"Drowning In Money" George Monbiot On The Floods

[Zaune]

Monbiot.com

We all know what’s gone wrong, or we think we do: not enough spending on flood defences. It’s true that the government’s cuts have exposed thousands of homes to greater risk, and that the cuts will become more dangerous as climate change kicks in(1). But too little public spending is a small part of problem. It is dwarfed by another factor, which has been overlooked in discussions in the media and statements by the government: too much public spending.

Vast amounts of public money – running into the billions – are spent every year on policies that make devastating floods inevitable. This is the story that has not been told by the papers or the broadcasters, a story of such destructive perversity that the Guardian has given me twice the usual space today in which to explain it.

Flood defence, or so we are told almost everywhere, is about how much concrete you can pour. It’s about not building houses in stupid places on the floodplain, and about using clever new engineering techniques to defend those already there(2). None of that is untrue, but it’s a small part of the story. To listen to the dismal debates of the past fortnight you could be forgiven for believing that rivers arise in the plains; that there is no such thing as upstream; that mountains, hills, catchments and watersheds are irrelevant to the question of whether or not homes and infrastructure get drowned.

The story begins with a group of visionary farmers at Pontbren, in the headwaters of Britain’s longest river, the Severn. In the 1990s they realised that the usual hill farming strategy – loading the land with more and bigger sheep, grubbing up the trees and hedges, digging more drains – wasn’t working. It made no economic sense, the animals had nowhere to shelter, the farmers were breaking their backs to wreck their own land.

So they devised something beautiful. They began planting shelter belts of trees along the contours. They stopped draining the wettest ground and built ponds to catch the water instead. They cut and chipped some of the wood they grew to make bedding for their animals, which meant that they no longer spent a fortune buying straw. Then they used the composted bedding, in a perfect closed loop, to cultivate more trees(3).

One day a government consultant was walking over their fields during a rainstorm. He noticed something that fascinated him: the water flashing off the land suddenly disappeared when it reached the belts of trees the farmers had planted. This prompted a major research programme, which produced the following astonishing results: water sinks into the soil under the trees at 67 times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under the grass(4). The roots of the trees provide channels down which the water flows, deep into the ground. The soil there becomes a sponge, a reservoir which sucks up water then releases it slowly. In the pastures, by contrast, the small sharp hooves of the sheep puddle the ground, making it almost impermeable: a hard pan off which the rain gushes.

One of the research papers estimates that, even though only 5% of the Pontbren land has been reforested, if all the farmers in the catchment did the same thing, flooding peaks downstream would be reduced by some 29%(5). Full reforestation would reduce the peaks by around 50%(6). For the residents of Shrewsbury, Gloucester and the other towns ravaged by endless Severn floods, that means, more or less, problem solved.

Did I say the results were astonishing? Well, not to anyone who has studied hydrology elsewhere. For decades the British government has been funding scientists working in the tropics, and using their findings to advise other countries to protect the forests or to replant trees in the hills, to prevent communities downstream from being swept away. But we forgot to bring the lesson home.

So will the rest of the Severn catchment, and those of the other unruly waterways of Britain, follow the Pontbren model? The authorities say they would love to do it(7). In theory. Natural Resources Wales told me that these techniques “are hard wired in to the actions we want land managers to undertake.”(8) What it forgot to say is that all tree planting grants in Wales have now been stopped. The offices responsible for administering them are in the process of closing down(9). If other farmers want to copy the Pontbren model, not only must they pay for the trees themselves; but they must sacrifice the money they would otherwise have been paid for farming that land.

For – and here we start to approach the nub of the problem – there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment – by the far biggest component of farm subsidies – that land has to be free from what it calls “unwanted vegetation”(10). Land covered by trees is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills.

Just as the tree planting grants have stopped, the land clearing grants have risen. In his speech to the Oxford Farming Conference, made during the height of the floods, the environment secretary Owen Paterson boasted that hill farmers “on the least-productive land” will now receive “the same direct payment rate on their upland farmland as their lowland counterparts.”(11) In other words, even in places where farming makes no sense because the land is so poor, farmers will now be paid more money to keep animals there. But to receive this money, they must first remove the trees and scrub that absorb the water falling on the hills.

And that’s just the start of it. One result of the latest round of subsidy negotiations – concluded in June last year – is that governments can now raise the special mountain payments, whose purpose is to encourage farming at the top of the watersheds, from €250 per hectare to €450(12). This money should be renamed the flooding subsidy: it pays for the wreckage of homes, the evacuation of entire settlements, the drowning of people who don’t get away in time, all over Europe. Pig-headed idiocy doesn’t begin to describe it.

The problem is not confined to livestock in the mountains. In the foothills and lowlands, the misuse of heavy machinery, overstocking with animals and other forms of bad management can – by compacting the soil – increase the rates of instant run-off from 2% of all the rain that falls on the land to 60%(13).

Sometimes, ploughing a hillside in the wrong way at the wrong time of the year can cause a flood – of both mud and water – even without exceptional rainfall. This practice has blighted homes around the South Downs (that arguably should never have been ploughed at all). One house was flooded 31 times in the winter of 2000-2001 by muddy floods caused by ploughing(14). Another, in Suffolk, above which the fields had been churned up by pigs, was hit 50 times(15). But a paper on floods of this kind found that “there are no (or only very few) control measures taken yet in the UK.”(16)

Under the worst environment secretary this country has ever suffered, there seems little chance that much of this will change. In November, in response to calls to reforest the hills, Owen Paterson told parliament “I am absolutely clear that we have a real role to play in helping hill farmers to keep the hills looking as they do.”(17) (Bare, in other words). When asked by a parliamentary committee to discuss how the resilience of river catchments could be improved, the only thing he could think of was building more reservoirs(18).

