The Battle for the Countryside: Britain Should Rewild its Uplands

thank you very much it's a real pleasure to be here for this debate the motion for the debates reads the battle for the countryside Britain should re wild its uplands which can seem to some may be an arcane subject not to me however nor I imagine to you and certainly not to our speakers the challenge that you face is to choose between competing options and sharply contrasting visions not only about the future character of a great swathe of Britain's most treasured landscape but more broadly a character that goes to the heart of a wider debate about the environment we'll hear about growing threats to biodiversity about the role of farming prospects for tourism about local livelihoods and agricultural subsidies about deep-rooted communities and cultures about heritage and of course about landscape and beauty in short the debate is about her a number of very important dilemmas that are delineated if you like in the uplands but have much wider significance for all of us who have a care for the future now to the format you've already voted on the motion when you came in and in the moment we're going to hear the opening speeches from our four principal speakers after that I'll announce the result of that first vote in which you've just participated then it's your turn your questions which I am sure will generate further debate between our panelists our speakers and after that the protagonists will deliver short summing up speeches which we then deliver the final vote on and that is where we come to our first speaker for the motion george mommy-o Guardian journalist environmental campaigner author of some my totted up some 16 books on that issue of the environment and related questions his most recent federal rewilding the land sea and human life sets out his vision for a new way of living by re-engaging with nature in a positive way he recently incidentally helped to found the charity rewilding Britain which seeks to redefine people's relationship to the living natural world George Monck meow thank you if you take a look at a satellite map of Britain and Europe you'll see something very peculiar in the rest of Europe you'll see more or less what you would expect to see that the lowlands where the soil is good and the climate is benign are farmed and as a result they're mostly treeless and the uplands where the soil is poor and the climate is harsh aren't generally forested because it's not worth farming there you look at Britain and you'll see something very odd the lowlands as you would expect to largely bear but the uplands are even barrer above about 200 metres trees are a rarity here as a result while the European average is 37% tree cover in the UK it's 13% the places where you would expect to find the great wildlife refuges the functioning ecosystems are almost completely stripped of what was once there there are many parts of the British uplands where you can walk all day and see a few crows and a couple of Pippins is this because of geography because of altitude because of climate not at all our uplands were once covered in a rich mosaic of habitats dominated by temperate rainforest teeming with wildlife now they're stripped depleted depleted of soil depleted of their water holding capacity so that the rain flashes off causing floods downstream depleted of wildlife but also spectacularly depleted of human life our uplands are among the emptiest parts of temperate Europe because the activities there do not support anything but a handful of jobs and very poor income something very strange has happened in this country what is it and the answer bizarrely is taxpayers money the reason for the difference between Britain and Europe is that the European Union bizarrely and disgracefully pays people by the hectare for owning land the more land you own the more you get paid it's about the most regressive redistribution of public money on earth today and on the whole in the rest of Europe land holdings are relatively small average land holdings in the UK are much bigger than the European average as a result you can make a living by harvesting subsidies and that by and large is what is going on in the uplands when you look at an upland landscape what you see is what appears to be sheep farming but in economic terms the sheep are ornamental the actual industry is collecting public money sheep farming everywhere in the uplands in fact all Hill farming in the UK makes a loss it cannot pay for itself because the climate is so harsh the soil is so poor that productivity is remarkably low according to my estimates which are the only thing going at them because there's no official figures and no academic figures sheep in the uplands of Britain occupy roughly four million hectares that's more or less the same amount of land as all the arable and horticultural land in Britain and yet they produce one percent of our food that four million hectares incidentally is more than twice the area of the entire built environment all the towns the roads the airports everything sheep in this country have done more ecological damage than all the building that has ever happened here they are a fantastically effective means of scouring the land they seek out tree seedlings is their favorite food they then seek out all the other edible plants leaving behind the coarse and wiry unpalatable grasses and in doing so they empty the ecosystem of its richness of its diversity of the habitats that animals and the other plants make yourself it's not just cheap in fairness those parts of the uplands of aren't sheep wrecked are trashed by grouse roots or by overstock deer doing very similar things and the pity of it all is that this incredible swath of destruction is employing such a pitiful number of people people who desperately need decent livelihoods people who desperately need to be able to stay on the land in Rory's lake district the average age of farmers is now 58 and rising rapidly the young people aren't sticking with it because even with the 3 billion pounds of subsidies we're paying they cannot make a decent living and this is before brexit are we going to continue after brexit to pay 3 billion pounds a year for environmental destruction the equivalent of the NHS deficit somehow I doubt it things are changing they're changing already and I say let's embrace this change and make a virtue of it and make a virtue of it through rewilding the mass restoration of ecosystems not in all the uplands by any means but in some large areas making wonderful thrilling places that we can step into almost on our doorsteps to experience a magnificent encounters with wildlife in ecosystems that we currently travel halfway around the world to have and what examples all over Europe from the Danube Delta to the fogger ash mountains in in Romania to the de Heiser of Portugal to the Vella bits in Croatia wherever you look rewilding is employing more people and generating more income than the traditional industries than were there that were there before it's bringing back not only a resurgence of wild but a resurgence of human life and the schools and the shops and the chapels and most importantly the pubs that were closing before are reopening communities are coming back to life on the back of a nature based economy because what you discover all over the world is that people will pay and pay well to engage with nature and to have magnificent experiences and everywhere in these places we see a great resurgence of wildlife guiding of Rangers of of bed-and-breakfast of catering of transport of all the associated activities because this is something without even any subsidies can actually provide decent employments it repeals the land as well as our rewilding the land the two things go together Rory made a charming video just a couple of days ago saying it's got a D people everything the Sheep is the biggest agent of dispossession there's ever been in the British countryside it drove the Highland Clearances it drove the enclosures in Utopia Thomas More says your sheep that was want to be so mild and tame and so small eater is now as I hear tell become so great a devourer and so wild that it swallows down the very men themselves and eats them up and what he was talking about thank you thank you very much on behalf of Thomas More I thank you what he was talking about was the enclosure driven by the wool industry which still to this day has left the countryside empty of people why don't we see this well perhaps because of two and a half thousand years of ovine propaganda beginning with the pastoral poetry of theocracies in ancient Greece picked up by the Roman poets picked up by the Elizabethan poets Spencer Marlowe Shakespeare and the rest picked up there up by the romantics and now every Sunday night on BBC TV the BBC BBC was only keener and cheap it would be illegal and as a result of this