JGF: Your new book – The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside? – continues to question the inequalities of land ownership, which follows on from 2019’s Who Owns England? revealing the devastating statistic that “less than 1% of the population own roughly half of the land in the UK.”
Over time, and under pressure to justify such high levels of private ownership in the UK, landowners have presented themselves as ‘custodians’ and ‘guardians’ who can be trusted to act as ‘good stewards’ without the need to introduce any regulations or interfere with ownership. Can you retrace the historical narrative of ‘stewardship’ back to its roots and explain its current – if fading – power?
GS: A lot of people will hear the word ‘stewardship’ or ‘custodianship’ and think that it sounds like a good idea – to not own something outright, but look after it on behalf of someone else. The etymology of ‘steward’ goes back to the Old English stīweard, meaning the ward or guardian of the household or animals – stig gives us the word (pig) ‘sty’ – on behalf of the lord of the manor. What that essentially conveys is that it’s someone looking after something on behalf of someone else, so it has that sense of only being here temporarily – trying to care for the land, to pass it on in a good state. I do think this is a noble ideal but it's also become the vogue as a narrative frame used by landowners, lobbyists, and business groups as a way of essentially defending the status quo and shielding bad environmental practices from too much scrutiny, and evading government regulations.
In the book, I trace this history back to its origins, but what I also found fascinating was uncovering how the language of stewardship was deliberately revived in the 1970s by groups like the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) and the National Farmers Union (NFU), and how successive NFU presidents have used the phrase ‘custodians of the countryside’ from the 1970s through to today. It's basically a right of passage for NFU presidents to keep parroting this phrase. And it's a phrase that's been picked up by politicians as well. Every time they go to the Oxford Farming Conference, the NFU conference, or CLA conference, they make some reference to landowners being the ‘stewards of the land’, and farmers the ‘custodians of the countryside’. And often, at least under the Conservatives, it was accompanied by a promise not to add to the regulatory burdens of farmers or landowners, but to carry on providing billions of pounds of public money in farm subsidies each year. So essentially, it's a way of deflecting attention away from the degree to which landowners and farmers have control over what they're doing, and hold considerable sway over what they do on the land. And too often it’s prioritising profit, personal gain, and private property rights over protection. Ultimately, the reason for it is to say, 'We want to have our private property rights unaffected by wider public, social and environmental issues’. I’m of the view that private property rights have always been to a certain extent compromised; there has to be a trade-off between the rights of private property owners and the wider common good. But obviously the lobby groups and the big landowners will push forcefully for those constraints to be minimised.
People reading my book may think, ‘I know a nature-friendly farmer’, or ‘I know a landowner who is as good a steward as they can be’. And I cite examples of people like that in the book as well – such as James Rebanks in Cumbria, and Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree rewilding the Knepp estate in Sussex. But again it comes back to the idea that individual actors are going to save us, and that we can put our faith in those heroes, rather than in systemic change. In some ways this has been encouraged by the rewilding movement because the way it's been brought into practice in England at least has very much focused on individual landowners doing heroic things on their own land. In Scotland it’s obviously quite a different narrative, with a challenge to ‘green lairds’, for example, and there has been a big debate about land reform, what land is for, and community land ownership in Scotland, over the last 20 years or so.
In the book you briefly mention Brett Christophers’ research on asset management firms, who have significantly increased their ownership of “essential infrastructure” over the last few decades, as farmland – a “real asset” – is now increasingly owned by pension funds and other large institutional investors. In your history of the “Great Draining” – where saturated marshes were transformed into Britain’s most fertile farmland – you investigate the negative impact of fenland ownership by the Church Commissioners, South Yorkshire Pension Authority, and even a UK holding company that can trace its ownership back to Utah’s Mormon Church.
Does this new type of owner – the institutional investor – present a different kind of problem in terms of reforming land management (compared with more traditional landowners)?
It's an interesting question. I do think it's perhaps more obviously capitalist land ownership than any other. You might say that aristocratic landowners are still quasi-feudal: they are intending to get profit from the land if they can, but they also come from a tradition of passing on the land to the oldest child.
I found the whole story of the Fens fascinating – in the book I cite Imperial Mud by James Boyce, a great account of the draining of the Fens, in the east of England, about 400 years ago. It was done by a very small group of people who today we would call venture capitalists, and in their day, they called themselves ‘the adventurers’, because they were adventuring capital and investment in order to do something that was quite risky at the time – a big engineering project had never been attempted at this scale. (There had been piecemeal drainage of lowland areas of Fens in Britain before that point). There were 13 of these adventurers, led by the Earl of Bedford, who had become a court favourite and been gifted some land by the Crown after the dissolution of the monasteries. So, with the sufficient capital to start this very risky, huge drainage project, they began to cut miles-long drains into the marshes to drain all of the water in the wetland out into the Wash, and thereby reclaim farmland which would be far more profitable because it was producing grains and food that they could own and control the supply of. Previously, the Fens had been used for producing food, but it had been in the form of wildfowl, fish, and eels. Essentially, it was a vast, wet common which people lived in, piloted boats, and caught wild fowl; it was providing food for people, it wasn't that it was a food-free wilderness, but it was a commons, so with the enclosure acts of the time, the adventurers really wanted to get their mitts on this land.