But while he is cavalier and ignorant when it comes to managing land to reduce the likelihood of flooding, he goes out of his way to sow chaos when it comes to managing rivers.

Many years ago, river managers believed that the best way to prevent floods was to straighten, canalise and dredge rivers along much of their length, to enhance their capacity for carrying water. They soon discovered that this was not just wrong but counterproductive. A river can, at any moment, carry very little of the water that falls on its catchment: the great majority must be stored in the soils and on the floodplains.

By building ever higher banks around the rivers, by reducing their length through taking out the bends and by scooping out the snags and obstructions along the way, engineers unintentionally did two things. They increased the rate of flow, meaning that flood waters poured down the rivers and into the nearest towns much faster. And, by separating the rivers from the rural land through which they passed, they greatly decreased the area of functional floodplains(19,20,21).

The result, as authorities all over the world now recognise, was catastrophic. In many countries, chastened engineers are now putting snags back into the rivers, reconnecting them to uninhabited land that they can safely flood and allowing them to braid and twist and form oxbow lakes. These features catch the sediment and the tree trunks and rocks which otherwise pile up on urban bridges, and take much of the energy and speed out of the river. Rivers, as I was told by the people who had just rewilded one in the Lake District – greatly reducing the likelihood that it would cause floods downstream – “need something to chew on”(22,23).

There are one or two other such projects in the UK: Paterson’s department is funding four rewilding schemes, to which it has allocated a grand total of, er, £1 million(24). Otherwise, the secretary of state is doing everything he can to prevent these lessons from being applied. Last year he was reported to have told a conference that “the purpose of waterways is to get rid of water”(25). In another speech he lambasted the previous government for a “blind adherence to Rousseauism” in refusing to dredge(26). Not only will there be more public dredging, he insists: but there will also be private dredging: landowners can now do it themselves(27).

After he announced this policy, the Environment Agency, which is his department’s statutory adviser, warned that dredging could “speed up flow and potentially increase the risk of flooding downstream.”(28) Elsewhere, his officials have pointed out that “protecting large areas of agricultural land in the floodplain tends to increase flood risk for downstream communities.”(29) The Pitt Review, commissioned by the previous government after the horrible 2007 floods, concluded that “dredging can make the river banks prone to erosion, and hence stimulate a further build-up of silt, exacerbating rather than improving problems with water capacity.”(30) Paterson has been told repeatedly that it makes more sense to pay farmers to store water in their fields, rather than shoving it off their land and into the towns.

But he has ignored all this advice and started seven pilot projects in which farmers will be permitted to drag all that messy wildlife habitat out of their rivers, to hurry the water down to the nearest urban pinchpoint(31). Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that Paterson has demanded massive cuts at the Environment Agency, including many of the staff responsible for preventing floods(32).

Since 2007, there has been a review, a parliamentary enquiry, two bills, new flood management programmes(33), but next to nothing has changed. Floods, because of the way we manage our land and rivers, remain inevitable. We pay a fortune in farm subsidies and river-mangling projects to have our towns flooded and homes and lives wrecked. We pay again in the form of the flood defences necessitated by these crazy policies, and through the extra insurance payments – perhaps we should call them the Paterson tax – levied on all homes. But we also pay through the loss of everything else that watersheds give us: beauty, tranquility, wildlife and, oh yes, the small matter of water in the taps.

In the Compleat Angler, published in 1653, Izaac Walton wrote this. “I think the best Trout-anglers be in Derbyshire; for the waters there are clear to an extremity.”(34) No longer. Last summer I spent a weekend walking along the River Dove and its tributaries, where Walton used to fish. All along the river, including the stretch on which the fishing hut built for him by Charles Cotton still stands, the water was a murky blueish brown. The beds of clean gravel he celebrated were smothered in silt: on some bends the accretions of mud were several feet deep.

You had only to raise your eyes to see the problem: the badly-ploughed hills of the mid-catchment and above them the drained and burnt moors of the Peak District National Park, comprehensively trashed by grouse shooting estates. A recent report by Animal Aid found that grouse estates in England, though they serve only the super-rich, receive some £37m of public money every year in the form of subsidies(35). Much of this money is used to cut and burn them, which is likely to be a major cause of flooding(36). Though there had been plenty of rain throughout the winter and early spring, the river was already low and sluggish.

A combination of several disastrous forms of upland management has been helping Walton’s beloved river to flood, with the result that both government and local people have had to invest heavily in the Lower Dove flood defence scheme(37). But this wreckage has also caused it to dry up when the rain doesn’t fall.

