In this interview, Dr Nick Kirsop-Taylor and author Guy Shrubsole discuss Guy’s career as an environmental campaigner and author, and the arguments of his latest book: The Lie of the Land: who really cares for the countryside?
NKT: Hello Guy, thanks for doing this interview, and congratulations on your new book. To start us off, what got you writing about land and politics?
GS: All the books that I want to write are intended to be campaigning or political in nature. I see them as a means of getting stories out about issues that have been neglected or underrepresented. I’m fascinated by the politics of land and nature and have for a long time wanted the political left to care a lot more about nature. But also, for nature conservationists to care more about political economy, because a lot of nature writing sees itself as apolitical, but in doing so ultimately aligns itself with the status quo, which is a bit of a problem.
NKT: Do you think that the British public care about the politics of land?
GS: I think they increasingly do, and there are encouraging signs of more people taking an interest. For example, the Right to Roam campaign, which I’m a member of, recently drew a crowd of about three and a half thousand people to Alexander Darwall’s estate on Stall Moor to protest against his attempts to restrict wild camping rights on Dartmoor. Or look at some of the public campaigning work that’s being done around community land trusts and pushing for a new ‘community right to buy’ policy in England; there’s a whole nexus of groups and public interest in this space in the UK.
Something that has clearly happened in the last few years is the reawakening of people’s connection to local place. This is very much to do with the experience that many had of lockdowns and only being able to go for a walk a day and therefore starting to rediscover local footpaths or local areas of common, and the sense of inequality of access to those spaces. There is desire amongst more people to question and challenge that inequality – to say why is this the case, why is it so unequal?
NKT:Do you think commercial books like The Lost Rainforests of Britain have the potential to make people more engaged with the politics of land?
GS: I really hope so – that was kind of the point in some ways. But I also just fell in love with temperate rainforests! In part, it was a genuine expression of fascination and wonder but was also asking some more subtle questions about the politics of land. There’s a huge amount of nature writing these days, with straining bookshelves about nature in every bookshop. I noticed with Who Owns England?, that it didn’t get put into the nature writing section, it got put into history or politics, but it was intended to be a contribution to a more politicised form of nature writing. There are of course various other authors who are trying to do this, like Nick Hayes and Amy-Jane Beer, and there’s a movement to try and re-politicise nature writing by asking critical questions about how we address the nature crisis whilst also tackling inequality, injustice and access. I’d like to think I’m part of this tradition and community. If you go back to the 1970s and 80s there were a whole bunch of amazing writers, some of whom I’m trying to shine a light on now – like Marion Shoard, and Ann and Malcolm MacEwen – who were asking these questions back then.
NKT: What questions do you think are important in this area and need more research?
GS: There are many answers to this. One big question remains who owns what? Our understanding of this, given the absence of an open and complete Land Registry to be able to answer questions definitively about the concentrations of land and power, remains incomplete. It would be amazing to see more scholarship that traces historically how patterns of ownership have interacted with patterns of land use. I explore this in The Lie of the Land by looking at the small number of people who own Britain’s upland peat bogs and how they mismanage them for driven grouse shooting; and also look at the institutional investors who profit from the draining of the Fens.
But what other patterns of ownership might there be, and how might these interact with and shape policy? If we knew how many and which people owned river catchments and riparian zones would that change our view of the policy interventions that need to be made, and on the actors engaged with the policy process? Maybe this might lead us towards talking a lot more about agricultural river pollution rather than just the sewage going into them from water companies.
NKT: What critical questions we should be asking of the imminent Land Use Framework for England?
GS: Is it going to introduce any new policy levers to impact decision making? How is it going to lead us to reach things like the Global Biodiversity Framework’s commitment for 30×30, or the UK government’s Environment Act targets, or turn around the decline in species abundance? What position does it take on things like land sparing vs sharing and the more interesting questions about how we prioritise land for ‘X over Y’; or how will it help us move beyond the political fudge of ‘multi-functional land use’, which is really a conflict avoidance strategy? Also, who are the lobby groups most active now and historically in shaping land policy in the UK? For example, in the new book I touch on the work of Professor Michael Winter and his research into the concerted campaign by the National Farmers Union to rebrand farmers and landowners as custodians of the countryside from the 1970s onwards – a subject I think probably merits further research.
NKT: Do you think that the UK has any chance of actually achieving the 30×30 target without a deep, sustained and critical conversation about the politics of land?
GS: We’re a long way off achieving it. I can see a narrow route to nominally achieving it through making some amendments to the statutory purposes of National Park Authorities and National Landscapes or being clever with definitions. There are powers that are missing from the original conception of National Parks that would enable them to do more to compulsorily purchase land for purposes of nature restoration. Even if all of that came to pass, and SSSIs were also being better managed and looked after, then maybe that would just about add up to 30% by 2030.
