English Pastoral: An inheritance, by James Rebanks

Author: James Rebanks. Review by Simon Webb

All the churches are now talking about the environment, but how many of us can talk about it with real authority? To have a comprehensive idea of what’s happening, one needs knowledge in a variety of fields: chemistry, botany, economics, even astronomy and palaeontology.

One of the strengths of this book is that the author sticks to what he knows. The son of struggling Cumbrian hill-farmers, James helped out on the family farm from an early age. As a boy, he also spent a lot of time on his grandfather’s rather old-fashioned farm.
This compulsively readable book brings home to the reader just how much farming has changed. Rebanks witnessed the introduction of modern techniques and has seen extreme versions of these approaches in Australia and the US. Highly reliant on artificial chemicals, some of these modern ways are unsustainable because they poison the soil and produce stressed, unhealthy livestock. They are also disastrous for the environment in general.

Rebanks’ disquiet about this state of affairs does not come out of some romantic sense that fields should not be factories, or that the countryside should look like a painting by Constable. He has seen how intensive farming drives out wildlife, de-skills the rural workforce and reduces the numbers of people working on the land. He also gives a depressing account of the lives of animals caught up in this system – bred for productivity, heavily dosed with medicines, and sometimes as disconnected from the soil as a contractor driving a giant combine.

The book is clear that farmers have not embraced these ruinous practices out of greed. Squeezed by falling prices, they have had to become more specialised and ‘productive’ just to break even and stay in business. Rebanks shows that this is not just unsustainable in ecological terms: the bank accounts of many of these farmers are as unhealthy as their cattle and their soil. 

The current set-up is justified by what Rebanks calls ‘the cult of cheap food’. Who would deny hard-up people the opportunity to buy cheap mince? It’s a tough question, but it isn’t the only one. We might also ask, who would deny their grandchildren the opportunity to live in a house that isn’t flooded every year, or the chance to see landscapes that are not sterile prairie wastelands? Rebanks doesn’t even mention how cheap food might be related to food waste, or obesity.

Now living with his own family on his grandfather’s farm, Rebanks is trying to turn back the clock. He has filled in an old drainage system to allow more water to hang around on his land. If more farmers did this, floods that come with global warming would be mitigated.

One farm reaching for sustainability cannot solve all of our environmental problems, but Rebanks’ book gives his experiment an added significance. In the words of an old Beatles song, ‘We’re all doing what we can’. This is what Rebanks can do, and what he knows how to do.

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