That’s the flipside of a philosophy which believes that land exists only to support landowners, and waterways exist only “to get rid of water”. Instead of a steady flow sustained around the year by trees in the hills, by sensitive farming methods, by rivers which are allowed to find their own course and their own level, to filter and hold back their waters through bends and braiding and obstructions, we get a cycle of flood and drought. We get filthy water and empty aquifers and huge insurance premiums and ruined carpets. And all of it at public expense.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. https://www.foe.co.uk/blog/camerons-cla ... dont-stack

2. http://www.architecture.com/Sustainabil ... -SUDS.aspx

3. Coed Cadw and Coed Cymru, no date given.The Pontbren Project
A farmer-led approach to sustainable land management in the uplands. http://www.coedcymru.org.uk/images/user ... %20v12.pdf

4. M. R. Marshall et al, 2013. The impact of rural land management changes on soil hydraulic properties and runoff processes: results from experimental plots in upland UK. Hydrological Processes, DOI: 10.1002/hyp.9826. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 6/abstract

5. Howard Wheater et al, 2008. Impacts of upland land management on flood risk: multi-scale modelling methodology and results from the Pontbren experiment. FRMRC Research Report UR 16. http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/5890/1/ur16_impa ... 2_v1_0.pdf

6. As above.

7. See for example Natural England, Environment Agency, Defra, Welsh Government et al, 2012. Greater working with natural processes in flood and coastal erosion risk management. http://a0768b4a8a31e106d8b0-50dc802554e ... ci-e-e.pdf

8. NRW, 9th January 2014, by email.

9. I talked to one of the employees over the weekend: everyone is being made redundant as all funding has ceased.

10. Official Journal of the European Union, 31st January 2009. Council Regulation (EC) No 73/2009 of 19 January 2009, establishing common rules for direct support schemes for farmers under the common agricultural policy and establishing certain support schemes for farmers, amending Regulations (EC) No 1290/2005, (EC) No 247/2006, (EC) No 378/2007 and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1782/2003. Annex III. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/Lex ... 016:EN:PDF

This rule remains unchanged in the current round.

11. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... griculture

12. European Commission, 26th June 2013. CAP Reform – an explanation of the main elements. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-621_en.htm

13. Natural England, Environment Agency, Defra, Welsh Government et al, 2012. Greater working with natural processes in flood and coastal erosion risk management. http://a0768b4a8a31e106d8b0-50dc802554e ... ci-e-e.pdf

14. John Boardman and Karel Vandaele , 2010. Soil erosion, muddy floods and the need for institutional memory. Area (2010) 42.4, 502–513 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2010.00948.x http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 0948.x/pdf

15. R. Evans, 2010. Runoff and soil erosion in arable Britain: changes in perception and policy since 1945. Environmental Science and Policy 13, pp 1 4 1 – 1 4 9. doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2010.01.001

16. John Boardman and Karel Vandaele , 2010. Soil erosion, muddy floods and the need for institutional memory. Area (2010) 42.4, 502–513 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2010.00948.x http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 0948.x/pdf

17. http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/? ... .1&m=40459

18. Owen Paterson, 2013. In evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Managing Flood Risk, Volume I. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... 30/330.pdf

19. I am grateful to Dr Richard Hey and to Charles Rangely-Wilson for the discussions we had about these issues.

20. Natural England, Environment Agency, Defra, Welsh Government et al, 2012. Greater working with natural processes in flood and coastal erosion risk management. http://a0768b4a8a31e106d8b0-50dc802554e ... ci-e-e.pdf

21. Sir Michael Pitt, 2008. Learning lessons from the 2007 floods. The Pitt Review.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. ... %20pdf.pdf

22. See http://www.wildennerdale.co.uk/

23. I hope before long to write up the extraordinary story I was told by a representative of United Utilities about the sharply differing responses of the rewilded River Liza in Ennerdale and the still-canalised St John’s Beck in Thirlmere
to the famous 2009 downpour.

24. Natural England, Environment Agency, Defra, Welsh Government et al, 2012. Greater working with natural processes in flood and coastal erosion risk management. http://a0768b4a8a31e106d8b0-50dc802554e ... ci-e-e.pdf

25. http://anewnatureblog.wordpress.com/201 ... nt-page-1/

26. http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/modeve ... ave-it-all

27. http://charlesrangeleywilson.com/2013/0 ... or-rivers/

28. Judy England and Lydia Burgess-Gamble, August 2013. Evidence: impacts of dredging. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/723 ... 282%29.pdf

29. Environment Agency, 2009. River Severn Catchment Flood Management Plan.
Summary Report.
http://cdn.environment-agency.gov.uk/ge ... ym-b-e.pdf

30. Sir Michael Pitt, 2008. Learning lessons from the 2007 floods. The Pitt Review.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. ... %20pdf.pdf

31. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/rive ... lots-begin

32. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... udget-cuts

33. Defra and the Environment Agency, 2011. Understanding the risks, empowering communities, building resilience: the national flood and coastal erosion risk management strategy for England. http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/do ... 510366.pdf

34. Chapter XVII.

35. Animal Aid, 2013. Calling the Shots: the power and privilege of the grouse-shooting elite. http://www.animalaid.org.uk/images/pdf/ ... eshots.pdf

36. See also the Upper Calder Valley Ban the Burn campaign. http://www.energyroyd.org.uk/archives/tag/ban-the-burn

37. https://www.gov.uk/government/case-stud ... heir-homes

[Simon_Jester]

I really do have trouble grasping the mindset of land management people who have such durable rocks between their ears, that they remain willfully ignorant of actual studies on how to control floods.

[Zaune]

I think the honest truth is that they're not trying to control the floods. They're trying to keep wealthy, rural and above all else reliably Conservative-voting landowners happy by keeping the EU farming subsidies coming in. Mr Monbiot has another essay on that site somewhere about just how thoroughly absurd those subsidies are; they might have made sense back in the sixties when we were just coming off rationing and the Soviets were reading Karl Dönitz's memoirs with great interest but nowadays they're basically a welfare scheme.

