The Caledonian forest, one of the largest and oldest forests in the UK, is dying.
By Greta Santagata
Its expanse is broken up, damaged by tree felling, fire and intensive grazing by sheep and deer. The introduction of non-native species of conifers and ploughing has reduced what was once one of the largest primeval forests in the UK into little more than 1% of its original range, and much of it is in a degraded state.
As new trees are struggling to grow due to overgrazing of the forest floor, the older trees are starting to die out and the forest is losing its ability to regenerate. Walking through it today feels like walking through an old persons house: so many memories, so little hope.
The same is true for most forests in the UK, which now cover just 12% of the territory, making it Europe’s second least-wooded country after Ireland.
For an island that was completely covered in thick closed canopy forest only 6000 years ago (a blink of an eye, in geological terms), the transformation has been radical. Since humans started to settle and domesticate animals, this forested wildlife haven slowly turned into scrub, then from scrub to heath and from heath to the green, flat, boundless deserts of grassy pastures that we know today.
At each one of these stages the number of habitats dwindled, species disappeared and the relationships between them became weaker.
Soil was progressively eroded, biodiversity plummeted and the environment impoverished further.
Today on the overgrazed uplands of Wales there is so little nutrient in the soil than anything can barely grow and very little life is to be seen, other than sheep. Birds have mostly gone, wild flowers, shrubs and trees are no longer growing, and insects are barely present, due to the lack of plant species and the heavy use of insecticides.
From an ecological point of view, the green, rolling hills of Britain, dotted with sheep and cattle, are as ecologically rich as a dusty desert: a dull anthropogenic reality, stripped almost entirely of the diversity of life that resulted from hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Why we need forests and wild spaces more than ever
Forests are barely considered an asset in this country. Paradoxically, you will find more people concerned about the conservation of the Amazon basin than that of the Caledonian forest, or any other UK forest.
But trees, more than ever before, could be incredibly valuable to us.
Not just because the untamed nature and wilderness of a forest provides a place for people to escape the stress of urbanised living and the structured predictability of modern life. But also because forests do a number of extremely useful things for us and it would be silly to not take this into account when clearing the land to build more houses.
Woodlands, to mention one example, can hold large amounts of water in their roots, a bit like sponges, and by releasing it slowly they act like a natural buffer against floods. Trees are also very good at holding soil together, preventing its nutrients from flushing off into rivers, which impoverishes soil and poisons water streams.
Trees are also great at sequestering carbon and locking it into their branches, something we should be concerned about doing more. They also provide habitats to a number of species: from lichens to insects, birds to mammals, all of which make up a healthy, productive and resilient ecosystem.
Given the changing climate and the ever increasing risk of floodings in the UK, it seems incredible that scarcely any effort to replant some of our long lost forests is being made.
Just consider that the cost of floods damage in the UK is currently estimated at £1.1 billion a year and is expected to rise to £27 billion by 2080. This would make it a very sensible choice to invest in reforestation and woodland conservation.
In opposition to this received wisdom, everywhere in the UK huge areas of land are being cleared or, absurdly, actively discouraged from turning back into wild spaces. And the reasons are always the same: it wouldn’t benefit the few who own the land.
Who owns the land and why they oppose reforestation in the UK.
We have to look briefly at the history of land ownership in Britain in order to understand the current situation. For centuries farmers kept cattle and goats in the uplands, and grew cereals, root crops and even hay on the tops of the hills.
From the 17th century onwards, when land started to be enclosed to make its management easier and maximise production, arable land started being turned into pastured, tenants were evicted and large conglomerates of land went under the management of fewer and fewer people. The same thing happened in the clearances of the Scottish Highlands, although in a much more brutal way.
There the land was completely reorganised, devoted mainly to pastoral farming and shooting, thus reducing the need for labour and pushing the sheep in and the people out of their land.
After the two world wars, subsidies further encouraged landowners to devote their uplands exclusively to pasture, and in Wales alone sheep numbers went from 3.9 million to 9.7 million: that is three sheep for every Welshman or woman. Since 1945 sheep have modified and cleared the land: allowed to roam inside woodlands and forests, they are preventing new trees from growing back, have decimated wild flowers and orchids and have turned a diverse upland environment into an ecological desert.
Sheep farms are by far the biggest cause of ecological damage in the UK. They are the biggest reason why habitats are being lost and farmland birds have been plummeting in numbers since the 1970s, leading to the decline of once common species like lapwings (-77%) or curlews (-81%) and the near extinction of the golden plover.
These numbers are an indication of the state of degradation of our uplands and valleys: habitats are disappearing in front of our eyes and ecological death is silently advancing nearly everywhere, to the great of expense of nobody else but us.
Subsidies to implement ecological disaster?
When it comes to spending, there are few areas where people question the use of money less, than when it comes to farming and land use. This is, as George Monbiot eloquently argues, a case of “agricultural hegemony”, where what is good for farmers and landowners is automatically considered to be good for everyone, without much questioning at all.
Furthermore, what most people don’t realise, is that we are paying everyday to perpetuate a system into which billions of pounds are being spent every year to degrade the natural environment and reduce biodiversity, to the advantage of the very few and the expense of the rest of us.
