Editorials

A Place in the Country By Simon Fairlie How can we rejuvenate the rural economy without destroying the landscape? The answer lies in changing the planning system, to accommodate genuinely sustainable, low-impact development in the countryside.

This is hardly a viewpoint that those of us who are lucky enough to live in the countryside can advance without arousing suspicions of hypocrisy.

Should the overwhelming majority of us live in towns? In the UK, this has become a topical question ever since John Gummer, when he was Conservative Secretary of State for the Environment some three years ago, unveiled projections indicating that another 4.4 million homes would need to be built by 2016, and suggested that, in order to protect the environment, the majority of these should be sited in urban areas.

I t is a question that may cause some difficulty for those of use who are concerned to protect the countryside from urban sprawl and yet who feel that the increasing separation of people from nature and natural processes is undesirable. Artificial food, unsustainable consumption, excessive packaging, traffic congestion, light pollution, violent crime, vandalism... all these, and a host of related problems, can be viewed as symptoms of an urban disease. Should we not welcome the statistics which show that a majority of urban dwellers would prefer to move to a more "green and leafy" environment? Or should we support the view put forward by Friends of the Earth that this process of "counter-urbanisation" would further desecrate the countryside, and therefore we should "debunk the rural image" and "ensure that those returning to our higher density areas outweigh those leaving"?

Here in Britain, the roots of this dilemma go back to the enclosures which removed a sizeable proportion of the rural population from the land in order to satisfy the demand for labour in the towns occasioned by industrialisation. But let us take up the story in the 1920s, when the increased mobility provided by the motor car allowed people with substantial urban incomes to seek out a place to live in the country. As Clough Williams-Ellis put it:

"Having made our towns with such careless incompetence, those of us who have the means to be choosers are calmly declining to live in them and are now proceeding with the same recklessness to disperse ourselves over the countryside, destroying and dishonouring i t with our shoddy but all-too-permanent encampments."

Artificial food, unsustainable consumption, excessive packaging, traffic congestion, light pollution, violent crime, vandalism... all these, and a host of related problems, can be viewed as symptoms of an urban disease.

Increasing opposition to the uncontrolled spread of ribbon development and suburbia led in 1947 to the Town and Country Planning Act which still provides the basis for our present-day planning system. The Act placed severe restrictions on

all forms of building and development in the countryside, other than those associated with agriculture, which was assumed to be beneficial to the rural environment. In one sense the Act was quite successful: i t did stem the spread of suburbia and prevent the "Californication" of England's countryside. But in another sense i t was a ghastly failure: it was powerless to stop the countryside being ravaged by the very force that was expected to be its saviour agriculture; and it did not stop the process of counter-urbanisation.

The 'Green Revolution' in farming caused hedgerows to be torn up, woodlands felled, pastures ploughed up and wetlands drained on a scale unparalleled in English history.

Between 1947 and 1997, as agriculture and forestry became industrialised England lost three-quarters of its agricultural workforce. The 'Green Revolution' in farming caused hedgerows to be torn up, woodlands felled, pastures ploughed up and wetlands drained on a scale unparalleled in English history. As farmworkers lost their jobs, they also lost their houses and these were progressively bought up and converted by urban incomers with substantial earnings. I f there were no more farmhouses or labourers' cottages available, then the incomers resorted to converting redundant barns. And as the agricultural economy collapsed under the weight of the counter-urban invasion, shops, schools, post-offices and vicarages closed down providing yet another niche for urban refugees. Meanwhile the sons and daughters of those who had once earned their living from the land were squeezed out of the rural property market and herded into 'social housing' in key vil lages or burgeoning towns.

A state of crisis has now been reached because, in the south of England at least, the reserve of available cottages, barns and redundant school buildings has more or less dried up, while the demand for a "green and leafy environment" has not. So where wil l the 4.4 million new homes go?

There is, of course, no immediate way in which all those who want to stake out a new home can do so in the countryside without a great deal more damage to the environment. Every effort needs to be made to improve the urban environment in a way that makes the city a more congenial and natural place to live; and every effort needs to be made to rediscover ways in which people (especially young adults) can share houses and so reduce demand.

But there is a way in which a small but significant proportion of the demand can

244

The Ecologist, Vol. 29, No 4, July 1999
be accommodated in the countryside, and indeed should be because it is needed there.

Whether by coincidence or through some as yet unidentified feedback mechanism, industrial agriculture has come to a crisis at the same point in time as the process of counter-urbanisation which has fed upon it. Surpluses and subsidies can no longer be balanced. After the scandal of BSE and the scare of GMOs, the public has lost confidence, and more and more people are prepared to pay for what they perceive to be healthier food. Prices of conventionally-reared livestock have hit rock bottom, while locally produced organic meat has been unaffected. The past year has seen an impressive increase in the number of farmers converting to organic production, while box schemes for organic vegetables have proliferated and local councils have been competing with each other to attract local producers to their new 'farmers' markets'.

The progress of change in this direction is unlikely to be smooth - there are bound to be hiccups related to fluctuations in economic conditions and prices. But the overall tendency is clear: the public, and indeed virtually every interest group aside from the food industry itself, would like to see farming become more environmentally responsible, healthier, more locally based and less mechanised. People want to see more small-scale family farms, they want the countryside that is associated with this kind of agriculture, and a sizeable and fairly well-off proportion of the community is prepared to pay for it.

But the cost does not only mean paying a higher price for food. It also involves finding accommodation for the additional workers needed to maintain a more labourintensive system. At the moment an average farmhouse with about 20 acres of land in the South of England costs in the region of £250,000 - there is no way that a family deriving their income from organic vegetable production or a similar venture could hope to pay off the mortgage on such a property. The people who can afford to pay these prices are mainly middle-class urban refugees seeking the good life, who also happen to represent a significant proportion of the people creating the demand for better food and other rural goods. Even i f i t were politically acceptable, reclaiming these buildings for the agricultural economy could be counter-productive.

The only alternative is to build more dwellings and agricultural buildings. Such buildings wil l need to be appropriate to the landscape, of environmentally low impact, and sustainable as regards the wider global ecology. This is not a particularly difficult task. Generations of builders prior to industrialisation managed to do it without

Unsustainable development in the British countryside

even trying; and nowadays there are architects, engineers and builders all over the country drawing up designs for sustainable rural housing, workplaces and communities.

The main obstacle to this happening is the planning system which tends to go into a state of shock when presented with the prospect of another dwelling in the open countryside. Applications by prospective farmers, smallholders or forestry workers for planning permission on a bareland holding (i.e. a holding where the original buildings have been sold off separately) are usually greeted with suspicion, rather than encouragement. Instead of welcoming a project which aims to improve the management of neglected land and contribute

to a thriving land-based local economy, planners question the need for the building, seek evidence of an income higher than that sought by the applicant or advise that the applicant commute to the holding from an unaffordable house in a nearby village.

While the planners are right to try to weed out bogus applications from speculators whose aim is to build a house in the countryside on an agricultural pretext and sell it for a handsome profit, they are not doing the rural economy or the environment any favours by discouraging the construction of low-impact homes and workplaces on sustainably managed holdings. The problem is that the planning system is at present ill-equipped to distinguish

The Ecologist, Vol. 29, No 4, July 1999

245