Led by the Land

Kim Wilkie asks how we manage the land for soil, water and life, while still growing food and respecting the beauty, stories and character of the last 6,000 years

Every age is convinced that it faces the end of the world, but ours is more able to achieve it. On top of political and financial fragility, we have an environment pushed so far to extremes that the survival of most natural life is in the balance.

Understandably in the climate crisis most attention has been focused on fossil fuels, but how we live in the wider landscape is also key. The vast majority of humans inhabit the temperate zones and in countries like the United Kingdom over 70 per cent of that land is farmed, with a further 13 per cent in forestry (DEFRA). The big question is how to manage the land for soil, water and life, while still growing food and respecting the beauty, stories and character of the last 6,000 years of settlement.

The British and Irish Islands have a deep sediment of fossilised lives that makes the landscape hum. These lives have been intimately linked to the geology, climate and a spiritual resonance on the edge of the old human world. The easily sculpted sedimentary layers, low northern light and high rainfall have created a tradition of grass covered earth forms that date back before the Bronze Age.

Burial mounds, fortifications and ceremonial places have set a pattern of working with the land on a scale that has inspired, from Eggardon Hill to Portrack House (the location of the “Garden of Cosmic Speculation”) and Andy Goldsworthy. The great English designed landscapes of Claremont and Studley Royal are part of the tradition and much of our literature and art are bound up in the rolling forms of the land. From Spenser and Hardy to Ravilious and Sutherland, landscape – and the stories it tells – lie at the core of our culture.

Eggardon Hill, Dorset

© Kim Wilkie

Working with land at this scale makes detailed decoration less relevant. Shapes, shadows and reflections are the key elements. Still water, sculpted slopes and carefully placed trees capture light and patterns over hundreds of acres. Twilight and frost reveal earth forms that the harsh midday sun flattens. Subtle ridge and furrow become a beautiful, Bridget Riley corduroy at dawn and dusk. Simultaneously, the land remains essentially productive under grazed meadows, contoured crops and tended woods and hedges. It is full of life; an animated prospect. These landscapes give a sense of humans flourishing – not just surviving – with natural systems over thousands of years…until now.

Because of the damage caused by Homo sapiens, there is a temptation to wish human beings out of the landscape and to solve the crisis by abandoning farmland to go wild and confining mankind to hydroponicallyfed cities. While urban life can certainly be made much better and more productive, this misses the point of human life as part of nature rather than separate from it. The ecologist Colin Tubbs conducted a fascinating study of biodiversity in Hampshire since the last Ice Age, nearly 12,000 years ago.

While perhaps expecting to find the moment of maximum biodiversity early in the Holocene, before settled farming, Tubbs actually concluded that the most diverse time was in the mid-eighteenth century. The patient agriculture of grazed wet meadows, open downland, coppiced woodland, laid hedges and wood pasture created a mosaic of habitats and a density of wildlife that was greater than the carpet cover of climax woodland. It also produced copious highly nutritious food in a cycle of perpetual fertility.

Mountain road through fractured rock, 1940

© Graham Sutherland Private collection

Since the Second World War there has been scramble to industrialise agriculture to feed the world more efficiently and more economically. But the economics have been based on how much food you can produce per farm labourer rather than per acre of tended land.

These are two very different calculations. Labour-intensive small holdings are much more productive per acre than vast tracts of industrialized farms, which rely on diesel and chemicals in order to use less labour. As petroleum products become more expensive and their destructive side effects are better understood, that economic viability falls apart.

If government subsidies are reviewed and the economist Dieter Helm’s proposals to tax polluters at source are finally implemented, farmers will no longer be able to afford to saturate land with chemical nitrates and phosphates that destroy the natural biology of the soil. The chemical agriculture of the last seventy years will no longer work.

Grazed pasture in Wales and England

© Kim Wilkie

There are a number of farmers who have given up on industrial agriculture and returned to first principles of treating the soil as a living organism. Gabe Brown and Joel Salatin have led the way in the United States and Henry Edmunds has transitioned to a highly productive 2,000 acre farm in Wiltshire. They all use grazing livestock as a central part of the management and fertilizing of the land, rotating crops with pasture.

Graham Harvey in his book Grass-fed Nation: Getting Back The Food We Deserve”(2016) and Judith Schwartz in her Cows Save the Planet (2013), show how livestock grazing on deeprooted leys not only feeds and restores the soil, but also helps to sequester carbon into the ground three times faster than the Amazon rainforest.

The methane red herring is a dangerous distraction. Microbial science is revealing extraordinary connections in the Earth’s “skin”. The Australian soil scientist, Dr Christine Jones, and the Cambridge fungal biologist, Merlin Sheldrake, are demonstrating the symbiotic complexity of soil and mycorrhizal fungi and how plants, animals and the atmosphere rely on those relationships. The health of all life, both human and wild, starts at a microbial level.

Ridge and furrow at dusk

© Kim Wilkie

When 83 per cent of our landscape is in farming or forestry and that land is undergoing a fundamental revolution, shouldn’t this be a major focus for landscape architects? Sustaining the natural resources of soil, water and air should be the starting point. It must guide how we cope with extreme weather; how we grow healthy food; where we allow development to take place; and how we stay sane and perpetuate the beauty and spiritual resonance of our landscape. The lives – human and wild – that depend on that landscape rely on clear heads, broad minds and a geological understanding of time.

Kim Wilkie is a landscape architect. The new edition of his book Led by the Land is published by the Pimpernel Press.