we are blinded to the realities of what is going on that this agency has strict human life and wildlife from our land but we could have a totally different economy coupled with a totally different ecology I envisage large areas of the land where we can see a revival of highly depleted wildlife like wild cats like capitalist a return of missing wildlife everything from pelicans to links from cranes to beavers that where we can enhance our lives and the people who host us through reviving their economies can enhance theirs ladies and gentlemen why would we not embrace this change why would we retain a failed model why would we be stuck in a past which cannot deliver for the future I ask you to approve the motion thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] and now our first speaker against the motion is minute battle she's president of the NF u first woman president incidentally represents agriculture and horticulture in England and Wales she runs a talented sheep family farm in Berkshire where she farms cattle sheep and arable and she co-founded two campaigns amongst other things that she's done ladies in beef and the great British beef week minute batters well I just want to start by thanking you so much for inviting me to speak here tonight many of you will have seen there's been a lot of engagement on Twitter about why is this event taking place in London I actually think it's really good to have an event like this in London I think we need to see far more of the countryside's coming to the town engaging showing what we are doing but I'm very much the odd one out here tonight because I hadn't realised that Rory had actually written a book my other partners in crime here or not have written several books and I haven't written any books I am first and foremost a farmer and I might be president at the nfu now but my earliest childhood memory was of wanting to farm I grew up with parents who farmed in partnership with my current landlords and I could remember from a very very early age having a a complete love of cows and an absolute determination to farm where I had grown up that wasn't going to be possible though because we didn't have succession tenancy and I grew up with a father who was very adamant that women did not go into farming and of course the more you're told you can't have something in my case the the more I wanted it and the more determined I was to have it so in 1998 I took on a very derelict farm with no fences no buildings a few fairly derelict suckling cows and every single friend I knew saying for goodness sake don't do it you have a successful career don't I've never for one minute regretted that decision I made and I guess the point I want to get across to you tonight is farmers are experts in their own field I would acknowledge that the c.a.p has taken them down many a wrong alley I would acknowledge that we can do things much better and I hope I'll get that point across to you but for me pharming mean to me you cannot beat seeing new life come into this world seeing a calf born sing a lamb born it is for me the most uplifting feeling that I can see and helping new life come into the world as I had to do two weeks ago I always took the decision in this job that I would work every weekend I wouldn't have any help of course all the problems are at weekends so we had a breach carving that's when a calf is coming backwards just as bad as it is with a human baby it has to come out fast pull the calf out not breathing massage its heart open its mouth breathe into its mouth and eventually it takes its first gulp of air I tell you there's no better feeling tonight the motion the battle for the countryside Britain should re wild its uplands I'm delighted to see our distinguished Secretary of State firstly still in his job thank goodness and Michael Gove had the sense to talk about health and harmony battles this is nature this is the countryside battles have no place in that field I bought look from the back they look the same don't they Penguin Books ferrule by George mom Bo and the Shepherd's life by James Reeb banks two great books and a lot of tonight's debate will be around whether you're in the feral camp or whether you're in the James Reeb Banks camp I hope tonight I can do James Reed banks justice and bring to life the uplands firstly can I just ask how many farmers that are in the audience could you just put your hands up so not many but how many uplands farmers okay so we literally I think I can count them on one hand I think there are five danny's that is quite important there are only five upland farmers in the room and it is their lives that we are talking about so how many upland farmers are there are there 100 other 500 George talks about them in fairly disposable terms actually in England there are 6,500 upland farmers so the uplands are the first instance they are owned they are cultural landscapes they are small farmed landscapes and they were agreed by consensus in the 1940s so how many people go to the uplands to this barren wilderness well actually 70 million people visit the uplands every year now many of you will know the late districts many of you will know X X more it's like comparing apples with pears they are incredibly diverse in what they have to offer but ultimately 70 million people go there and they hold 86 percent of open access so that is why people go there because they can go they can see the beauty my friend Andrea was there recently and I said to Andrea I'm doing this debate with George he's gonna be tough he's gonna want things different he's gonna want it rewilding he's gonna say there's a couple of crows and no trees and that's it come back and tell me what is there so she came back and she said well firstly I'm covered in bites all over for the invertebrates that have been biting me on my two-week camping trip it is a life she said especially in the mornings it is a live with birdsong she came back and she said it had been the best holiday she'd ever had so those 70 million people that visit let's break this down George talks about subsidy most governments across the world support agriculture in one way or another because they want to see food stay at a consistent price we have a new opportunity to build a new structure for the UK based on what we have to offer and how important that is but 70 million people and we have 230 million pounds worth of public funding that is going into the uplands so if you break that down that is less than three pounds 30 per person per visit now I don't about you where you live and where you parked your cars I can't even park my car for one hour in the city centre car park now you can go to the uplands I think that is a phenomena return on investment for less than three pounds 30 per person and of course support is there to provide things that the market can't deliver on so 70% of our water comes from the uplands 28 out of the 38 dragonfly species are in the uplands now last week I was in Holland talking to the Dutch farmers and I had the chance to ask them about the east of our departing project it's been a rewilding project just east of Amsterdam it's 5,000 hectares in total and it was an area of land that as George says in his book it's a good idea and it'll be interesting to see what happened and that is how it started as a a good idea and we'll see what happened well it is an absolute disaster zone the trees have gone the wildlife has gone and the animals that were introduced are starving so that is cattle horses and deer the farmers union over there said farmers would be put in prison for what has happened and for the Dutch families in Amsterdam instead of taking their children there to enjoy the blue tea and the splendor they take their children there at weekends loaded up with hay to feed the animals the point I'm trying to make is you can't just stand back and hand over to nature the point I made at the beginning about farmers being experts we have to manage the landscape the UK whether we like it or not is a farmed landscape and the uplands have been farmed for millennia now I couldn't come here tonight as a lowland farmer without speaking to my great friend in Northumberland Graham Dixon now I took the chair of the Environment Agency up to meet Graham and Graham bowled up to me and he said oh you all that woman from the Environment Agency and I said no I'm not I'm your president of the nfu and I thought oh no here we go another grumpy upland farmer and you know what he gave me phenomenal presentations so he's finishing 2000 lambs for M&S he stopped the village of El Winton flooding with his natural flood risk management measures and he's the farm behind the five point sheep nameless plan that was launched three years ago at the Oxford farming conference to say Emma was bowled over by him is an understatement and he is now working in partnership with the Environment Agency rolling out the