Today, the latter-day stewards of the Fens are institutional investors. It’s profitable because the peat soils are ‘Grade 1’ farmland. That's why you have pension funds invested in them: they’re looking after people’s pension pots and want to make sure it's a safe bet, so they’re investing in things that they think are going to have sure-fire success. I argue that actually this is a very short-sighted investment because the Fens are degrading year on year, and not only are they adding to climate change through releasing carbon dioxide from the drained peat soils, but they are actually losing their fertility and their ability to grow food, so it's really no longer a safe investment for institutional investors. Of course, what they might think is, ‘Quick, let’s get out of here’ and sell up, but then somebody else prepared to take more of a risk will come back in, which is how you get the venture capitalists coming back in, trying to squeeze the last droplets out of the Fens, along with all the carbon.
But what I think is starting to happen, and I hope this continues, is people challenging the activities of some of the institutional investors – Cambridge colleges, the Church Commissioners, and pension funds. There’s been a really vibrant divestment movement in this country in the recent past to try to get pension funds and others to divest from fossil fuels. I think we now need to move to pressuring landowning investors who are destroying natural carbon sinks for profit. The group Wild Card have been running great campaigns to challenge the royal family on how they use their land and trying to get them to rewild more of their estates, and now they're turning their attention to the Church Commissioners. Recently, they launched their campaign outside St Paul's Cathedral with Chris Packham, which got quite a lot of press. In my book I’m keen to highlight campaign groups that already exist and are doing things about land and nature, and I think Wild Card is a great example.
In some ways, these organisations are more vulnerable to public pressure than the aristocratic landowners. Some of them have put out statements saying we're going to get to net zero by 2030, which is something that the South Yorkshire Pension Fund is signed up to. Okay, so what are you doing to defuse the carbon bomb that you own in the Fens, then? One of the Church of England’s five missions is to ‘safeguard creation’, as they refer to it, and groups are using those words back at the Church Commissioners to say, this doesn’t live up to that ideal, so what are you doing about it?
One of the main alternatives to the current “complex packages of voluntary incentives” that are failing to change land mismanagement is the revival of “The Nature State”, which would mark a move away from expensive subsidies for private landowners to increasing the public ownership of land to ensure it is more likely to be managed in the national interest.
It feels like any state intervention in terms of the acquisition of land should be done in partnership with local, democratic associations – potentially through a novel framework like ‘public-commons partnerships’. We can see these principles, for example, in the initial design of GB Energy’s Local Power Plan, where there are plans for a partnership between the state and local community energy groups.
Given concerns about the fickleness of state ownership – and since you spend a significant time in the book retracing the mass sell-off of land by the state over the course of the previous century – can you expand on the potential democratic governance models for a “Public Nature Estate”?
I am a fan, albeit a sceptical fan, of there being a more active state in the UK. The phrase ‘the nature state’ comes from an academic and historian called Matthew Kelly who came up with this to describe the set of institutions and policies that emerged in the 1940s. During World War II, the state had to extend many of its powers, having been really very small in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, post-war, Clement Atlee’s Labour government supported the creation of the welfare state, the NHS, social security, and so on. But what Matthew Kelly shows is that in parallel with this, there was the creation of a smaller but still very significant ‘nature state’ which comprised things like setting up national parks in 1949. The same bit of legislation that created national parks also created an environmental watchdog called the Nature Conservancy, which is now called Natural England (with devolved equivalents in Scotland and Wales), and also created our first nature reserves called Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs). These basically form the foundation of the conservation policy in this country. It's really important to not only remember that history but also to champion what we have left of it because, a bit like with defending the NHS, it’s not necessarily perfect, but it is worth holding on to and trying to improve on. And it's something that has come under assault over the decades by people trying to cut it back, get rid of it, or deregulate it, and by landowners who have been upset by the idea of the state interfering in their affairs and constraining their private property rights, as in the case of SSSIs. In that case, you’re essentially saying to the landowner, ‘Sorry, you can’t actually destroy everything on this land in pursuit of profit, or your shooting interests, because we have designated it as having scientific interest for its ecological and uniqueness and the habitats preserved there’.
