The Shaping of the Countryside was published in 1979 and covers themes very dear to my heart - in particular the way that the countryside has been shaped by centuries of human labour. Whitlock begins with the geological foundation of the British Isles, quickly moves to bronze and iron age history and the Roman Invasion. At each point he shows the contribution of those peoples to the physical shaping of the countryside, through deforestation, building and particularly agriculture.
Unfortunately despite a strong start - I was particularly drawn in by his comments about newcomers to his village who often desire the place to stand still, yet seem unaware of the continual change inherent to the countryside - I was disappointed by many of Whitlock's assertions and some of his political arguments. I also found too many factual errors to have real confidence in his writing.
Whitlock's biggest flaw is that he sees "progress" as positive. He makes some assertions around this that would today be concerned incorrect, such as his early equation of the arrival of Christianity allowing the development of the "arts of civilisation". In an extended, and accurate, discussion of enclosure he declares it a "necessary evil". This isn't to say that he is uncaring, or dismissive of the violence and suffering caused by the enclosure of land and the dispossession of the peasantry, but that he argues that "the detested enclosures were probably a necessary evil before Britain could become a great industrial nation". This is a problematic framework - enclosure freed up the peasantry to become waged workers (in towns or in the countryside) - but there was no inevitability that it needed to be perused in a way that was so detrimental to the people involved. That it did was because capital puts profit before people. For Whitlock the anti-enclosure protests or other social movements are worth acknowledging but they are going against the grain of history.
It is interesting to read his comments on industrial agriculture, which he again sees as necessary. Necessity for Whitlock is to do with the sheer amount of food that can be produced. The heavy application of chemicals, or battery farming are technical marvels for Whitlock. There is no sense of mass production of chicken being problematic for the animals, or the quality of the food (never mind the environment), instead it is simply about producing cheap food that turkey is no longer a luxury food, but one of the "commonest dishes".
He makes some remarkably naïve comments about birds and agriculture. Starting by saying that he believes that farming and nature conservation is compatible, he argues that its ok to destroy hedges as long as other cover is made. He then claims that bird censuses ignore "vast numbers of birds which flock to the stubble fields in autumn... the bare fields are invaluable foraging-grounds". Where this crude approach true, we wouldn't be seeing the catastrophic decline in bird species that we have done over the last fifty years. Perhaps Whitlock's real target is revealed with his next paragraph which dismisses nature conservation as "an attractive way of earning a livelihood". While it is no doubt true that conservationists have not always been motivated by the right reasons, his suggestion of their "ulterior motives" seems to smack more of a belief that all conservationists dislike farmers by default, and only farmers knew best.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it is disappointing to read a farmer and "conservationist" from the 1970s with a belief in the powers of chemicals that would shame a contemporary multinational's brochure:
As fast as each new threat [weeds] develops, scientists produce a chemical weapon to help fight it. The race is now so fast and furious that not all the new chemicals have their possible side-effects thoroughly studied before they are released on the market. Constant vigilance is necessary.
I don't know about other readers, but I'd prefer chemicals used on my food to have been studied for dangerous side-effects before they are sprayed on fields.
Whitlock writes in the early period of the European Common Market. He acknowledges that the future of the countryside depends in part on whether UK governments see the need to provide most food from abroad at home, but doesn't really understand that the dynamic shaping the countryside is now driven solely by the need to make profit. He makes some predictions about the future of rural villages, some of them borne out, others more fanciful, but the solution he pitches is as idealistic as some of those he critiques at the start of the book. Ultimately he looks forward to the future of the countryside as an unchanging one, where "the pageant of the seasons remains, and always will... the swallows will always come in April" at the same time as he misses the sights and sounds of the past - the "sound of bat on leather" the hammering in the smithy and so on.
Unfortunately capitalist development put paid to these rural idylls, if they ever really existed and is currently putting paid to the natural world and its seasons variations. We'll need much stronger rural politics and visions than Ralph Whitlock offered in 1979 if we're to have any countryside to enjoy in the future.
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