The week before last it was cows in the crosshairs, when Government announced plans to feed Britain’s cattle methane suppressants. But sheep are not exempt from green pressure. Some rewilding proponents would like so see the woolly creatures gone from the land altogether.
“Those campaigning to make our farming systems less productive, and who want to rid our hillsides of sheep, need to explain where the alternative food stocks will come from,” says Myfanwy Alexander, a writer and broadcaster from Montgomeryshire in Wales. She sides with sheep against the likes of George Monbiot, Ben Goldsmith and the Oxford-based charity Rewilding Britain.
Myfanwy Alexander has come to the defence of sheep in Spiked
[George] Monbiot blames sheep for preventing Britain’s uplands from developing a rich woodland habitat. He delicately ignores the fact that many of these areas are either peat bogs which are too soggy for oaks, or otherwise have layers of topsoil which are too thin for oaks. I grew up in the upland hills of Montgomeryshire. The only trees to be seen growing in the shallow soil there were thorns, twisted by the harsh winds. Sheep thrive in hill country not because they are ploughing through virgin forests like four-legged JCBs, but because they are able to survive on the thin pickings on offer.Ben Goldsmith may think we don’t need to produce sheep meat because he doesn’t particularly like it. But there is certainly demand from the wider public – why else does the U.K. import 40 million tonnes per year from Australia and New Zealand? And although sheep meat is no longer as much of a staple of the British diet as it was in the Victorian heyday of mutton stew, South Asian communities now also provide a very sizeable market.
Worth reading in full.
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Just the sort of half-arsed, badly thought out nonsense that the left seem to find appealing.
And the likes of Monbiot presumably turn a blind eye to the transportation from New Zealand, compared with local production. It’s often a better product, especially the more specialised ones, like salt marsh lamb: https://www.gowersaltmarshlamb.co.uk/
Not quite, the more extreme zealots want to ban aviation and shipping too.
The eco zealots are pulling wool over our eyes
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Greens won’t be happy till we are all eating Bluebottle Soup and Locust Curry. —-Everything green is either worse or more expensive or BOTH. And that is the whole idea of it. Because no human impact whatsoever is the goal.
Well, locust will be out as it is not a local British insect, and the only bluebottles I know off don’t thrive in winter.I am assuming that the Monbiots of this world will eschew anything flown in unless it arrives under its own steam, and a plague of locusts wouldn’t do our arable crops a lot of good.
Have you never heard of Frozen Bluebottles? And if we can import wood pellets then why not Locusts? But hey you and I both know what is going on here right?
No humans is the goal.
Well maybe not “No Humans”. Because if there are no humans you won’t have any self appointed and self styled bureaucrats to regulate and coerce the rest of us into submission.
I would like to hear from Monbiot after a winter spent eating British staple root crops and brassicas.
His verbal output, or something else? Methane from his digestion perhaps? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1352231019304522
Is the linked paper meant seriously or is someone trying to increase emissions of human urine?
And a seriously meant question from me. How can a living organism not be carbon-neutral over the course of its lifetime from birth to decay into its elements?
I recall Monbiot when Climategate occurred. ——Boy was he shocked, and thought he had backed the wrong horse. But he pretty soon learned that the thousands of emails revealing the fraud could be swept under the carpet and that mainstream media would help in that regard, so he could breathe easy again and start spouting his climate junk science.
My local council and the environments agency have together been ‘rewilding’ the area where I walk my dog every day. Before this great saving money, sorry, ‘rewilding’ idea came to them the fields were cut back twice a year and the river cleared. We had wildflowers, house martins, dogs and other small animals could access the river to drink, it was a beautiful place to walk in the summer.
last summer, our third summer of ‘rewilding’ we had….Nettles. Everywhere. And if it wasn’t nettles it was some kind of gorse making the river inaccessible. The grass was too long for dogs to get far into / owners to pick up from, so this was all accompanied by the smell of dog poop.
Usual unthoughtout nonsense.
40m tonnes of sheep per year. That’s about 1 tonnes for every meat eater in the land, or about 2.5kgs per person per day. I think the figure should be around 100,000 tonnes, but still, it’s a lot. Oddly, about the same amount we export.