However, I am sceptical as well, not just for the reason that different governments can come in and change policies, but also because there is obviously the chequered history of the way in which public sector bodies have treated nature. For example, the Forestry Commission was set up to grow timber, and in the process of doing that, which it was very successful at for a while, it managed to help cut down loads of ancient woodland, which is not great from a nature or climate perspective. But what I guess I'd say is that you can change the statutory obligations on public sector bodies in a way that you can't so easily with private sector landowners; you can make them more accountable. So I still retain this degree of faith in our ability to change how the state operates, and recommend us doing things like giving national park authorities updated legal duties to foster nature recovery, for example, and the same for the Forestry Commission, whose remit is well out of date – it was last updated in the 1960s. And then bringing them all together into what some conservation groups are now calling a ‘public nature estate’.
The public sector needs to be doing more work both to look after nature on its own land, but also to increase its landholdings, to reverse the trend towards just selling off land, as Brett Christophers has documented in his books. We should be asking why it is that we don't have national parks that are owned by the nation in Britain. There are historical reasons, but are those historical reasons still valid today? Why shouldn't we see national park authorities, for example, expand their ownership of land in the national parks? And, in doing so, helping to restore the park’s nature and making them more publicly accessible and so on. We’re now really seeing some of the issues with national parks not being more in public hands. For instance, on Dartmoor, near where I live, nature is really in a shocking state for a national park. We're down to the last few breeding pairs of curlew and lapwing which used to frequent Dartmoor far more in the past. And you've also got challenges from private landowners, like Alexander Darwall, who’s trying to take away the right to wild camp on Dartmoor. If more of that land was owned publicly, it simply wouldn't be an issue; it would be down to the national park authority to set the rules.
I would also definitely emphasise how keen I am on community ownership of land, which I talk about a lot in the book. I've been visiting community buyouts in Scotland and talking to people who were involved with them, and just seeing what's possible. In particular, the story of the Isle of Eigg buyout that Alastair McIntosh tells is so inspiring – not just of changing the legal title from one of an absentee laird who used to own the island as if it was a work of art, traded on the international commodities market, but also how this community took it back and took charge of their own destiny. Alastair McIntosh talks about the sense of unlocking the imagination, of creating new possibilities when it comes to thinking about how land is used, and community ownership really does that. I saw that in practice with the Langholm Moor community buyout in 2022, which has since become the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve. I really want to see projects of that scale and ambition and imagination start to happen in England, and I am now more hopeful of that because there are growing numbers of community groups starting to think about how they can crowdfund and do this anyway. This is exactly what happened in Scotland in the 1990s – they didn't have any legislation that supported the buyout of the Isle of Eigg, they didn't have the Scottish Land Fund at the time, but they managed to do it anyway, and it was an incredible battle. And that's what needs to happen in England, to demonstrate the possibility, and to think beyond the purchase of pubs and village halls, important assets as they are for communities, and start to question, for example, ‘Why don't we own that huge stretch of moorland that we depend on as our natural flood defence?"
What I really hope – again, being sceptical of politicians, but also taking the opportunities where they arrive in politics – is that the new government has said they’re going to bring in a community right to buy in England. We don't yet know the details of the policy, and rather than trusting them to do the right thing, I think that as campaigners and activists we should be pushing them to do what's possible, and even perhaps improve upon what Scotland has done, and to come up with as many possible projects to test the new laws as possible, to really test the boundaries.
In terms of the constitution of the current environmental movement, there seems to be no shortage of NGOs campaigning on single issues or in local areas. Though the patrician societies of the Victorian era have their limitations, they are mostly membership bodies that mainly rely on regular financial contributions from their members, enable participation through voting on resolutions at AGMs, and even allow members to run for elected positions.
If you take the Outdoor Swimming Society as an example of the most recent wave of NGOs, it is not even a society, though it strangely claims to have ‘members’ on its website (which appears to mainly involve nothing more than joining one of its digital “channels”). Describing itself as an “anti-governing body”, it only has a few patrons and the same founding CEO for nearly two decades since its creation in 2006.
Though we can all see the value in a diverse ecology of organisations, where is the current conversation about democratic participation and representation in the environmental movement?
I've recently become a member of the National Trust, partly in order to vote in their annual AGM in order to prevent the right-wing, reactionary Restore Trust taking over their board. I do think the National Trust has played an absolute blinder with this, showing the way to fight back in the culture wars. Now, have I taken my democratic participation in the National Trust any further? Not really, no. Have I put forward an AGM motion yet to try and get them to do something better with their land rather than just defend them against the reactionaries? No, but maybe I will in the future, and I hope lots of other NT members do as well.