natural flood mismanagement measures that they are delivering and I said to Graham I said Graham if this was your if you view standing here tonight what do you really think we have to offer he said does everybody in that room want high welfare nutrient-dense safe affordable food do they want that I would say yes do they recognize farmers role in mitigating climate change that we can plant more trees we can do this in a way that really really works for everybody like I've shown at our Winton and are we going to rebalance Agriculture's relationship with nature does brexit offers us an opportunity to do things differently yes it does the point I want to get across to you tonight and I feel so passionate and so worried about not landing that point with this intelligent audiences farmers going forwards are the solution and I absolutely urgent tonight thank you [Music] our second speaker for the emotion is mark Cocker acclaimed as an author and as a naturalist his latest book is called our place can we save britain's wildlife before it is too late the argus turned out that our world's become increasingly denatured bear of flowers of animals and of birdsong and examines in the book the threat to the British countryside posed by agribusiness and landed estates mock Cocker ladies and gentlemen I just want to say a word about George mombi oh he sent me that speech and I cannot believe he memorized the entire thing off the CAF and quoted accurately Thomas More's utopia but so thank you George for a compelling account of how and why we should bring nature back to our uplands I want to delve a little into two background issues circling back on one of the points that George made but also offer a final reflection on the real challenge we face in our relationship with the rest of life in these islands but first I want to reiterate that it's perfectly reasonable for us here to debate the matter in the heart of London I raised it precisely because a number of people have said constantly on Twitter in the run-up to this event that it's a subject entirely entirely for rural communities to discuss amongst themselves they have argued what can you city dwellers by and large know about the lives of distant hill farmers or the challenges that we face what right of you here in Westminster to reflect on these questions well they are correct in one sense most of us don't own or manage land fifty-five million of us living in towns or cities own an average of seven one hundredths of an acre but it doesn't mean that we don't play a part in the administration and conduct of what happens on the land of others because for the last 80 years we have paid scores of billions of pounds landowners my money your money Jonathan and your Secretary of State Michael Gove and it's great to have you here three billion of it on average every year goes to farmers there is a perverse dimension to this because you might assume that in a progressive country the most needy would be best rewarded but that isn't how it works the biggest sums go to the biggest landowners our largest landowner the Duke of the clue with his two hundred and forty four thousand acres of Scotland was in receipt in 2016 and 17 of two million seventy five thousand nine hundred and thirty nine eight nine hundred and thirty eight pounds and fifty-one Pence and the reason we give him so much because the more land you owned the more money you receive that leave ring of money out of the public purse from the ordinary citizen and even from the poorest to the richest is nothing less than feudalism it is unjust it has to end but for our purposes understanding the scale of that financial giveaway allows us to sweep aside the argument put forward by farmers or their supporters that what happens on their land is nobody but nobody's business but theirs it is our business we have a right to discuss it and be involved in the future of our land it may not be a case of insisting that farmers must do exactly what we want but we are completely within our rights to discuss it and it's perfectly okay for us to ask that things change so why do they need to change my second point is to clarify what subsidies marching in lockstep with a system of agricultural intensification have inflicted on our country during the last century in effect the British people have had to endure the most radical simplification of their country where once there was complexity filigree beauty and meaning there are now in large measure uniformly engineered engineered arable monocultures or a rectilinear system of graze field comprised of nothing but livestock and grass one overlooked but fundamental part of that simplification what has happened to the human diversity in those same places at the height of subsidy driven intensification Conservative MP Richard body judged that we'd lost a hundred and thirty thousand small farmers in a single generation from the 1960s its impact on the non human inhabitants of these islands that comprise our countryside has been nothing short of devastating from England we've lost ninety-nine percent of four million acres of flower rich meadows in southern England large moths have declined by 40 percent in the last few decades three-quarters of all British butterflies have declined in either abundance or distribution in the last 40 years during the 20th century we lost a million ponds all our amphibians and reptiles are threatened as a consequence these figures only glanced at the real impact which these losses carry they're just numbers they don't express the individual heartache which is inflicted on millions of people tens of thousands all over the country so I want to tell you a little bit about how the decline of birds impacted upon me this is what intensification and subsidies have done to the places where I was born in Buxton in Derbyshire precisely the kind of area where we could do something other than over graze it with sheep when I was a child of 12 to 18 this was a landscape of lapwings and gray partridges snipe and Reid buntings Woodcock's perform their fabulous roading displays over our garden in the evenings and just up the road in the woods above where I lived I'd see wood Warblers singing in the beaches cuckoo sang every spring morning there were red starts and tree pivots spotted fly catchers and common sandpipers around the reservoir they were part of my daily life most moving and I remember it vividly a moment in 1972 when I first saw as a 12 year old boy a ringed goozle a migrant upland thrush with a plaintive wild voice the bread in the gritstone cloths since then all of those birds that I have mentioned have gone completely or remained merely as occasional visitors as part of a red-letter day whenever they're sighted they've not just gone from Buxton and from my daily life those species have declined nationwide by between 60 to 95 percent all of them every single one overall in the last 40 years we know we have lost 44 million breeding birds that's what happens when you strip nature down to the very stump that's what happens as a consequence of a subsidy driven industrial farming regime over 80 years that pursues only production and treats land as a as a medium for tax breaks or for profit land is so much more than that nature is at the heart of our spiritual lives it's a safety valve for our mental well-being it's the theater for all forms of physical exercise it's a key driver of our cultural life place our special places are at the heart of our sense of identity nature is part of our daily joy these are the things it does for us other than provide food which is absolutely essential of course but it also provides home and life for 50 to 80 thousand other species than our own they have a right to live here to plant trees mosses ferns Fox toads bees butterflies moths spiders birds mammals funghi liver Worth's yet the state of nature report of 2016 the most authoritative audit of British wildlife ever undertaken judged England to be the 28th most denatured country on earth how bad does it have to get before our opponents admit that things cannot go on it is time to put something back into the land other than ourselves I'm gonna close by clip by telling a very short anecdote a reader of my book wrote to me recently I'm about what happened on his Norfolk alakh allotment many species of plant and associated insect pollinators like the disturbed habitats associated with hand-done crops hand-dug crops and the organic allotments are great for while this chap had some wildlife friendly plants on his allotment and he received a letter from the allotment committee telling him and that he had to stream and spray what they called weeds on his plot and if he didn't comply they would take the plot off him and use his deposit to spray it for him this leads me back to our motion about rewilding the uplands we can forget the reintroduction of wolves and the conversion of sheep pasture