When I go for a walk on Exmoor, I often think of Guy Shrubsole. Guy, you see, has decided that the woods of the West Country, specifically Exmoor and Dartmoor, are examples of ‘lost rainforest’, and that he is the knight in well-waxed Barbour sent to save them. Every time I feel the familiar drip of water from the epiphytic ferns on a mossy oak trunk running down my neck, or the clinging touch of lichen against my ear, I shiver in the expectation of a new wave of ecological destruction; an ancient crosscut-saw powered by the push-and-pull of ignorance and ideology.
During the pandemic, Guy moved from south London to south Devon, and has taken up various new projects. One is to redefine the acid deciduous wet woodland of Britain as temperate rainforest and to encourage people to map it online as part of his Lost Rainforests of Britain project.
It’s no exaggeration to say that mapping is one of the first actions of a colonial power, from the Jesuit cartography of the Americas to the early consolidation of British power via the Survey of India. Mapping implies power, and directs rule-making from afar by those who are not directly living on the land. By encouraging those who have come across polypody ferns to register areas of woodland online, Guy harnesses volunteers to produce data on his own terms. He is now using it to apply pressure to the government to restructure agricultural payments (formerly £2.4 billion each year) post-Brexit, in the direction he thinks best. ‘Without knowing where Britain’s remaining rainforests actually are, how can we expect landowners and the government to protect and restore them?’ he asks.
He’s asking the wrong question, because landowners, tenant farmers, botanists, ecologists and even the government do know about these places, they just call them copses, covers, coverts, wet woodland, wet acidic woodland, coetir, coille, Atlantic or hanging or ancient woodland. They don’t tend to call them rainforests, which are characterised by a closed or continuous high canopy, because these woodlands are often remnants of coppiced or pollard woodland or have an indigenous name which describes their endless variety. In his new book, Guy tells us that ‘a temperate rainforest is a wood where it’s wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants’, which as definitions go is as loose as the relationship between cyanobacteria and fungi in a lichen; it would cover all the woodland of Britain, from the magnificent oaks of Bishop Auckland to the chestnut coppice of the Weald.
It’s a definition that he later backtracks on, taking the life-long work of Oliver Rackham and others (who discerned the remnants of ancient woodland over painstaking years of rheumatic fieldwork), and then drawing a line down the country over the isohyets of the Pennines so that ‘Lost Rainforests’ are found with cookie-cutter cuteness around the sheep-grazed uplands of Devon, Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District and Western Scotland. These happen to be some of the least populated areas of Britain, where investment in education and infrastructure is low. They’re also some of the areas of the UK which have the highest level of environmental protection and National Parks areas where much of Britain (including Guy, we learn) heads for summer holidays. ‘We’re so unfamiliar with these enchanting places, we’ve forgotten they exist,’ says Guy in the first chapter. It’s a revealing sentence which sums up the problem with his project. He has landed in a place he doesn’t know or understand, and so he sees it as an empty land, a land full of promise where the few ill-educated inhabitants don’t recognise what they have, and so manage it badly. Sound familiar?
I will skate over the clichés which Guy stuffs his text with (trout ‘lurk in the depths’, sows ‘amicably nose up against wellington boots’, leaves ‘glow luminescent green in the afternoon sun’, ecologists – if men – are ‘true sages of the woods’ which come in ‘majestic swathes’) and come to the nub of the matter. Guy, understanding that white men can no longer simply go and Save the Rainforests, is looking for the nearest soft target in which to set his campaigner teeth, and has found the land of the Romantic poets, the Wild West, where the Atlantic winds ruffle the beards of the lichens, and the dipper warbles its way up a babbling brook. So while Guy intends to listen to people like Dafydd Morris-Jones – a sheep farmer in Wales who says that ‘My concern with rewilding is that it takes the people out’ – he is happier hanging out in his small echo-chamber of friends.
I worked with Guy on the England Tree Strategy, and he is first and foremost an activist; the palatable sort of activist who has a foot in both camps. He’s young, urban, privileged, white and fundamentally conservative in his views, responsive on email, present at in-person consultations in London, and charming when he wants your data. But unlike the authorities and botanists he quotes (prioritising those who look like wizards and have beards), he is a storyteller first and an observer second, who goes in with a fixed idea of what he wants. For Defra in 2021, this worked. Lacking political direction, and with environmentalism pressing at them from different angles, it was easy for them to take Guy’s upbeat certainty for scientific proof. As a result, his catchphrases have made their way into government strategies. The real problem with redefinition, mapping and half-truths is that they feed into policy and shift the ground under the feet of people who live off and care for the land.
Guy argues that the future of the Lake District lies with farmers ‘fetching a premium for grass-fed beef rather than loss-making mutton, and supplementing incomes with revenues from eco-tourism.’ This jolly sketch was constructed partly by Sir Dieter Helm, another respected policy maker, who also recently moved to Exmoor from Oxfordshire and laments its degraded appearance. Sir Dieter is an economist in Oxford, who from 2012-2020 headed up an advisory board to the government called the Natural Capital Committee. This committee, and Sir Dieter’s book, proposed that large amounts of ‘marginal’ farmland in the UK should be rewilded and that farm payments post-Brexit should be based on a principle of ‘public money for public good’ supplemented by eco-tourism. By fits and starts this is moving into mainstream policy, but although tourism has been remarkably successful on 3,500 acres of poor clay soil at Knepp Estate, one and a half hours from London, it is less likely to offer a sustainable income stream to the farmers who farm sheep on Exmoor.