[Simon_Jester]

Thing is, you could subsidize the landowners to do something sensible; if you've got them on payroll you might as well pay them to do something that doesn't leave you up to your ass in floodwater.

[Darth Tanner]

The EU farm subsidy is already used to promote leaving edges of fields free for nature, it'd be a simple solution to make it promote leaving areas that would help flooding as forest instead.

Well I say simple, it is EU regulation administered by EU sceptic UK government- they'd probably intentionally mess it up even if they tried to reform it.

[Thanas]

I can tell you exactly why the EU subsidies are structured that way. Because the two biggest nations who got the most out of them were Germany and France. Both are actually nations where large forests are not uncommon, in Germany they are in fact the norm rather than the exception. The only thing keeping Germany from becoming a huge woodland area again are the farmers and Germany not being a huge woodland area was politically desirable. That is why the EU regulations historically require that the land is actually farmed and do not subsidize trees (because some people could then double their money by raking in subsidies while also having the forestry industry).

THe trouble is that the EU subsidies are structured one way and do not take into account specific regional differences. One could easily redo them, but that would require Britain to *gasp* engage with the EU instead of just saying no.

[Simon_Jester]

Hm. That's interesting, and I can see how that influences the character of the law: Germany is in danger of reverting to the Black Forest while Britain isn't.

[Zaune]

Necroing this one because Monbiot's come out with another column on the same topic, going into more detail on the numbers:

Just as mad cow disease exposed us to horrors – feeding cattle on the carcasses of infected cattle – previously hidden in plain sight, so the recent floods have lifted the lid on the equally irrational treatment of the land. Just as BSE exposed dangerous levels of collusion between government and industry, so the floods have begun to expose similar cases of complicity and corruption. But we’ve heard so far just a fraction of the story.

I hope in this article to lift the lid a little further. The issues I’ve begun to investigate here – the corrupt practices and the irrationality of current policies – should unite both left and right in a demand for change. They should be as offensive to those who seek to curb public spending as they are to those who seek to defend it.

In July 2013, the British government imposed a £26,000 cap on the total benefits a household can receive. In the same month it was pursuing a different policy in urgent discussions in Brussels: fighting tooth and nail to prevent the imposition of a proposed cap precisely ten times that size (€300,000, or £260,000). The European Commission wanted this to be as much money as a single farmer could receive in subsidies(1). The British government was having none of it.

It won, with the result that this measure is now discretionary: member states can decide whether or not to cap the benefits they give to farmers. Unsurprisingly, the British government has decided not to. The biggest 174 landowners in England take £120m between them. A €300,000 cap would have saved around £70m(2). If farmers were subject to the benefits cap that applies to everyone else (£26,000), the saving would amount to around £1bn(3). Why should the cap be imposed on the poor but not the rich?

Last week the MP Simon Danczuk read out a letter in the House of Commons that one of his constituents had received from the Department for Work and Pensions(4). It told her she was about to “enter the second stage of your intensive job-focused activity”. It expressed the hope that “all the activity or training intervention completed so far has not only supported you to achieve your aspirations but has moved you closer to the job market.”

Lying in a coma since December had not affected her ability to work, or her progress towards achieving her aspirations. She’s in a coma because she suffered a heart attack. The heart attack, her father maintains, was brought about by extreme stress, caused by the threat of having her benefits stopped despite a mental illness so severe that she had been unable to work for 27 years.

Two days before this letter was read to the Commons, the farming minister, George Eustice, was speaking at the conference of the National Farmers’ Union(5). He began by paying “tribute to the great work” of its outgoing president: “thank you for what you’ve done.” Can you picture a minister in this government saying that about the head of any other trade union? The NFU’s primary work is lobbying. Yet the critical distance between government and lobbyists you would expect in a functioning democracy is non-existent.

The same goes for distance of any other kind. The address of Eustice’s ministry, the department for environment, food and rural affairs, is 17 Smith Square, London SW1. The address of the National Farmers’ Union is 16 Smith Square, London SW1. Though farmers comprise just 0.3% of the population of England and only 1.4% of the rural population(6), ministers treat them and their lobbyists as an idol before which they must prostrate themselves. Rural policy and farming policy are, to the government, synonymous; 98.6% of rural people are marginalised by the decisions it makes.

Eustice continued his speech by announcing that he is seeking to “slash guidance”, to “drive down the burden of farm inspections further”, and that he is “pushing hard at an EU level for sanctions and penalties to be more proportionate.”(7) These are the sanctions and penalties imposed for breaking the conditions attached to farm subsidies. They take the form of a reduction in the benefits a farmer receives. “More proportionate” is the government’s code for smaller.

So just as the rules and penalties regulating the ordinary recipients of benefits have become so onerous that many find them almost imposssible to meet, the rules and penalties attached to the benefits the rich receive are being reduced.

But how? The conditions attached to farm subsidies (which are called cross-compliance) are already so weak as to be almost non-existent. Let me give you an example. There are several rules which are meant to encourage farmers to protect their soils from compaction and erosion(8). Their purpose is to sustain fertility, to defend water supplies and the ecology of the rivers and to prevent flooding. Not one of these measures appears to be either functional or enforceable.

All farmers receiving subsidies must complete a soil protection review. This is a booklet they fill in to show that they have thought about soil erosion and identified any problems on their land. Once every 100 years on average, an inspector from the Rural Payments Agency will visit the farm(9). If the inspectors identify a soil erosion problem, they have the power to … er, offer guidance about how to rectify it. And that, in practice, is it. There are hardly any cases of this guidance being followed up with even the threat of action, let alone the imposition of any penalties(10). And even the guidance, Eustice now promises, will be “slashed”.

