interesting aspect of this, replicating the trickle of back-to-the-landers from previous generations, is whether the less ‘productive’ landscapes typical of Wales might be more appealing to the would-be smallholder than, say, the wheatwrecked farmlands of eastern England precisely because they haven’t been terraformed to an anachronistically large-scale, high-energy and monocultural agriculture. As is often the case, renewal may come from the margins.

As I was drafting this piece, I came across a pile of old magazines, one of which contained a scornful review by Jonathan Raban from 2010 of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory. Blond served as David Cameron’s house intellectual around that time as Cameron sought to rebuild the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects after thirteen years of Labour governments. In his review, Raban took special exception to the influence of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton on Blond – Distributist ancestors to part of my own agrarian vision – offering the usual excoriations about their “homesickness for a rural and small-town life that never existed outside their Arcadian dreams of Merrie England”. Distributist ideas like widespread, mortgage-free property ownership might go down well at the pub in the BBC’s rural soap opera The Archers, said Raban, “but what meaning they might have for people on sink estates or in sprawling, ethnically diverse conurbations…is beyond comprehension”.

I’d venture to say that mortgage-free ownership of their own property might go down pretty well with many such people, especially after fourteen years of defiantly non-Red Toryism and grim austerity initiated by David Cameron, who quickly discarded Blond once he became Prime Minister. And so it was with the original Distributists – too conservative to embrace the genuine radicalism of their own vision in which government is generated bottom-up by self-possessed people with the means to make a livelihood, rather than top-down by a state which offers services in return for claiming the ultimate prerogative to rule (I’ll mention another book in passing here – an old one by John Hoffman called Sovereignty – that I read recently by chance and found informative on these points. I hope to say more about it as some point).

Raban is surely right that the Distributism of Belloc and Chesterton can’t serve unaltered as a model for present politics. But I’m wondering if it would be possible to write a book about England – not Merrie England, just England – with similar aspirations to Carwyn’s book about Wales. I think it might be harder to find a unifying thread. But if I were that author – and I’m kind of wondering if I should be – I’d be less dismissive of some of what Belloc and Chesterton had to say. It’s true of course that Merrie England has never existed – and I’m not sure if Belloc and Chesterton really thought it had – but we too easily create another myth of present and future merrie-ness if we set ourselves determinedly against learning any lessons from the past.

A final point, briefly. I’m conscious that all the books I’ve discussed in this post and the last one were written by men. I’ve got quite a pile of female-authored books in the in-tray and hope to make some amends in that respect soon. But more importantly, gender issues in one form or another have been occupying my thoughts lately, not least in relation to agrarian transitions. So I hope to write about that too.

Current reading

Peter Heather & John Rapley Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West

Caroline Lucas Another England