There is a middle way

Land use doesn't have to be all or nothing; we need to be more pragmatic and less proscriptive

- Land use doesn't have to be all or nothing; we need to be more pragmatic and less proscriptive

WE are past the peak of environment hysteria.’ This might sound like a Conservative politician today, but it’s a land agent quoted in Farmers Weekly in 1973. I’d gone through my old farming magazines because we appear unable to hold a discussion about land management without using the prefix ‘re-’: re-store; re-cover; re-generate; re-wild—all as part of our great post-Brexit re-form package. It suggests that we’re trying to regain the past, which strikes me as an ambition to follow carefully.

By all means learn from previous causes and effects, but the past can bask in a sunlit glow. That’s why I enjoy reading old contemporary writing, for real-time reactions, hopes and fears. I wanted to know what language, if any, was used to discuss environmental issues in the year we joined the Common Market.

Among such perennial headlines as ‘Government is taking risks with country’s food’ and ‘Kill off badgers to halt spread of TB’, finally an article called farmers to ‘Take the lead on land use’. The aforementioned agent argued that ‘there are two primary land uses, farming and forestry’ and that ‘if these two uses were integrated, then secondary uses such as recreations and tourism would fall into place’.