Bad enough? Oh no. Most inspectors have no expertise in soil erosion. So all they tend to do during their centennial visits is to ask the farmer whether he or she possesses a soil protection booklet. If the answer’s yes, that’s job done, even if their soil is rushing off the fields and into the rivers.

To discover whether or not farmers are causing a related problem – soil compaction through the use of heavy machinery in the wrong conditions – inspectors need to dig holes in the fields with a spade, to look at what has happened to the soil layers. But – and here you have a choice of laughing or crying – they do not possess the power to conduct an “invasive investigation” (ie digging a hole)(11). So they are not permitted even to detect, let alone enforce, a breach of the compaction rules.

Are we there yet? Nope. Even these unenforceable non-rules are deemed too onerous for farmers growing a crop that both strips and compacts the soil faster than almost any other. Because the rows are planted so far apart, and because the soil is left bare through autumn, winter and much of the spring, maize causes more severe erosion than any other cereal crop. Yet, as I pointed out a fortnight ago, maize growers are entirely and mysteriously exempted from the erosion rules(12).
Soil erosion in a maize field. Photo: Defra

Soil erosion in a maize field. Photo: Defra

Since then I have asked the department five more times for an explanation. While all my other questions have been answered, albeit half-heartedly, this one was not fudged or spun or mangled, but simply ignored. I’ve never encountered this before: a government department refusing even to acknowledge that a question has been asked. What should I conclude but that the answer is highly embarrassing? I guess that because it’s almost impossible to grow maize without wrecking the soil, and because the government’s plans for biogas production depend on growing maize to fuel anaerobic digesters, the only way to reconcile this conflict is to remove the crop from the regulations(13).

In a devastating response to claims made in the Guardian’s letters page by the National Farmers’ Union(14), the soil scientist Robert Palmer calculated that so much compaction and erosion is caused by maize growing that a 10-hectare field causes the run-off of 375 million litres of water(15). Maize expanded 24% between 2012 and 2013, much of it in sensitive catchments. This is a formula for repeated flooding.

As a result of these multiple failures by the government, even Farmers’ Weekly warns that “British soils are reaching crisis point”(16). Last week a farmer sent me photos of his neighbours’ fields, where “the soil is so eroded it is like a rockery. I have the adjoining field … my soil is now at least 20 cm deeper than his.” In the catchment of the River Tamar in Devon, one study suggests, soil is being lost at the rate of five tonnes per hectare per year(17).

I could go on. I could describe the complete absence of enforceable regulations on the phosphates farmers spread on their fields, which cause eutrophication (blooms of algae which end up suffocating much of the freshwater ecosystem) when they run into the rivers. I could discuss the poorly-regulated use of metaldehyde, a pesticide that is impossible to remove from drinking water(18). I could expand on the way in which governments all over Europe have – while imposing a temporary ban for flowering crops – permitted the use of neonicotinoid insecticides for all other purposes, without any idea of what their impact might be on animals in the soil and the rivers into which they wash. The research so far suggests it is devastating, but they were licensed before any such investigation was conducted(19).

There is just one set of rules which are effective and widely deployed: those which enforce the destruction of the natural world. Buried in the cross-compliance regulations is a measure called GAEC 12(20). This insists that, to receive their money, farmers must prevent “unwanted vegetation” from growing on their land. (The rest of us call it wildlife habitat). Even if their land is producing nothing, they must cut, graze or spray it with herbicides to get their money. Unlike soil erosion, compaction and pollution, breaches of this rule are easy to detect and enforce: if the inspectors see trees returning to the land, the subsidy can be cut off altogether.

Many of the places in which habitats might otherwise be allowed to recover – principally the highly infertile land in the uplands – are kept bare by this rule. It’s another means by which floods are hard-wired. The government has just raised the incentive to clear such land, by announcing that hill farmers will now be paid the same amount per hectare as lowland farmers – equalising the rate upwards, not downwards(21).

It also seems to be on the verge of raising the amount of public subsidy paid to the owners of grouse moors by 84%(22). These are among the richest people in Britain. The management of their land to maximise grouse numbers involves the mass destruction of predators and the burning of blanket bogs, causing floods downstream(23) and releasing large amounts of carbon(24). If this looks like the work of a self-serving club of old school chums, that’s because it is.

First we give landowners our money: vast amounts of it, uncapped and almost unconditional. Then we pay for the costs they kindly dump on us: the floods, the extra water purification necessitated by the pollution they cause, the loss of so many precious and beautiful places, the decline of the wildlife that enchants and enraptures. Expensive, irrational, destructive, counter-productive: this scarcely begins to describe our farming policies.

But it need not happen this way. Change the rules, change the incentives, support impoverished farmers to do the right thing, stop support for the rich farmers altogether, and everything else can follow. In my book Feral I’ve begun to sketch out what a functioning, lively, wonderful countryside could look like(25). High in the catchments, where most of the rain falls and the soil is so poor that farming is sustained only through public money, we should be paying the farmers to replant trees, which hold back the water and stabilise the soil.

To these returning forests we could reintroduce animals that have been wiped out across much or all of this land: capercaillies, wildcats, pine martens, eagles, lynx, moose, bison, even, in the Scottish Highlands, wolves. Aside from the opportunities this rewilding presents for re-enchanting our lives, experience elsewhere in Europe suggests that eco-tourism has a far higher potential for employment, for supporting communities, for keeping the schools and shops and pubs and chapels open than sheep farming does(26).
Lynx and cub. Photo: Norbert Rosing.

