In case he somehow manages to stick with it for long enough to actually do some of the things he’s promised it is worth asking a few hard questions about whether those policies will actually work.
One of his most promising proposals has been the announcement of a major reforestation project for the uplands of Britain. On every level there are benefits from restoring tree cover. It helps climate change. It controls flooding. It improves biodiversity. It reduces soil erosion. It can also make walking the landscape a more interesting and varied experience and can attract sustainable tourism jobs to parts of the country that badly need them.
Yet, as with everything to do with the countryside, it may not be quite that simple. Past experience of major government tree planting programmes has not been good. Large monoculture plantations of fir trees are some of the least popular landscapes around. Underneath the dense cover little light reaches the ground and there is little pleasure to be derived from trudging past endless rows of the same trees. Wildlife is at a minimum whilst the trees are there and the scars on the land that are left after they are cropped are horrible sights.
So there is a faction that argues that the best way of restoring landscapes is natural succession. You simply remove grazing animals, do nothing and wait for seeds to germinate and mother nature will restore a natural balance. There are areas of land close to healthy woodlands where this sort of approach can work very well. There are plenty of other areas where it won’t.
Blind faith in the power of nature to heal itself is exactly that. Blind faith not sound environmental science. Sometimes, I would say oftentimes, humans can do so much damage to a landscape or an environment that nature can’t simply restore itself to health without a lot of help. There is an area of land near me which is an ex lead mine. Hundreds of years since the spoil heaps were created nothing grows on most of them because arsenic and lead eventually kills off any plants that manage to get a foothold in loose washed out mining waste.
Most of the open moorlands in the north of England have been stripped of tree cover steadily for over two thousand years. Much of it went in the iron age. The Romans got rid of some more. Then there was a phase just before the Black Death when a lot more went. Finally, much of what little was left went with the enclosures and the relentless nibbling of sheep.
Once land has been without tree cover for so very long there are large parts of the uplands where the soil is leached out acid and it is really hard to get a tree established. It isn’t enough to simply prevent saplings from being eaten by deer. Young trees in such places need help to make the soil less acidic.
Even where trees will naturally re-generate from dormant seed the kind of trees that grow up doesn’t bear much resemblance to what was naturally there a couple of thousand years ago. Then we had a landscape of low scrubby trees of great variety including hawthorn, hazel, ash, and sloe. What often comes back when land is left to its own devices are a lot of birch trees.
As it happens I am very fond of birch trees. But you can have too much of a good thing. They come up like weeds quickly and once they are covering the ground it takes another hundred years or so before there is much chance for slower growing species to start to re-occupy areas where they fall in storms. Given great patience and consistent determination over many generations of government policy a healthy natural landscape will emerge. It is also just possible that we could leave future generations something more vibrant rather more rapidly. Regardless of whether those future generations are humans, trees, birds, or fungi.
I therefore think we need to be consciously planning what we plant. If Michael Gove is going to drive forward the planting of several million new trees then we need to plant the right ones.
In my view that means thinking not just about establishing a rich and varied natural environment. It also means finding ways to make an environment that is as varied and natural as possible to also be as productive as possible. We need our land to produce some food as well as to foster wildlife. It is simply morally wrong to suggest that large chunks of damaged land in Britain should be set aside to gradually restore themselves to health and not play any part in feeding people. That would be asking other parts of the world to farm land to feed us whilst we turn our land into playgrounds.
Michael Gove is already encountering resistance from farmers who want to know what value their land will be after the trees are planted on it and how they make a living. At the moment the answer seems to be that the government will pay landowners for the public good of turning their sheep grazing land into forests. That is highly unstable and unsustainable policy. If leaves farmers living off subsidy instead of their land and it leaves landscapes vulnerable to a future removal of those subsidies. There is a high risk that the woodland areas will go as soon as the subsidies do.
The alternative is to encourage farmers to plant varieties of trees that can sustain both wildlife and an income from the land and to adopt woodland farming practices that produce food. For example, including significant amounts of hazel in a mixed planting helps to produce a valuable foodstuff that is both attractive to humans and to wildlife. Apple, pear, cherry and walnut trees may not all have been present in the woodlands that existed 2,000 years ago but they could be an important part of the mix in a woodland landscape that produces food as well as wildlife. Letting cattle roam amongst a more open forest of productive trees might very well enable farmers to produce more food from tree covered land than they currently get from sheep on bare moorland. Such a planned forest landscape could also produce a mixed and vibrant community of wildlife much more rapidly and effectively than random chance. One of the richest areas of wildlife in the Dales is a mixed woodland area close to Austwick where cattle graze. Much of it was replanted a couple of hundred years ago but looks and feels like it has belonged there for ever.
Put simply what I am arguing for is that the farming community and the environmental community come together to work out a way that subsidies can be used to make land both productive and environmentally rich. It is a poor lookout if environmental campaigners and those who try to earn a living off the land can’t find commonality of interest in this. Both want land of high quality to be passed on to the next generation and both want to see what happens in our upland farms to be sustainable for the long term. We need to get better at working together to achieve that.