to climax woodland if we can't even allow a little bit of space for a few flowers important and full of extraordinary potential it may be to rewilding z-- it is not enough it is only a part of the picture because what we need is something more fundamental that takes account of wolves and allotment flowers alike we need more of the fifty to eighty thousand species which share these islands with it we need more nature in the uplands but we need it everywhere we need it in our cities in our back gardens in our civic spaces what is rewilding but allowing more nature to co-exist alongside us we should realize that real rewilding is not something that happens out there only in remote bits of the countryside far from here it is something we can all do and share it is a further reason why we should hold a debate here because it is as relevant in this place as it is in Rory's Cumbria so when you vote for it tonight recall that it's something in which you can and should participate and if you're not willing to do it on your patch then don't expect upland farmers I have faith however that you will share my contention that we cannot go on as we have we have to change and we must restore nature to this denuded country if we don't we will rob future generations of what Italy it means to live fully in connection with the rest of life I ask you to approve the motion [Music] our second speaker against the motion is Rory Stewart the Conservative MP for Penrith and the Border's Eden and the border here he therefore is the MP for the constituency in England with the largest percentage of up clans in 2018 he was made justice minister and as we speaks far as I know he's still Justice Minister before that he was the Minister of State is that true just checking for those Minister of State for African before that he was Minister for the environment and Rural Affairs at Defra indeed after the awful floods of 2015-2016 he was the flood envoi for Cumbria and Lancashire overseeing the recovery efforts there he is passionate about the borderlands between England and Scotland which you can discover if you read his book the marches are borderland journey between England and Scotland his most recent book Rory Stuart's well thank you very much indeed um this is a very very serious debate and although we've had a lot of very entertaining speeches it is important to try to clarify what the differences are between our positions so I'm going to be a little bit boring to begin right the key point about this debate is it is about rewilding the uplands it is not about whether or not we care about nature in Britain so we need to begin absolutely by acknowledging that a lot of what George and Mark have said is 100% absolutely true there has been a terrible loss in Britain particularly since 1940s since the Second World War in terms of beauty in terms of wildlife in terms of meaning a lot of that has unfortunately been driven through the 40s 50s and 60s by agricultural policy long before anybody joined the European Union an enormous amount of damage has also been done by forestry plantation damage has been done by cities damage has also been done by abandonment of land all of this together means that everything that George and Mark have said in terms of environmental damages absolutely corrects and I'm not here in any way it's a challenge there erudition their knowledge the question is how do we respond to this and in particular do we respond to this in terms of this motion which is and is only about rewilding the uplands now that means that I have to deal with two quite different people here right a one of them of course is George now it's extremely difficult arguing against a man of such immense hutzpah erudition able to quote Thomas More off the top of his head who talks sometimes than Guardian articles about his delight at the notion of reintroducing the Asian elephant on the Rhino only to change positions and suggests he doesn't really mean that he means the wool from the Lynx who talks about creating two Serengeti Zin Europe and then shifts back to saying perhaps Britain is too small I ought to know how difficult it is to argue against someone like this I ought to know how difficult it is to try to make small detailed reasonable arguments against someone like this I worked for Boris Johnson now mark on the other hand is making a different kind of argument mark is making a very very powerful argument for the British environment but very little of his argument if you listen to it carefully was about rewilding or about rewilding the uplands he talked with immense passion and conviction about the loss of butterflies many of those butterflies would not flourish in the closed canopy temperate rainforests that George mom bo is imagining appearing through a rewilding uplands many of the species which have been evoked by Mark's powerful speech and this might even extend to lap wings and curl you may also not flourish in a close forested or even scrubbed environment it's also true that much of the loss that he's talking about in terms of ponds and a lot of the arguments he's making around industrial agriculture simply barely apply to the uplands of England that industrial architecture enshrined in the agriculture I quote the words that he's using he's talking about arable monoculture he's talking about rectilinear pastoral systems these are simply not characteristic of the upland in fact most of the land that George is concerned about most of the uplands that he's concerned about and with reason then he has strong arguments here most of that is simply not rectilinear it hasn't received large amounts of fertilizer it hasn't received large amounts of pesticide effectively the claim that George is making is that the uplands have been over stopped but that's not the only claim that he's making and I'm going to be a little bit boring just for 45 seconds to try to point out why it's quite important to focus on the claims that are actually being made and I'm sorry if I'm sounding a little bit legalistic here in that amazingly charming exposition by George he began with a great fact he produced a great vision Europe in general has 37% woodland cover Britain by contrast has only 13% and what is responsible for this it is subsidies and in particular the subsidies of the European Union what is the problem with this argument the problem with this argument is that woodland cover today in Britain is larger than any time since the 14th century the entire amount of woodland cover in Britain in 1900 was 3% would George like to explain exactly how we went from 3% coverage in 1900 to 13% coverage today and somehow it's all the faults of European Union subsidies shades of Boris Johnson begin to appear in my mind right and the reason why I'm doing this is that it is quite important to understand what's really going on and it's quite important to understand the kind of solutions that George is proposing not mark because as I say mark is basically making an argument that I 100% agree on mark should be on this side of the table Mark is arguing for good environmental restoration projects and in particular he's put a huge focus on the catastrophic damage to our lowlands the uplands ironically contain most of the triple-s eyes in Britain it is exactly because there has not been intensive agriculture in the uplands that we now end up in the perverse situation that environmentalists are trying to argue for the displacement of farmers from the uplands as a reward for the fact that those farmers did not trash the environment in the same way that the lowlands were trashed instead of turning around 180 degrees the basis of George's argument George has stated in a Guardian article 2013 that there are three reasons why we should concentrate on the uplands number one it is unproductive land number two that it is far from cities and number three that it is sparsely populated those are exactly the three reasons why we should be focusing on environmental projects in the lowlands that fertile productive land is far more capable of generating biodiversity the key example of the kind of rewilding we should be doing in this country and by rewilding of course I don't mean the visions of the Yellowstone National Park that George sometimes tongue-in-cheek evokes of wolves and Lynx's and great romping herbivores Serengeti is in fact what's happening in Knepp in Sussex at the moment a really strong example of how taking three and a half thousand acres of lowland fawn can deliver species such as the nightingale such as the turtle dove which of course do not live in the uplands that loss of the nightingale has absolutely nothing to do with the uplands again it should be close to cities and close to populated areas because the natural capital value lies partly as George implies in humans getting into that landscape far more health benefits will accrue to the populations if we did and this