Where Have All The Hedgerows Gone?

What people need on Twitter is more education and less politics.

I had a classically nonsensical conversation with a couple of twitterati over the weekend. It followed an entirely predictable path and got no-one anywhere other than cross, but it was illustrative of a couple of significant issues which are holding us back in the fight against the crisis in nature here.

The exchange started when I responded to this tweet:

England loses 10,000 miles of hedges every year. With loss of every hedge, a precious piece of countryside disappears forever. If we can't control borders, overpopulation/urban sprawl will turn this pleasant land into one beastly car park

Everything here is wrong. The tweet was accompanied by a photo of supposedly bucolic bliss showing dry stone walls and flowerpots, which might not have inspired confidence to start with.

Why is it wrong? 10,000 miles was the guestimate Max Hooper came up with for maximum annual hedge loss in the 60s. I'm not saying things are ideal (!), but losses now are much smaller, particularly following legislation in 1997. Estimates vary as to exactly how many hedges we're still losing. The vast majority of lost hedgerow, in those days and now, is/was the result of changing farming practice and/or poor management. It has indeed been a sad and devastating loss in the landscape, but not one caused by urban sprawl.*

Closing our borders isn't an effective policy response to the collapse in global biodiversity which is - only now - making headlines. As the story behind our hedgerows actually shows, there is no silver bullet, no instant fix, to any of this. We've got to stop thinking there is. We need to make many changes to the way we live to tackle these enormous and complex problems. Some are already happening. These changes will have to be driven by education and science, not political agendas. This is what Michael Gove - incidentally - seems as if he might understand.

Pleasant Land?

My twitter spat also illustrated another problem. 10,000 miles subsequently posted a photo showing the kind of "pristine" English countryside which we are concreting over. In this case his problem was the ghastly mooted housing development in the Cambridge-Oxford arc.

This isn't pristine countryside. The woodland is in retreat. The hedges are heavily degraded (ironically!). There's a monoculture of some kind of heavily fertilised fast growing grass, which will dominate any other species. This temporary ley will probably have been doused with selective broadleaf herbicides for good measure. Once it's knackered it will be sprayed with herbicide and replaced. In other words, this pastoral scene is exactly the sort of thing we DON'T want.

We - collectively - seem to have a weird view of the countryside. Much of it is pretty much a green desert. The fields surrounding us here are pretty much as useless for wildlife as a housing estate. Further, the inhabitants of a housing estate don't spend their time trying to slaughter all the insects thereabouts. Just because it's green doesn't mean it's pleasant.

Producing a false narrative about the countryside is not going to help us. This has got specific historic precedent in the UK over hundreds of years - and it tends to end badly! Much, much more helpful is doing something practical in today's world. What some farmers are trying to do now needs a lot more support from us as consumers, and the government. Many farmers are trying to help nature while making a living producing the food we don't want to pay for. The cards are - currently - stacked against them.

Climate change, food production, consumption, the built environment... We need to action multiple practical solutions and fast, rather than just harkening back to a bucolic idyll we have misremembered and misrepresent. Oh, and get planting/seeding.

*The UK does sometimes feel very crowded, but in actual fact urban areas only cover something like a surprisingly low 6-8% of the country. This has been rising following recent planning policy changes, but city dwellers are pretty squished in.