Lynx and cub. Photo: Norbert Rosing.

We should turn the rivers flowing into the lowlands into “blue belts” or “wild ways”. For fifty metres on either side, the land would be left unfarmed, allowing trees and bogs to return and creating continuous wildlife corridors. Bogs and forests trap the floodwaters, helping to protect the towns downstream. They catch the soil washing off the fields and filter out some of the chemicals which would otherwise find their way into the rivers. A few of us are now in the process of setting up a rewilding group in Britain, which would seek to catalyse some of these changes.

Where soils are fragile and the risk of erosion is high, farmers should be encouraged to move towards regenerative or permacultural techniques: clever new methods which can produce high yields without damaging soil, water and wildlife(27). A fortnight ago, Rebecca Hosking, a farmer who uses regenerative techniques, published a photo of the confluence of the stream leaving her land with the stream leaving her neighbour’s land(28). His looked like cream of tomato soup; hers was clear.
Rebecca Hosking's stream meets her neighbour's.

Rebecca Hosking’s stream meets her neighbour’s.

The British government currently spends – on top of the £3.6bn in farm subsidies disbursed in this country – £450m on research and development for the food and farming industries(29). Much of this money could be characterised as corporate welfare. Yet a search of the British government’s website finds not one mention of permaculture. Not a penny of public money is being spent on investigating its potential here.

It’s not hard to see how a land which is now being pillaged, eroded, polluted and wrecked could be allowed to remain productive – even to produce more food for people than Britain does today (though perhaps less for livestock and biofuel) – while also supporting a vibrant ecosystem. It is not hard to see how public money could be spent to deliver social goods rather than social harms. But for this to happen we must insert a political crowbar between numbers 16 and 17 Smith Square, to prise the government away from the industry it is supposed to regulate.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11216061

2. http://www.eadt.co.uk/business/farming/ ... _1_2360224

3. http://www.thisiscornwall.co.uk/MP-s-ca ... z2uuZpF8DM

4. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014 ... -find-work

5. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... sh-farming

6. http://www.monbiot.com/2012/06/08/captive-animals/

7. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ ... sh-farming

8. see Defra and the Rural Payments Agency, 2014. The Guide to Cross Compliance
in England 2014: complete edition.

http://rpa.defra.gov.uk/rpa/index.nsf/0 ... dition.pdf

9. In other words, 1% of farms are visited for a cross-compliance inspection every year.

10. The Rivers Trust, 2011. Defra Strategic Evidence and Partnership Project. http://www.theriverstrust.org/projects/ ... ow-res.pdf

11. The Rivers Trust, as above.

12. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... protection

13. http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/ara ... 04.article

14. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... n-the-soil

15. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... lood-blame

16. http://www.fwi.co.uk/articles/10/02/201 ... expert.htm

17. Cited by The Rivers Trust, 2011. Defra Strategic Evidence and Partnership Project. http://www.theriverstrust.org/projects/ ... ow-res.pdf

18. Water UK, 13th August 2013. Briefing paper on metaldehyde.

http://www.water.org.uk/home/policy/pos ... g-2013.pdf

19. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... des-nature

20. Defra and the Rural Payments Agency, 2014. The Guide to Cross Compliance
in England 2014: complete edition.

http://rpa.defra.gov.uk/rpa/index.nsf/0 ... dition.pdf

21. Defra, December 2013. Consultation on the implementation of CAP reform in England:
Summary of responses and government response. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... 201312.pdf

22. Defra, December 2013, as above.

23. Joseph Holden et al, 2013. Fire decreases near-surface hydraulic conductivity and macropore flow in blanket peat. Hydrological Processes. DOI: 10.1002/hyp.9875. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 5/abstract

24. David Glaves et al, 30th May 2013. The effects of managed burning on upland peatland
biodiversity, carbon and water. Natural England. http://publications.naturalengland.org. ... on/5978072

25. http://www.monbiot.com/2013/05/24/feral ... rewilding/

26. Stefanie Deinet et al, 2013. Wildlife comeback in Europe: The recovery of selected
mammal and bird species, pp284-288. Rewilding Europe. http://www.rewildingeurope.com/assets/u ... pecies.pdf

27. http://permaculturenews.org/

28. http://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/ ... -solutions

29. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... ssible.pdf

[Irbis]

For – and here we start to approach the nub of the problem – there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment – by the far biggest component of farm subsidies – that land has to be free from what it calls “unwanted vegetation”(10). Land covered by trees is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills.

Funny that, because if you actually click the link and check the 'unwanted vegetation' part of regulation, the very next position talks about establishing buffer zones on rivers, which is exactly what the article postulates. I am not qualified to say if the article is yet another UK bashing on EU, but here in Poland, we had opposite problem before establishing network of inspectors. People declared some parts of the farms uncultivated as pro-ecological measure, but continued to illegally farm them. I'd guess the actual directive leaves to a member state what exactly is 'unwanted' and it's just UK government being dumb.

Anyway, It's sad. We had corrupt Farmer's Party in government last 8 years but they never even approached close to this level of brazenness and open flouting of the law. Maybe because they rely more on small farmers than big ones on average.

Also, I wonder what effect on soil erosion and floods wind and solar farms have, as on both ground is left absolutely bare to not interfere with energy collection. Both also regularly use heavy machinery - all factors the article criticizes, and on bigger scale than farming.