is my radical proposal for you to take on these radical proposals if weary while did the Greenbelt right if we planted trees all the way around London then the benefits would be extraordinary schoolchildren would get out into that environment the health benefits of walking in that environment would follow the air quality benefits that would follow from foresting the Greenbelt in terms of nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions in London would be astonishing doing it in the uplands achieves none of these benefits and insofar as there is a population in the uplands it is because of something I wish to finish on the fundamental point is firstly that these upland farmers are people who live there who own that land who have rights and who are working unbelievably hard day and day out to preserve it but finally that the landscape that they are preserving is the landscape we dream of when we fight on the Western Front that landscape of wild uplands and pasture of sheep and dry stone walls embodies not just history but meaning which is central to our identity thank you very much indeed [Music] you've heard the principal arguments for and against and in a moment it's your opportunity to raise any questions that you like with our speakers but before that you will want to know I'm sure what the vote was before we started for the notion rewilding 61% against 13 percent undecided 26% see what happens when we have the final vote so who is going to kick off with questions and thoughts from the floor we've got one down here number one I'd like to know if the panel agree that in order to reduce the worst impacts of climate change we need a lot more trees to absorb the carbon dioxide which is driving climate change as recommended by the zero carbon Britain report okay I'm gonna hold that and take a lot more trees is that question to deal with climate change up the back the number four so yeah I'm wondering like if we can have a bit of the best of both worlds some research that's come out the University of Exeter shows that the presence of beavers on land well a pair of beavers over five years built 15 dams in an enclosure site and they trap 200 tons of sediment coming off farmlands well the surrounding lands 70% of that soil was farmland soil they also reduced phosphate flow by 1/4 and nitrates by 1/3 there they seem to have this great role in buffering aquatic so what do you what are you asking so I'm wondering like if the sort of well as well as that effect they can buffer against flooding in the uplands so surely is there not a role for beavers in rewilding the uplands but also supporting farming communities there and the impacts they may be having okay trees and beavers the role of the role of trees minute first of all look I mentioned it with what Graham Dixon had said I mean yes we can plant more trees we've actually got more trees now than we had a hundred years ago and in the last five years the Woodland Trust have worked with farmers and planted a million trees so it isn't just about planting trees mitigating the challenges of climate change is a huge job as custodians of seventy percent of the land I think farmers have a massive role and really are up for taking on that challenge and delivering on it but yes absolutely supportive of more trees in the right place and as part of a cohesive catchment based approach because the point being catchments are incredibly different farming systems are different and you've got to work with the catchments in order to get the biggest bang for buck for climate change there's absolutely support you're saying in the right place George Rory made the point earlier it's 3% in 1900 of the land was covered with trees now 13% which suggests an increase how honest earlier you talked about a protein you said some large areas should be rerouted put those two things together how much more woodland cover do you want to see or at remote well on Rory's point the point about Europe is that the woodland has recovered in the uplands then most of European countries were also bad and there's been a massive woodland recovery you go to Slovenia you go to Italy you go to Switzerland you go to so many European countries you will see forests where there were not forests before a hundred years ago that has not happened here and it's happened for the reasons I outlined what percentage would you get - if you get your way you value this huge error I would I would like to see at least 10% of the British uplands become reviled it and you know I'm not talking about a blanket rewilding by any means but you know this is the most appropriate place for trees to grow because you're not displacing fertile land which should used for growing food and while I would love to see more trees in the Greenbelt as well I don't want to take vast tracts of good food producing land out of production I want to see it in the places where it makes makes no sense to be farming because you produce so little Rory pick up on beavers the role of beavers in protecting let me just come back on on George and the fundamental points about Britain is that we have been very densely populated for a very very long time these trees have not disappeared from Britain recently if you look at the uplands where I live in the Lake District you can see from the positioning of Romans signal stations that this land was deforested at the time of the Romans you can see from the positioning of Neolithic standing stones which relied on astronomical visions and you can see also from pollen sampling and from the nature of the peat that this land was deforested a very long time ago in fact the majority of Britain as George Ness and as mark knows was deforested during the Neolithic period now the pigment is that an argument of Bigfoot is that argument against reforesting it's not nothing to get reforesting it's not it's not against reversing but it is an important fact to register in people's mind that George is not talking about returning to the recent past so insofar as we care about the history of the British landscape the meaning embedded in that landscape in the sense in which that landscape is the roots and growth of our civilization so far as we care about seeing those Neolithic standing stones those archaeological sites that medieval woodland that moorland those butterflies those birds these things are not consistent with attempting and it would be very difficult given the nature of the peat to reforest the upland at the same time this point about Europe is simply not true the woodland cover in Poland for example in the 18th and 19th century was approximately 40% of the landmass when it was 3% in Britain it is currently in Poland at about 28 percent the story fundamentally is that these European countries were much wilder and insofar as scrub and trees have returned to Europe they have returned because of depopulation abandonment of those areas okay okay um mark would you pick up on the on the Bieber question in the context of what you were saying about the denature is can I talk about beavers and trees but they seem to go together quite often don't they one way or another the first thing to say is that of course beavers would be part I mean the other thing too to qualify as that Rory tried in a fantastically skillful military maneuver to split Georgia me oh and I applaud his fabulous strategy that would have been a great success in Afghanistan but doesn't work here I was simply fleshing out some of the younger pinning arguments that drive Georgia's main contention that the uplands are the place it's the cheapest and most meaningful part to make the biggest impact as quickly as possible just does anything to say about behaves or just before you come to videos you you in your in what you were saying you talked about industrialized agriculture yeah the point was made against that that there's very little industrialized agriculture in the uplands as opposed to the denatured lowland is that it so does your argument not attach more to the lowlands that does to the uplands the classic part of that is that when subsidies were ply to the head of sheep in Cumbria and Derbyshire the numbers of sheep stopped on individual farms rocketed and that was because the the the subsidy paid per sheep just increased the coffers of the sheep farmer and so and so it was just subsidy driven profiting regardless of the quality and the impact on the land so I think it was subsidy driven if it wasn't industrialization okay to Eva's fever I mean one of the interesting thing is that beavers we have been trying cautiously to reintroduce beavers I think it's a fantastic way in which we could manage more sustainably our riverine environments one of the interesting things is that the a major drag on beaver reintroduction has been the deep caution of farmers and understandably there are conservative people but you know we need to awaken that these things can