Let’s take Wales as a case study for this, a place that has lost almost of all its forest (forest cover is at 14%, with only 7% of woodland wildlife being stable or increasing), where 90% of its freshwater courses are polluted due to bad land management and its biodiversity has plummeted.
Each farm in Wales receives, on average, £53k of subsidies a year, whereas the net income made by each farm is on average £33k, resulting in a net loss of £20k a year per farm.
Overall, farm subsidies cost the UK £3.6 billion a year, totalling up to £245 per household per year. This would make some sense if at least it guaranteed food security, but Wales actually imports 7 times the amount of meat it exports, showing that perhaps that land isn’t as productive as it could be. And if using public money to subsidise private businesses is already a questionable choice, this is even more true in this period of austerity and cuts to public services.
What’s more absurd is that this money is going towards the destruction of the environment, the depletion of soil and loss of biodiversity.
It’s all written into the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and in The Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition, a European code with an immensely ironic name, which sets the baseline requirements that farmers must meet in order to receive CAP subsidies.
Some of these rules state that nothing should be planted on the land, no wild plants should be allowed to grow, the land must produce absolutely nothing and pasture land must contain less than 50 trees. In other words, nothing but sheep is allowed to roam, grow or breathe over these desolate pastures.
Trees, which retain water, sequester carbon and offer a habitat for many insects and birds are banned. Hedgerows, which are vital for preserving soil and preventing nutrients from leaking into rivers and killing all freshwater wildlife, must be limited. Flowers, orchids and different types of vegetation, which would benefit a number of insects including our precious and much endangered bees, are not allowed to exist.
Pastures, all around the EU, have been disqualified from receiving subsidies because of being too welcoming for wildlife, including Scandinavian wooden meadows or the century old Spanish Dehesa.
This also happened in Scotland, where the presence of yellow flag Irises has prevented land from being subsidised or in Northern Ireland, where the government was fined for granting subsidies to farmland with hedgerows wider than 2 metres, or in Bulgaria where an inspector found a single stem of wild rose in a meadow and rejected the farmer’s claim for support.
This has obviously encouraged farmers, all over Europe, to chop down ancient trees, destroy reedbeds or extirpate wildflowers in order to receive the money. In essence, they have been paid with taxpayers money to implement ecological disaster.
So who benefits from these subsidies?
On the one hand you have a constant increase in the cost of farming (CAP has been increasing the cost of feed, machinery and chemicals) pushing small farmers out of business and making it nearly impossible for new farmers to establish themselves.
On the other hand, there are small farmers who graze their stock on semi-natural rough pastures getting their payments cut off. You can easily see how the result of this is to concentrate the larger subsidies on the most intensively farmed lands whilst taking them away from the smaller businesses. So much so, that the National Farmers Union reported that “21% of upland farms are not expected to continue beyond the next five years.” This is therefore a manoeuvre that is intended to benefit the very few and very rich landowners who own most of the territory, causing huge environmental damage and leaving everyone else to pay for the consequential ecological cost of this.
The irony, or madness I should say, of the CAP policy is the fact that there are other subsidies put in place to encourage exactly the opposite: preserving nature and increasing biodiversity. However, these are far less generous and often end up encouraging farmers to destroy and rebuild in order to make a greater profit, whilst offering very little help to the environment.
Breaking free: repossessing the land and sustainable farming
Whether the CAP policies were created to benefit a specific minority of people or they are the result of short sighted decisions based on inaccurate information, we cannot know. But people across the whole of the UK have been responding to the need for more traditional and sustainable farming methods, for healthier and larger forests and for a more equitable distribution of the land.
In recent years, across all Europe, the number of farms employing traditional methods to raise livestock on natural pastures has been slowly increasing. The key is to preserve a mosaic of environments on the land, including shrubs and trees, upon which stock is raised. This allows for both a healthier and more varied forage, a reduced dependence on fossil fuels and feeds and a number of different habitats for other wildlife. Places like Village Farm in Devon, orCourtyard Farm in Norfolk are models of how sustainability, food production and quality can all emerge from the same land.
At the same time, the political need for reform has been surfacing.
The recent proposal for Land Reform in Scotland aims to rock the powerful landed gentry and move towards a system in which land is used in the best interest of the Scottish people.
More specifically, it looks at how the land is owned, occupied, taxed and inherited, targeting things such as the peculiar tax exemption that gamekeepers and deer stalking estates have been receiving, courtesy of John Major’s government, since 1994. This exemption, which means that the elite landowners shouldn’t be burdened with the expense of paying business tax like everyone else for rearing animals in an intensive and destructive way, exemplifies the kind of protection they receive and how their powers and influence still persists.
And what about the Caledonian forests then, the remnants of what once was the green lungs of the United Kingdom?
The charity Trees for Life have been operating since 2008 and their mission is to restore this ancient forest by planting trees, reintroducing missing key species and fencing off large areas of land from the destructive presence of sheep and deer.
They have already planted over a million native trees and they plan to reach two millions by 2018. Trees for Life might also benefit from the Scottish land reform, which allows community groups to force the sale of privately owned land when owners stand in the way of “sustainable development”.
So although it may take time to shift the current system, it is positive to see that land use and ownership is being looked at and that community buy-outs of land, which could be put to better long term use for nature and society, are becoming not just possible but highly probable. After all, as journalist George Monbiot once wrote, restoration is a work of hope.