However, within most of our National Parks and National Landscapes, land is predominately in private hands, and largely unregulated in terms of how it is being used. Consequently, nature will remain extremely degraded in those areas, so it falls to this government to make some hard decisions and come up with some more interesting and bold policies. That’s where the ideas and theory about the nature state come in (see von Hardenburg et al 2017).
We’ve had a fairly sterile and unproductive debate for the last 15 years or more about the role of markets, or the role of incentives, or the role of trying to get private money into nature restoration. Sure, there’s a role for these, but if we were having this debate in the 1940s, it wouldn’t be such a difficult discussion. There wouldn’t the handwringing about how we get money into nature restoration because the state would buy the land, be more interventionist, and simply tax land better rather than going down increasingly convoluted conversations about complicated biodiversity markets and other market-based approaches. I often hear people in conservation say, “there’s all this money out there sloshing around that ‘the market’ wants to invest in nature, we’ve just got to make the conditions right for it…”. If there’s all this spare capital sloshing around with nothing useful to do, let’s just tax it and put it to work in the interests of the common good – such as by restoring nature.
NKT: How do you think the journey to nature restoration is going to progress (for the UK) without serious and sustained research into the nature of the political economy of land and power?
GS: I don’t think we can get there without that research and a national conversation about land – who owns it, how it’s used, what it’s for. There are people who would say we can get there through persuasion and inspiration alone. I love the power of inspiration – that’s what I tried to do with Lost Rainforests of Britain. But I was also very clear that there is a big role for government too, in setting the right policies. There’s a certain naivety about the big rewilding landowner-saviour approach, which is a willingness to only talk about the good but not to criticise the bad in large-scale land management. A small number of people working in government, civil servants and advisers, understand that something needs to change in the policy levers that they reach for, to reach nature restoration goals. This involves looking critically at the public realm in terms of the land it owns (and could yet own) and the approach it takes to seeing land as critical national infrastructure. But also looking at the role of regulation and regulators – reframing environmental regulation from being a burden on the economy to considering it as a vital part of the way in which we protect nature.
NKT: What’s the relationship between public imaginations for re-natured futures and policy, the nature state being rejuvenated, and feeling like the public realm can ‘do stuff’ again?
GS: This isn’t about simply trusting politicians to do the right thing around nature restoration: there needs to be a movement of people pushing for this too. The area in which I feel most hopeful about is in a form of rejuvenated nature state, seen in Scotland in recent years. This is around catalysing community ownership of land, as a way of not just inspiring but also empowering communities to take much greater control over their local land to play real and active roles in restoring nature. Alastair MacIntosh is a land reform campaigner who was involved in the Isle of Eigg community buyout that took place in Scotland in the 1990s. He didn’t talk about it just purely in terms of the transfer of legal title from one person to another, he was talking about it in terms of “creating a new constellation of possibility.”
We don’t really have a sense yet of what could be done and what could be achieved by communities having greater ownership control of land, because it’s something that’s become so alien to us for so long. But if you go back a few hundred years it wasn’t alien. It was part of people’s lived experience in their management of the commons and having that kind of local group that wasn’t part of the central state, but which oversaw commons management and regulation. It’s essentially giving a modern democratic 21st century spin to that old idea, creating that again. Scotland has used its devolved powers for environmental policy to pioneer a collectivist approach, a communitarian approach. Now there’s half a million acres of land in Scotland that’s owned by communities, which is truly empowering! The public sector has such an important role to play here, too: there is now a Land Use Strategy in Scotland, there is a statement of principles about what land is for. And built into the Community Right to Buy legislation are strong provisions for sustainable development and democratic accountability. This opens different ways of thinking about the ownership and management of land and making landowners far more accountable to the public.
Bios: Guy Shrubsole is an environmental campaigner and writer. He is the author of Who Owns England?, an instant Sunday Times bestseller; The Lost Rainforests of Britain, which won the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation and was shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society Literary Prize; and most recently, The Lie of the Land. For the past decade and a half Guy 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. He lives in Devon.
Dr Nick Kirsop-Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Politics Department at the University of Exeter in Devon. His research focuses on the changing nature of the state and governance in response to the nature and climate crises, and the place of conflict and contestation in environmental governance. His new book (forthcoming 2025, Amsterdam University Press) titled ‘Governing the Nature Restoration State’ will offer an account of the state’s deep institutional relationship with multiple natures and the governance implications of states which adopt the societal-mission of nature restoration as their central organising principle in response to the global nature crisis.
