Tom Mooney's Reviews > English Pastoral: An Inheritance

Our response to ecological collapse may prove to be the defining legacy of our generation, one way or the other. Many well-meaning, largely urban and middle class people have taken to the streets in the name of the planet in recent years. But waving placards and climbing on top of trains when something becomes fashionable is all show. In this brilliant, deeply moving book, James Rebanks details what true rebellion and real bravery look like.

Rebanks begins by recounting his romantic upbringing, largely under the wing of his grandfather who, even in the 70s and 80s was something of a throwback to a simpler time. He writes beautifully of time spent on his grandfather's rented Cumbria farm where he learned to do things the old way: slow, labor-intensive farming that was in step with the natural world around them - though they never necessarily thought of it like that. It was just the way things had always been done - rotating crops, leaving fields to rest during fallow years, grazing livestock who then shit the goodness back into the soil.

He then shatters this English idyll, recounting his and his father's push to modernise their farm and 'improve' their land in ways encouraged by greedy governments and supermarkets. Fertilizers were spread, fields enlarged, hedgerows and coppices cleared. The soil health decimated.

Rebanks shows honesty and candour when detailing the things his family got wrong and this serves as a basis for change towards the end of his father's life. Rebanks picks up the pieces and gives us his blueprint for the future of farming in the UK - a future where farms and the natural world coexist for the benefit of nature and humans alike, where there is diversity and rotation, harking back to the traditions of the past while embracing new technologies. These are changes he has already made on his own farm - to the consternation of some and to the detriment of his finances in a world where all incentives pour towards intensive, single-crop or single-livestock farming. These are brave choices he has made which have both eyes on the long term. This is farming for the benifit of generations he will never see. And it is something that is radical and requires conversations and cooperation to work.

This is real bravery. Real activism. Rebanks is someone with his hands in the soil, not some placard-waving virtue-signaller. His father and grandfather would be very proud.