[madd0ct0r]

For – and here we start to approach the nub of the problem – there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment – by the far biggest component of farm subsidies – that land has to be free from what it calls “unwanted vegetation”(10). Land covered by trees is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills.

Funny that, because if you actually click the link and check the 'unwanted vegetation' part of regulation, the very next position talks about establishing buffer zones on rivers, which is exactly what the article postulates. I am not qualified to say if the article is yet another UK bashing on EU, but here in Poland, we had opposite problem before establishing network of inspectors. People declared some parts of the farms uncultivated as pro-ecological measure, but continued to illegally farm them. I'd guess the actual directive leaves to a member state what exactly is 'unwanted' and it's just UK government being dumb..

not exactly - that part of the code is more about spraying of pesticides and fertilizer I believe.

[Zaune]

Necroing this after a bit under year because guess what? It's happening again. Nothing whatsoever has changed, apart from the budget for flood defences getting cut again and a few hundred thousand people have been made homeless while the damage is likely to run into the low billions.

I wish I could say I was surprised.

[madd0ct0r]

In fairness, we've had truly truly horrible weather. October was unusually dry. Novemeber was unusually wet, with 2months worth of rain saturating the ground. The weather's been so warm that water keeps evaporating and being dumped as rain - we've basically had spring melt running since november. december was record breaking for rain.
http://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2015/12/28 ... -rainfall/

while hill-forestry would help the flashiness and take some of the peaks out, theres simply too much water. This is another of those 100 yr event s moving towards 5 year events. Thanks climate change!

[madd0ct0r]

Ghetto Edit:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... drain-land

In 2002 Walshaw Moor, a 6,500-acre grouse shooting estate upstream of Hebden Bridge [Maddocotr - that's just above York, which was totally flooded 26th Dec 2015], was bought by the retail tycoon Richard Bannister. Satellite images before and after show a transformation of the land: a great intensification of burning and draining. These activities raise the number of grouse, which in turns raises the amount (running into thousands per person per day) people will pay to shoot them.

In 2011, the government body Natural England launched a prosecution of the estate, citing “illegal works” on the moor. The estate was charged with 45 offences, 30 of which involved building allegedly unauthorised drainage channels. It denied all criminal activity. In 2012, as Mark Avery documents in his book Inglorious, something very odd happened. After £1m had been spent on the case it was suddenly dropped. Instead, Natural England struck an agreement with the estate under which the owner of Walshaw Moor would be given £2.5m of public money, in the form of a special package of enhanced farm subsidies, to carry on more or less as before, without reversing what were alleged to have been illegal works.

Avery’s freedom of information requests seeking to discover why this astonishing reversal took place have been repeatedly blocked, so there is no definitive explanation. But we know that the minister responsible at the time, Richard Benyon, is himself a grouse moor owner, and was lobbied over this period by the Moorland Association, which represents other grouse moor owners. We have no way of knowing whether these facts are related, and I cannot make a direct connection between the management of Walshaw Moor and the present flooding of Hebden Bridge. But there’s little doubt that the​ ​management of grouse moors tends to increase the risk of flooding.

I hope the opposition makes something of this.

[jwl]

The article in the OP seems to give an impression there is a net deforestation in the UK: this is incorrect, there is a net reforestation. The policies mentioned may have slowed the reforestation, but not reversed it.

[His Divine Shadow]

Off topic, but why isn't it politically desirable for Germany to become a huge woodland area again?

I mean unless you want to keep using the land to secure domestic food production and keeping the local agricultural industry running (both sensible and proper policies). Or is there some other reason?

[LaCroix]

Off topic, but why isn't it politically desirable for Germany to become a huge woodland area again?

I mean unless you want to keep using the land to secure domestic food production and keeping the local agricultural industry running (both sensible and proper policies). Or is there some other reason?

Because most land is private property, and the people would rather continue to keep farming. Only about one third of Germany is state property, and most of that is mountains or woods (or cities), anyway.

[Thanas]

Off topic, but why isn't it politically desirable for Germany to become a huge woodland area again?

I mean unless you want to keep using the land to secure domestic food production and keeping the local agricultural industry running (both sensible and proper policies). Or is there some other reason?

That is the most important reason (besides placating the agricultural lobby). Starvation and being unable to secure your food supply is something of a German trauma, it having happened three times during the last century.

[Zaune]

To some extent that's also true in the UK; I can see the logic to keeping a certain amount of land in a state where it could be cultivated quickly if the need arose. But if we're hoping for complete agricultural self-sufficiency then that ship sailed about a hundred years ago.

[Thanas]

It isn't like they expect to do the same in Germany either or just rework the land in case of war immediately. It just is the reason for why so many agricultural policies in Germany exist in the first place.

[Broomstick]

Even if a nation can't be self-sufficient agriculturally it still seems wise to maintain food production capabilities in the event that foreign trade is disrupted for some reason.

[jwl]

To some extent that's also true in the UK; I can see the logic to keeping a certain amount of land in a state where it could be cultivated quickly if the need arose. But if we're hoping for complete agricultural self-sufficiency then that ship sailed about a hundred years ago.

I dunno, I think it might be doable. You'd need to cut out pretty much all meat though, and food would become a lot more expensive.

Also in that case wrecking soil quality is a really bad idea.

[Broomstick]

Nope, I don't think even a vegetarian UK would be self-sufficient - maybe even less so than a non-vegetarian one (see final paragraph). You had rationing during WWII when you had significantly fewer people and you were still reliant on imports from the US and elsewhere to make ends meet. You've got about 15 million more people living on your islands now.

