Embracing nature to restore our wild places

ENGLAND is known as a green and pleasant land, but in my opinion the affection that gave rise to the term has somewhat blinded us to the truth behind a pleasant façade.

- By ERIN McDAID

Much of our countryside is indeed green and pleasant on the eye, but the stark reality is that much of our landscape is as lifeless as a bucolic scene in a painting or photograph.

Where wildflower meadows were once bright with colour and buzzing with birds and insect life, we have hectare upon hectare of mono-culture grass fields producing fodder to be packed into what look like over-sized black bin bags to provide food for animals that may spend many months housed indoors.

Modern grazing systems may be more productive in terms of meat and milk and return tidy profits for supermarkets, but these profits come at a price. The shift away from the traditional grazing approach that created a wonderful patchwork of flower-filled fields surrounded by dense hedgerows havens for species from dunnocks to hedgehogs, has left our landscape much the poorer.

As we seek to restore our damaged landscape and put threatened species on the road to recovery, learning from the past and working with nature is often the solution.