be incredibly profitable on a whole range of things such as climate change sediment control flooding etc etc so yes to be this and the other thing to say about trees class and quickly is important ok well short trees would come up again in the fourth third or fourth reconquered seems the lights are glaring at us there was a woman with her hand up yes dark hair yes I would like to ask about predation probably this is probably fit for mark I I think probably all of us in this room are very worried about butterflies and songbirds being on the decline who and who is not worried in this room about decline of butterflies right a hundred percent of we take it that's a good start but I feel that farmers always get the blame for this and particularly intensive agriculture and something that isn't talked about enough is predation we worry about hedgehogs and in the Hedgehog debate it's always about the lack of habitat but actually very few people mentioned that Badgers eat hedgehogs Badgers are a huge predator the biggest predator songbirds Sambas are down so severely sparrowhawks has a clue in the name sparrowhawks eat sparrows and yeah the RSPB only protect songs of prey okay point taken predation mark well each issue has to be taken on its own I mean the other thing to say is ablute it as a predator young blue tits in your bird box on nothing but caterpillar larva but the reason that songbirds have declined or some songbirds has declined is not the increase in sparrowhawks it's an old chestnut all of the studies that have been done one classic example one classic example is the blame put on Magpies for the loss of songbirds what they found was that where Magpies had exponentially increased in numbers so had the songbirds as well they have lived side by side for tens of thousand millions of years and of course some localized impacts of predation are very negative but they aren't the problem themselves Minette predation has huge impact I just wanted to mark you talk about Hettich payments it is really naughty to do that twenty years ago Hettich payments ended twenty years ago you bring it up tonight to sensationalize the argument they went 20 years ago it is not relevant to the farming of today but the point on predation you know I am lucky enough to farm on the world sure Hampshire even I can see trees a dent from the game and Wildlife Conservancy trust and we as farmers have come together in order to make sure that we get the Lapwing back in the numbers that we want on the Aven Valley now what we have found is that we have to put a special protection over the Lapwing nests in order to keep the foxes away the LAT wings are coming back on to the avian Valley but predation is a massive issue you know the Fox doesn't have a natural predator the budget doesn't have a natural predator and if you've got ground nesting birds you've got to have the right environment for it and you know we have to take that seriously you can't just say predation isn't an issue of course it is an issue if you're a ground nesting bird and you lay your eggs on the ground it is not rocket science to work out that they are easy for de for anything to come along and eat ok I'm going to take a number of questions there's so many and just under and I'm afraid we're gonna carry pick the questions if necessary we're number two is just there over there my name is Mark Blackie Dourdan I live on the edge of the Appleby's Site of Special Scientific importance on the edge of the York North York Moors can you stand up oh sorry see you and we seem to enjoy on those Moors a quality of natural life Lapwing curlews and ring easels mr. Mumbai er seem to have never noticed I don't think he's ever been on a more in his life does he if I assure him that there is immense wealth of wildlife and particular ground nesting birds which would be exterminated by his ruddy Tremper at forest doesn't he feel slightly sorry for English natural life I start getting all I want George respond to that quickly I'll bring in down here yes well in response to both mark and indeed Manette I would ask how did nature cope before we came along it must have been in a pretty dire state before human beings turned up to look after it George we managed them in all the walls you talked about they were managed before human beings turned up okay I'm going to go sorry to go on I can answer the question that George poses and you you know the answer having read Thoreau how did nature manage before we turned up he tells us it it managed on the basis of giant herbivores he points out he thinks that the black thorn is designed to deal with the elephants he talks about Serengeti s he talks about apex predators and indeed the answer is you have a trophic system the idea about a trophic system if you want to go to the rewilding theology here is it comes in Yellowstone National Park it's about cause corridors carnivores so nature managed in this place when there were about a hundred thousand humans living on this island which was at about the time of the Mesolithic period okay I didn't predict that question the question number one and then if I take that and then take the question for number four and then we'll carry on in my questions read about the hypocrisy of national policy in the way we all debate about elephants and rhinos in the world we currently have British troops in Malawi we've got a new fund going over to protect elephants so we essentially guilty of conservation colonialism mark three in that we're telling farmers in Africa or people in Africa they can't take that land they can't kill these elephants but yet we have not got our shot back in order in the United Kingdom so surely we need to find better policies in order to get the UK wildlife back in order before we start going lecturing countries overseas and they take the question from up there number four just in the middle air hi hello so we've heard a lot about the cost-benefit analysis of responsibly restoring or responsibly stewarding land and I accept that it's probably the role of a responsible government to triage public money in terms of where and where they spend it in the first instance I just wonder I'm any conscious of the quote from John 10:10 above the above the thing and I just wonder where their spaces and also what the mechanisms are for preserving species biodiversity for other than human reasons where the spaces are where the weather space is and what the mechanisms are for preserving species biodiversity for reasons other than human use and also for the purposes we know not which we may need in the future and over there well number three was I just like to make a point to both sides of the panel about trees this obsession with trees we have woodland and we're also keen on rewilding and learning more about it but closed canopy forest is not the native way of Britain that is why it was 3% in the past it's more now but closed canopy tree cover does not help rewilding or biodiversity in fact there are various trees that can't be supportive in closed canopy tree cover like Oaks who need big open spaces what we need is wetlands Meadows to stop having Long's in our gardens and allow grasses to grow that will provide havens for all this other wildlife from the bottom up insect life and straight through ok and predators there's no way to say that predators are something you can get rid of it's part of it ok thank you I want to pick either one I think we might pick up on is this a biodiversity question is what comes into the mind is that there are a number of different species that need to be protected in a number of different ways so it's partly the question of the space that is available and partly the question of what is required to protect biodiversity in a society where we also grow food and who'd like to start on that it won't you I I'd like I'd like to say something which is that when we were in the back room we were getting on really really well I was slightly upset when there's been there before Rory that started shouts exactly about subsidies which I'll answer later Minette but you'll understand what I was meaning but the critical thing here is that this is a binary structure it's a debate between two sides the tragedy of this kind of processes it cannot get at the complexity of ecosystems and truthfully you know the lady rat mentioned the issue of predators well and the gentleman mentioned the issue of his more being grateful a prism etc etc predators are a problem we have large populations of Fox as they are causing enormous damage some species we can't find a simple one-size-fits-all to solution to ecosystem issues because they are by their very nature incredibly complex language itself the linear structures of human thought struggle to convey how these systems work so truthfully we need to be more flexible and and and and attentive to each other's arguments because that's very do you do you take the view