Re-wilding is a euphemism for starving people.
The Net Zero zealots are proposing:
46-60% less energy use per person
35-50% less meat consumption
20-25% of agricultural land to be “released” for forestation
UK FIRES is even more extreme, proposing that beef and lamb be banned altogether.
This is what we are up against.
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/what-will-net-zero-ever-do-for-us?r=nhgn1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
You can also add in they intend to reduce your individual water consumption as well, from 142-170 litres per day to 110.litres per day. Everything is being reduced, no smoking, drink less, eat less meat, travel less etc etc etc, the only thing in the ascension is bureaucracy and stupidity
And, as Gabe Brown points out, livestock are one of the 6 essentials for healthy soil.
This is a grossly oversimplified article based on easy targets such as Monbiot and Goldsmith.
Many environmentalists see the type of hill farming Myfanwy Alexander describes as an asset to be preserved against the threat of intensive lowland farming and imports. Traditional hill sheep farming has existed for centuries and has a reasonable claim to be part of the natural environment. However, while almost all UK farms rely on subsidies and non-farming activities to remain profitable, hill farms are particularly dependent on subsidies.
Farming is not just about producing as much food as possible as cheaply as possible. Many farmers do accept this and work with government and organisations such as Rewilding Britain to combine environmental and agricultural values. For an excellent and highly readable account of the realities, rewards, and compromises of hill sheep farming read James Rebanks’ books.
Unfortunately, Monbiot and Goldsmith appear to have influence. Monbiot is also enthusiastic about the 15 minute city surveillance and restrictions being imposed in Oxford.
I am not sure what they have written about the proposed Oxford traffic regulations but perhaps they are not wrong about everything:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/society/cities/60923/what-is-freedom-15-minute-city-conspiracies-show-just-how-little-some-understand-it
What’s there to understand? The plan is to monitor the number of times people use their local roads using cameras. They they are only allowed to use those roads a set number of times per year before they are fined. It’s dystopian.
Look the detail: https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/residents/roads-and-transport/connecting-oxfordshire/traffic-filters
Traffic and parking restrictions to ease congestion, improve safety and improve the environment are hardly new and don’t normally cause so much controversy. This may not work but it is hardly a sinister attack on civil liberties.
Could you give the BS a rest?
Presumably you are of the school of thought that only people who agree with the politics of this site should post on it? What you might call the “sceptically correct” PoV. I know there are some that welcome an alternative viewpoint but don’t worry I will stop when my £5 expires – I just thought I would get as much value from it as I could.
A sinister attack on civil liberties is exactly what it is.
Restrictions on civil liberties are a matter of degree to be balanced against their benefits – almost everyone accepts a restriction on driving on the wrong side of the road and most people see the need for planning controls. During the war the population accepted far more draconian restrictions. Provided we are a democracy then I don’t see why it is sinister. It is society’s choice. It becomes sinister if it is done without any way for those restricted to voice their objections or vote those in power out of power.
A business owner with a cafe on the Cowley Road tried to voice objections via a poster. Did the councillors listen to his concerns? No, they tried to silence him.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-64588582
I hope the voters of Oxford do use their votes to remove these councillors because they appear to be working for globalists rather than the people of Oxford.
Trees did grow on the uplands of Britain particularly the very tops of the Brecons. It wasn’t farming that removed the trees, but the end of the Holocene Climate Optimum. Temperatures were at their hottest 9k to 5k years ago and the tree line was several hundred metres higher. The tree line came down when temperatures fell. We are still colder as indicated by the current position of the tree line. In addition, when the ice retreated plants animal and humans moved back in so we were clearing woods and altering the land right from the beginning of the post glacial warming. The normal state of British Countryside is a barren wasteland perhaps under a kilometre or two of ice. The last time these islands had as much flora and forna as now was 120,000 years ago, during the Eemian. Mother nature does NOT care, it just is, and we have to figure out how to stay alive. Monbiot is unable to acknowledge that we have done a pretty good job.
The scale and intensity of the recent wild fires in California and Australia were as a result re-wilding ideology. No clearing of undergrowth or back burning was/is allowed on pain of massive fines. The tragedy here is that the Aborigines have used controlled burning for millennia, because it enriches the ground but also avoids the ‘hot burns’ as they call them.
