Roughly 100 years ago conservationists created the first great national parks, such as the Serengeti in Africa and Yellowstone in America. You may have thought that era was over, but last week I had dinner with a man who is trying to create a reserve out of 4m acres of Montana.
It is in an area where the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who led the first US government expedition to the Pacific coast in 1804, reported a profusion of wildlife: mountain lions, grizzly bears, wolves, elk, whitetail deer and American bison.
The plains of eastern Montana are one of the last places on Earth where a large landscape of unploughed land can be reassembled, believes Sean Gerrity of the American Prairie Foundation. He has a long way to go to link up his American Serengeti: so far his foundation owns 38,000 acres, the size of a Scottish sporting estate, and controls another 120,000. But Gerrity believes that, after a 10-year struggle, it is now no longer a matter of whether but when he will succeed.
Gerrity even claims to have given some of the cattle ranchers — who he insists are compatible with his grand design — a new marketing strategy. They have taken to marketing their beef as “predator friendly”. Maybe the Scottish farmers who lose lambs to sea eagles could learn a thing or two.
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The American Prairie Foundation has an inspiring answer to the question of what room there will be left for nature in 2050, when there will be 9 billion human mouths to feed. It is predicated, of course, upon land somewhere else, such as Kansas or Argentina, being intensively farmed in pretty destructive ways, and on Gerrity’s Montana neighbours being ready to live with predators, both of them controversial thoughts.
A separation between productive agriculture and wildlife has long been the American way. But what space will there be for nature in parts of the world where there is little land left, wild or otherwise, and the solutions to feeding the world and growing fuel compete for the same land — as they do in the medieval field patterns of Europe and in the developing world?
The present tide of concern about whether the world can feed itself was unleashed by the spike in grain prices in 2007-8. It was spun into something greater by Professor Sir John Beddington, the government’s chief scientific adviser, who warned that food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy could unleash a “perfect storm” of civil unrest upon the world. In its recommendations on the future of food and farming in January, his Foresight team concluded that feeding a more populous world while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and maintaining biodiversity would require a “redesign of the food system to bring sustainability to the fore”. Bold words for a government report.
The Foresight report, which drew on work from scientists in 40 countries, was welcomed for stating commonsense truths: that hunger is already a problem for a billion people; that farmers need roads and land rights as well as new farming technology; that wasted food represents an enormous resource that should be easy to tap. And it was quite right to say that, with 2-3 billion more mouths to feed, we can’t go on as we are.
As time passes, however, Foresight’s call for a “sustainable intensification” of agriculture looks more unsatisfactory, because it is hard to define and is arguably just a conscience-salving aspiration. There seemed to be as many definitions as speakers at a Westminster seminar on the Foresight report last week. Organic farmers thought it meant planting fruit trees through their arable crops. Biotech firms thought it meant being allowed to use GM crop varieties already used in other parts of the world.
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The agricultural intensification of the postwar era caused well-catalogued declines in wildlife. Wetlands were ploughed and hedges rooted out. Wildflower meadows became monocultures fed on nitrogen fertiliser. Birds such as skylarks and corn buntings, which depended on insects and seeds within crops, declined because of sprays and efficient harvesting. Those declines have been slowed only recently, if at all. So “sustainable intensification” sounds a contradiction in terms without new kinds of technology, and vulnerable anyway to a rise in oil prices that could knock agriculture back decades.
You may say, as some did last week, that if we are to feed ourselves, we must make sacrifices. People at the seminar argued that we should already be writing off the ecology of the middle of the fields — the skylarks and corn buntings and stone curlews that live in the crop — and create hedges and grass strips around fields as habitat for wildlife, just as we have already ploughed up set-aside. But we should not delude ourselves that this will necessarily be sustainable. There will be casualties.
The useful message of Foresight is that we need to think big — as big in redesigning our agriculture as Sean Gerrity has in setting out to save an ecosystem. While “sustainable intensification” is to be wished for, the reality is that it looks most achievable in inefficient places, and more difficult closer to home. Frankly the chief scientist should produce a new, slimmer report spelling out what his conclusions mean for places where wildlife and farming live side by side, such as Britain. For here, I suspect, the arguments have only just begun.