that if if we were more attentive rather than more adversarial as it were say we protagonists in this debate that you could have some Wilding in the uplands some upland farms that happen biodiversity as well some lowland farms that have the same is it compatible because your your main of sorts was on industrialized agriculture well is it compatible with the production of food on large scale farms at relatively take into account the subsidies relatively low cost well what I would say is that the cheapest deal we have is to rework that to increase our biodiversity to fulfill our own human needs of spaces for agriculture but also for recreation etc spiritual cultural NEADS the uplands of the cheapest deal on offer but truthfully what we need is is something everywhere and they're different arguments in a different place I mean look I I violently agree with mark I'm not I'm not making a joke when I say that he's on our side that there are very small points of difference one of them is it's simply not true that in natural capital terms the uplands are the cheapest land if you look at the full natural capital value of lowland land I took the example of the green belt around London in terms of its potential for biodiversity its potential for air pollution its potential for recreation its potential for human contact the value of that land and natural capital terms makes it a much much better deal than up than land but the more fundamental point which I think we keep edging around is that land in Britain is contested we're a very densely populated island we are more densely populated than India right that's one of the reasons why this is under so much pressure so we have to weigh up biodiversity which is under serious threat alongside food production so to answer this question about hypocrisy we need to think not just about how much food we produce but how much food we consume and unless like George you become a vegan if you continue to eat sheep but you just drive those sheep off the British uplands all you're doing is pushing the environmental damage onto somebody else's country right those same sheep are out there they're eating up somebody else's country they're methane is going up into the air and destroying the climate from somebody else's country and the final thing is let's not lose sight of meaning and history in this debate because that human landscape is as precious as Westminster Cathedral you know there's so many more did Barry Beckett George glory is so right we do need to stop eating sheep [Laughter] yeah they're definitely in there and then number four and then down here and assembly I'd love to bring everyone in we're not gonna be able to sew up there number four first then number one and then the guy here whose arm is nearly falling off it's been up for the last 27 minutes in the front row so fourth question about 30 years ago my brothers and I inherited 220 acres of essentially pit props we were growing pit props for mines my grandfather made I think a tax based investments in the 1950s on the edge of a major UK city for 30 years my brothers and I have been in the planning system and as far as I'm aware the only way that we can re wild these these are coniferous trees into the citrus deciduous woodland is through some form of planning development some sort of housing now the problem with that is on the edge of a city that you immediately have the planning system attacked by people who don't like the idea of houses and I can understand that for the people who live in those houses don't get to fate because they're not in that village at that time so I'd like to ask the panel how can we re while on a micro scale as individual landowners if we need to build houses and what effect would that have on the planning system to resolve that problem thank you okay thank you and Dan where was the next one down Dan down here yeah it's down here number one I'm a farmer I'm a member of the NEF you and I agree with Manette that farmers could do much to make a difference the problem is we get a lot your money for doing nothing and we've got a lot your money for doing nothing for a very long time that things have to change having said that farmers are very very good they're very very good at producing things and nature conservation organizations are not so there's a lot we can learn from farmers and we should be doing that but when it comes to beavers I worked for B with beavers for 20 years and we talked about the uplands one of the huge problems we have is that there are very few trees up there and if we're going to have beavers up there doing all the marvelous things they do producing a landscape which has eighty percent greater biomass eighty percent greater biodiversity which is literally shrilling calling thrumming with life we are going to have to replant those uplands hurt the trees back and then restore them on a scale that we're also not used to doing because they written we focus on small species and this is a big animal thank you very much I'm trying to get a bit more gender equality than I'm able to get when I look around at the faces so there we are number three after we've heard this one down here I'm confused about the the the economic stand up suggest only places by the economics of the question I have one question for each side for Orion Minette side how do you confront this apparent fact that upland farming is an economic can you explain that it doesn't seem to be worth doing on the other hand for the other side your ambitions are that there would be a great increase in economic value from people visiting these uplands if they were rewilding but given the immense economic value which is shown by tourism in for example the lake district is that realistic okay Rory first of all okay on the net so the answer to this question is that I was rather surprised by George saying that the Upton Sardi populated any of you who have queued in ambleside for an hour and a half or visited Al's water would be a bit surprised by this my constituency is of course more densely populated and it's been at any time in history and in fact all these things that George is talking about guides archery outdoor industries are driving our economy we generate 2.4 billion pounds a year out of the options as they currently stand now how does the economics work to this question these subsidies asthma net points out per farmer for delivering that to the visitor we get about 14 million visitors a year works out at about 3 pounds 20 per visitor for our heritage for the contribution they make to our dry stone walls and to that landscape which they visit by contrast the amount of money which you as the taxpayer give to the Victoria and Albert Museum compared to the number of visitors of that museum works out at 14 pounds 50 per visitor so the economic argument for this on the basis of tourism is that you are getting for about a quarter of the amounts of money all that delights of the Lake District preserved by those farmers I'll come back to you Lynette we drop the George short your economic case so there is a two surveys one conducted by the National Trust one by Newton rig College both of which does a very similar thing they showed people pictures of the Lake District with more and more trees in those pictures they'd photoshopped trees in and first they asked people what is the current state of the lake district and almost everybody's pointed to the pictures with more trees than there actually are then they said what would you like the state of the lake district to be and overwhelmingly people chose more trees not just than there are but then they thought there were it's not the subsidies and the sheep farming that are drawing people in this crazy equation that that money that we're spending translates into tourism there's no link between those things at all except possibly a negative link Georgie all over one since you're crocheted you do you if to set on the statistics who wants to stop a flow they do you accept there are approximately 70 million and per capita per visit that equates to according to Manette 330 and according he's downing the price 320 that that that in its own terms is an economically cheap food for the for the user they're dividing farm subsidies by the number of visitors now I might as well divide the number of spiders in Britain by the number of visitors so two things I'm not connected winnette look Joe I mean George talks about photo shopping trees on I mean that is like going to my children and say look you can Photoshop more and more and more sweets do you want that well yes of course they're going to say yes you can't just I mean it is an insult to our landscape to say that you can photoshop it and give an accurate picture of what is going on George and where does your evidence case come from is that is that you sitting down at the family table saying does this photo shop look better does this