Re-wild away! We’ll just import all our food from around the world like we do our fuel, coal from Australia( 300 years of coal supplies only 1 mile down under our feet and we chose to transport it 11,000 miles across the world instead!), gas from the Netherlands, what could possibly go wrong?
Has anyone considered the emotional anguish caused by the breakdown in relationships for many a fellow Welshman? 🐑
The Achilles heel for humanity is the need to belong, or not be on the outside of the ‘group’ and to do the ‘right thing’. The trouble is, these drives override the ability to scrutinize whether the group is good or whether the ‘doing the right thing’ is actually might actually be the wrong thing. This Achilles Heal allows all sorts of bad actors to manipulate people and especially when these bad actors think they are convinced of their rightness.
And who is the group here? See the reactions and down votes for MTF’s contributions (perfectly reasonable and balanced). I wonder how many of the down-voters actually bother to read the articles he links to.
Re-wilding is not just about forcing us to become vegetarian, it is about taking farmland out of production altogether, and we only produce just over half the food we eat now.
Less food + more people = expensive food and hunger
Less food + more people + an economic collapse = no food and starvation
For most of my life habits like the Yorkshire Dales have been world renowned for their beauty. These habitats have taken millennia to create and give views that recharge your soul. This is being destroyed by planting too many trees, and in just a few short years all this heritage will have been thrown away in pursuit of a false god called net zero.
I am vegetarian, so would very much welcome the cessation of production of lamb meat.
However, sheep are vital for so much more. Not only are they wool producers, but their grazing and manure are extremely useful for maintaining a varied sward of wildflowers and meadow grass, etc, and are used strategically at certain times of year on nature reserves. Land that is left fallow is often also grazed by sheep to improve the fertility of the land, and to prevent overgrowth.
To re-wild Britain would be to transition to ever-greater reliance upon imports from countries that are willing to continue their agricultural ways of life, and a paucity of locally sourced produce.
Of course it is important to protect our wild spaces, and even, dare I say it, expand them where it is possible and doesn’t chip away at vital agricultural resources.
David I think that your comment would have got quite a few upticks but for the first paragraph. The vegetarians I know have made a personal choice for themselves, but don’t mind if I continue to eat meat. To tell us that meat production should be stopped is quite a punchy statement.
Well said. I have a close friend who turned vegetarian ten or so years ago and now flirts with veganism. She was continually preaching at me until I told her it was like being cornered by a Jehovah’s Witness.
We’re still friends.
Why do you seek to impose your dietary choice on other people? I don’t try to make you eat meat.
Realistically, until this country can supply ALL the food it needs the re-wilding option is unavailable.
Realistically that should have been a baked in part of national policy and adopted and supported by every government since WWII. The fact that we cannot yet supply 100% of our food needs means that the re-wilding nonsense is part of another agenda. Like much that goes on today the headline is never the real story. Taking land out of food production can only have disastrous results for the people of this country and a poorly fed populace is part of that. People’s bellies may be kept almost filled but the nutritional value will be poor but without “bread” there will be riots.
So re-wilding is evil, nasty, vicious and hiding serious harms.
‘Many thanks, too, do we owe to the sheep, both for appeasing the gods, and for giving us the use of its fleece.’ Pliny the Elder
Plus without doubt my favourite meal is a slow cooked lamb chop. Vegetarians can only imagine the incredible flavour.
George Monbiot is a fool who has a track record of being completely wrong about most things, such as we have 12 years left to save the planet which he proclaimed over 15 years ago, rewilding is no different.
Firstly, rewilding is a misnomer, it is replacing one man made environment with another man made environment.
Secondly, animals do no contribute in any way to climate change. Animals have been on earth for millions of years, a few sheep or cows are not going to make any difference. All the carbon emitted by animals originates from the atmosphere. In fact they trap carbon in the soil through their excrement.
Thirdly, reducing productive farm land must result in increased food imports, increased transport emissions and require more farmland to be created elsewhere.
I could go on, basically it is nonsense.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make farming environmentally friendly but don’t stop farming!