Now, early in the war years the government did do a study on what the diet would likely be if the UK lost all access to imports. The results were survivable and the subjects involved remained in good health for the several months study, but it would have been problematic for those who weren't young and healthy to begin with, possibly also for pregnant women and young children. It was also noted that such a diet produced a remarkable amount of farting. No doubt if it had come to that extreme people would have dug up their yards and green spaces even more than they actually did in order to plant as much food as possible (these past few years I've produced quite a bit of food from half-assed gardening in a small plot in my yard, in a harsher climate than what the UK enjoys.) Nope you probably wouldn't have outright starved, but everyone would have been thinner and perhaps a bit hungry most of the time.

These days? Not sure the UK could stretch to cover 15 million more people. It would be very tight, especially for the first one or two years.

The Combined Food Board, despite the flaws inherent to both internal and international politics of the nations involved, did quite a bit to keep folks outside North America fed. Even so, the biggest bottleneck in getting food from the Americas to Europe was shipping capacity. Of course, the Axis weren't exactly helping with that...

We had rationing in the US, too, during WWII. Some of it was for things like sugar and coffee which were globally in short supply (neither was grown in the US) due to disruption of shipping. The CFB had a hand in that, basically the US agreeing to ration it so as to leave some available for Britain. A lot of US rationing involved fuel and raw materials like rubber, not so much agricultural products. Some food types and preparations were rationed (such as tinned meat) to make sure it was available for the armed forces' supplies first.

Anyhow - I'm not sure going full vegetarian would be best, either. Certainly less meat, but the UK can readily access seafood, and dairy cows can convert grass inedible to humans into usable calories and nutrients. Chickens can also turn kitchen scraps and whatever they find in the yard into eggs and meat. Makes more sense to utilize those resources rather than dispensing with them and trying to replace them by plowing yet more land.

[Vendetta]

Nope, I don't think even a vegetarian UK would be self-sufficient - maybe even less so than a non-vegetarian one (see final paragraph). You had rationing during WWII when you had significantly fewer people and you were still reliant on imports from the US and elsewhere to make ends meet. You've got about 15 million more people living on your islands now.

It might be eventually, when literally everyone was forced to switch to a maximally efficient diet.

Once a good deal of the extraneous poor people had starved to death, of course.

[Broomstick]

Nope, I don't think even a vegetarian UK would be self-sufficient - maybe even less so than a non-vegetarian one (see final paragraph). You had rationing during WWII when you had significantly fewer people and you were still reliant on imports from the US and elsewhere to make ends meet. You've got about 15 million more people living on your islands now.

It might be eventually, when literally everyone was forced to switch to a maximally efficient diet.

You can't eat grass. Ruminants can. Cows, goats, and sheep are how you convert grasslands into something people can eat.

Also, it would be stupid to ban fishing under such circumstances. A cut-off UK desperate for food would not go vegetarian for that reason alone.

[jwl]

Nope, I don't think even a vegetarian UK would be self-sufficient - maybe even less so than a non-vegetarian one (see final paragraph). You had rationing during WWII when you had significantly fewer people and you were still reliant on imports from the US and elsewhere to make ends meet. You've got about 15 million more people living on your islands now.

Now, early in the war years the government did do a study on what the diet would likely be if the UK lost all access to imports. The results were survivable and the subjects involved remained in good health for the several months study, but it would have been problematic for those who weren't young and healthy to begin with, possibly also for pregnant women and young children. It was also noted that such a diet produced a remarkable amount of farting. No doubt if it had come to that extreme people would have dug up their yards and green spaces even more than they actually did in order to plant as much food as possible (these past few years I've produced quite a bit of food from half-assed gardening in a small plot in my yard, in a harsher climate than what the UK enjoys.) Nope you probably wouldn't have outright starved, but everyone would have been thinner and perhaps a bit hungry most of the time.

These days? Not sure the UK could stretch to cover 15 million more people. It would be very tight, especially for the first one or two years.

The Combined Food Board, despite the flaws inherent to both internal and international politics of the nations involved, did quite a bit to keep folks outside North America fed. Even so, the biggest bottleneck in getting food from the Americas to Europe was shipping capacity. Of course, the Axis weren't exactly helping with that...

We had rationing in the US, too, during WWII. Some of it was for things like sugar and coffee which were globally in short supply (neither was grown in the US) due to disruption of shipping. The CFB had a hand in that, basically the US agreeing to ration it so as to leave some available for Britain. A lot of US rationing involved fuel and raw materials like rubber, not so much agricultural products. Some food types and preparations were rationed (such as tinned meat) to make sure it was available for the armed forces' supplies first.

Anyhow - I'm not sure going full vegetarian would be best, either. Certainly less meat, but the UK can readily access seafood, and dairy cows can convert grass inedible to humans into usable calories and nutrients. Chickens can also turn kitchen scraps and whatever they find in the yard into eggs and meat. Makes more sense to utilize those resources rather than dispensing with them and trying to replace them by ploughing yet more land.

When I say "pretty much all", I mean an order of magnitude less than the current diet, not zero. The UK population may have increased since the 1940s, but it has also gotten richer, and agricultural science has progressed a lot. And if you explicitly planned for it, it would work differently than having to do it on the hoof as happened in WWII. Also in a major crisis situation I would imagine less of people growing their own and more green spaces being nationalised and given to experts to squeeze as much use out of the land as possible.