ConClusion: naTure, hisTory and C onservaTion^191would be hard indeed to oppose the uncontrolled eruption of housing and
industrial development across ordinary farmland on grounds of biodiversity.
In spite of the popular impression that England is becoming very rapidly
urbanized, according to some estimates more agricultural land has been
planted up as woodland of varying kinds in the last 25 years, than has been
built over.^36 But there is a serious shortage of homes in this country, and
strong pressure from some political quarters to allow a resumption of the
kind of low-density uncontrolled sprawl which was slowed by the planning
reforms of the post-war years. On the other hand, the disarticulation of the
‘rural’ from the ‘natural’ might serve to emphasize the specifically cultural
importance of traditional landscapes, bringing to the fore quite different
reasons for their preservation. The countryside, apart from producing food,
is simply different from the town, fulfilling a very real need for space and
solitude, peace and quiet, away from the endless noise and activity of the
‘24/7’ culture: it can provide that sense of apartness captured so well in
the writings of Robert Macfarlane.^37 It contains innumerable traces of –
constitutes vital evidence for the study of – our past, our history. And it
is firmly embedded in all aspects of our culture: in our literature, in our
art. People do not visit Dedham Vale primarily to see the flora and fauna,
but because Constable painted the landscape there, Lombardy poplars and
all. And on top of all this, of course, the countryside – parts of it at least
- remains home to a range of plants and animals which will never, ever be
able to establish themselves in towns and suburbs.
Whether in the town or in the country our flora and fauna exist and have
long existed within an almost completely man-made world. In the 1990s
a number of people – strongly influenced by Frans Vera’s ideas, and at a
time when it appeared that there was serious agricultural over-production in
Europe – advocated that large areas should be ‘re-wilded’, returned in effect to
the dynamic, grazed savannas which supposedly existed in Mesolithic times.
We should, it was argued – and still is by some – try to create extensive areas
where ‘natural processes get the chance to evolve’, in place of the essentially
cultural landscapes in which nature currently exists, its various forms shaped
by human management.^38 Quite how any of this would ever work in practice
has always been unclear – what animals would have done the work of auroch
and how they would have been fenced in are never clearly explained. But
more serious are the broader philosophical issues raised by such a policy.
What exactly would we be creating, and how ‘natural’ would it be? A few
ecologists pine for a time ‘before humans messed up the ecosystem’, but
even if we could kill everybody off our ‘original’ landscape, whatever that
may have been like, could never return. As Peterken has noted, the pre-
Neolithic vegetation of England – in its condition of ‘original-naturalness’,
‘before people became a significant ecological factor’, was different from
what it would be in a state of ‘present-naturalness’, defined as the ‘state
that would prevail now if people had not become a significant ecological
actor’, simply because of climatic changes and of other entirely natural