I've worked for a reasonably-sized NGO, Friends of the Earth, which had certain internal democratic processes, such as having an annual gathering and local groups networks. And I think it asks more of its supportive members than the National Trust ordinarily does, getting people to take action on a local level. But I get very frustrated by the pace of change and the ability of these NGOs to move fast enough and be bold enough. There are obviously the constraints of charity law and so on, but ultimately, form has to follow function, right? And if you're losing the battle to save the environment, to stop the nature crisis, then we need structures that are capable of doing that.
What I really find aspiring is the new wave of environmental groups that have grown up in the last few years. I'm not actually talking about the climate movement here because I see them as slightly separate. Of course they do overlap, but more and more I see myself as operating within the ‘nature conservation movement’ space, which has its very old members, like the National Trust, RSPB, and the Wildlife Trusts. But it's got some much newer kids on the block, such as Wild Justice, who take legal action, judicially reviewing the government when they think they have done the wrong thing and broken the law, and they're very pugnacious about it. Wild Card, as I’ve already mentioned, is an activist group that's grown up out of XR. Then there are all of the river guardian groups, and I’d put Right to Roam and the Outdoor Swimming Society in this space as well, because there's a movement around access to the countryside that’s being more activist in its tactics, using forms of direct action like mass trespasses, and citizen science on rivers to try and test their pollution levels and raise the alarm about that. I find that much more engaging and empowering and inspiring, and the thing that binds them together is that they are, in some ways, asking more of their members and supporters – to go out and actually do some river testing, not just to sign a petition.
If you're being asked to take direct action, obviously that is something that only those who are privileged are most likely to do. But I do also think this new wave of nature activism has got an appeal for people because it's quite place-based. It’s less about issues that might seem remote and a bit abstract – ‘Let's save the Amazon’ – it's about what we are actually doing in our own backyard that’s harming the environment, or that landowners or water companies have done. I think there is a certain appeal to that and I think it probably links with people rediscovering their local patch in and around Covid lockdowns, which has played a role in the burgeoning interest in swimming, paddling, and kayaking in rivers – hence the river guardian movement.
I also think that it would be wonderful if, over the next year or two, we have a wave of local groups trying to buy river banks, because it would set such an interesting precedent. When you own the bank, you essentially own half the river, and I think I'm right in saying that there's been a recent legal ruling that if you are the owner of a stretch of riverbank, because of those property rights you get the ability to sue people who are polluting the river. This creates a really interesting potential for class action lawsuits from community groups that might start to own rivers. Of course, that's operating within the realm of private/community property rights, but it would be a very big change from what we currently have, and would start to challenge some of the drivers of river pollution.
Finally, and to bring the conversation back to everyday concerns, it still feels like the relationship between the need for housing, transport infrastructure, employment, food, and nature is rarely aligned in the public or political discourse. What narratives and practices – with the potential to work at scale – do you think present a way forward in these contested debates?
You get some of that with conversations around land use frameworks, and there has been some really great work done by the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission to try and bring together different voices, from farmers and landowners, to river groups and environmental groups, to developers and groups trying to push for community housing. I do have some criticisms of the way in which the FFCC envisages a land use framework operating. I think in some cases you have to have a trade-off, you can't just have what they call ‘multifunctional land use’ everywhere. Ultimately, every land use is multifunctional – even a conifer woodland has multifunctional uses in terms of its timber, carbon absorption, and places to go for walks in, but it's not great for biodiversity. So if your aim is to try and resolve the biodiversity crisis, then a conifer plantation isn’t that helpful. You do have to sometimes prioritise, and that can involve hard decisions, it can involve somebody or some interest group losing out to some extent. But what I hope is that with a land use framework across the whole of England, you would at least be able to say, ‘Look, of course we need to continue producing food, of course we need housing, and of course we also need plenty of space for nature to recover in and for natural carbon stores to take some of the carbon out of the atmosphere’. And those are all important things, it's just that where in the country is going to be better suited for those things sometimes differs.
There may be examples of win-win situations, like with regenerative farms where you might get lots of nature coming back around the margins of the farm, or because of the reduced amounts of pesticides and fertilisers and so on. But you will also need space where land is given over entirely for nature. I hope the government will publish a land use framework at some point. My fear is that it ends up being very high-level, not wanting to cause any ruptures with anyone, and therefore might end up being almost useless. But I do also hope that it might change the debate: that England might start having the conversations about land that have been happening in Scotland for the last 20 or 30 years – about what land is for, who it serves, and how we can reimagine its use for the common good.
The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside? is published by Harper Collins (2024).
Guy Shrubsole is an environmental campaigner and writer. He is the author of Who Owns England?, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, and The Lie of the Land. He has campaigned on the climate and nature crises, working for a wide range of organisations from Friends of the Earth and the Right to Roam campaign, to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). He lives in Devon.