one look better does this one look better I mean where have you engagements to find that the the other point on profitable farming in the uplands you know there is a challenge for the UK and that we have a very high cost of regulation in the UK now if you compare us to a country like New Zealand that hasn't chosen to regulate on on water quality it is starting to now because it has to we have been doing that for many years and regulation is not free regulation costs you can't say that upland farmers are unprofitable there's clear evidence if you look at the a HDV work that shows that actually the top 25% are absolutely in profit and there are many things and new policy we can do to look at driving profitability not least sorting out the supply chain and making sure that farmers are at least getting a fair minute I think the income figures that one reads suggest that the upland farmers twelve thousand a year income way below the minimum wage it is a very challenged way of life in places because it is very prescriptive as to what you can and can't do so your average upland farming business has got 28 breeding cows and 330 approximately breeding ewes so those are not big farming businesses those are small farming businesses cheap numbers have declined a lot in the last 20 years since the days that mark was talking about but ultimately many of these things can be changed but as I said to you and it is an important point if farmers could achieve a fair return from the market then actually they would need no support at all but the upland is very fair eternal market means pay more for your sheet beat effectively well above a cost of production price if you're producing anything below the cost of production you lose money but the appellant's also provides a vast amount of things that the market doesn't pay for so this is very much what Michael Gove is focusing on and we've got to look to the future these two keep harping back to the past I'm going to I get it I need a corset I really am about to come to hook they're not going to come to a halt before I go to the very patient woman who's sitting there when you've got a microphone in fact if you already you've really nicked the microphone well done Julia I couldn't be chair of the uplands Alliance we bring together farmers conservationists academics and government and one of our we have five components of a healthy uplands and one of them is investment in return for public benefit and what we really resent is that we should read wild the uplands because it's cheap that's a really bad argument the reason why upload farms are as George would say unprofitable is because we don't pay for the goods that they provide and if we were to pay properly for the goods that the uplands provide then of you would find that we could would get much better public benefits we all know that the cap is not been great we all would like to restructure it but we do need to pay properly and those who deserve provide most should receive accordingly you've you've provided food for the thought as it were of our speakers who are going to sum up so again to leave your thought there and I think you had five thoughts you wanted to give us but that one I'm afraid anyone I got time for I'm sorry we move to the point where it would be great if we could go on but we have to pause we come to the point of the final vote on the motion to remind you of that the battle for the countryside Britain should Rewald it's uplands just reminder if you have already made up your mind tear up your voting slip into and put either for or against in the ballot box if you haven't made up your mind perfectly respectable position put the whole card in the box and very soon I will be able to tell you how you voted but the ballot boxes are or should be coming around we start off in two minutes to start their cases in sorter from how we started so we start against the motion two minutes Rory Stewart so fundamentally it's important to weigh up I feel all these very strong arguments about biodiversity with an important understanding of who upland farmers are and what that landscape is and I really do appeal to those of you in the audience who visited the Lake District could you stick your hands up if you visited Lake District right thank you so I'm speaking to an audience that knows this landscape many of the things that make it so precious and I may be speaking just personally because this is what I look out out of my bedroom window those dry stone walls yes the Lambs in the spring yes the mosaic of different fields yes the Neolithic standing stones yes the remnants of the Roman occupation but above all a sense of thousands of years of our own identity it's not simply that 40% of Lake District farmers carry Viking DNA in their veins it's that those pollarded ash trees in Borradaile were pollarded first by the Vikings there's very little of that left in Britain we've lost it in the lowland by and large and unfortunately in the Highlands of Scotland we've lost it almost entirely and I speak as somebody who comes from the highlands of Scotland right I come from an area that looks at valleys which were once populated by small farms of exactly the sort that you can see today in the Lake District you can see the remains of the dry stone walls you can see the abandoned farmsteads you can see the loss of all the evidence of pastoral and agricultural life we only have it left in the uplands it's a rare precious fragile survival as I said something as precious to us as Westminster Abbey should be something that we should be conserving and preserving which is why I beg you if you are focusing on environmental projects please focus on the Highlands of Scotland where there are huge spaces for pursuing exactly the restorations of the Caledonian forest that George is talking about an area where incidentally the number of visitors going to see that forest is about one fourteenth of the number of visitors going to see those lake district elephants and please invest in the lone uns please restore as they have a net those lowland areas rich in biodiversity close to cities which populations can visit which contain our most precious species and allow that last fragile rare element of our national identity in the uplands to survive for generations to come because if you don't you can see today in New Hampshire you can see today and the Pyrenees what would happen if it's lost once it's gone those Shepherds those farms those dry stone walls are gone forever thank you and now speaking now you don't have to get up they come and do it down here that's part of the rule of the game you have to just be seated not allowed to stand unless you really choose okay there is a global context to this debate which i think is important to remind ourselves of and that is that the rest of life on our planet is in crisis we heard earlier this spring that the northern white rhino has gone extinct giraffes and lions which were part of my childhood imaginative world are now threatened with extinction 50% of all wildlife populations on this planet have did have gone in the last 40 years there are 7.5 billion human beings four-fifths of the Seas of the fished areas of the sea are now fished to or beyond their capacity in Europe alone we lost 200 million pairs of breeding birds we are in a real crisis and and we have been very bad at valuing the rest of life we are coming to appreciate it and we've had a knock about occasion tonight we've had some fun but the truth is that really what I found was a kind of consensual from all sides that we need to change so we've got Michael Gove here tonight and it is a fantastic opportunity regardless of whether weary wild the uplands vote for it because we have to vote for a fundamentally different way with our relationship with the rest of life so I ask you to vote for it to send a signal regardless of the arguments themselves because of that is the most powerful thing the audience can do well we can go into them you can hear the knob out but we need more nature the uplands are a fantastic place to start I okay to vote for this motion and now the final words against the motion Minette batters well regardless of the argument tonight mark you just said I think the argument is is everything tonight and you talked of giraffes and rhinos I'm not sure what they hold place they hold in the uplands I want to remind you of what I said about the hasta broaden project in Holland it started as a nice idea it started with their debate very much like this and it not only destroyed lives and led to very long and protracted deaths it has also made the Dutch government come out and insists that within the twenty the next 12 months the 50% of those animals are cold so be very very careful tonight about the decision that you make because that was a nice idea that went very very badly wrong now I do definitely feel very much the odd one out I think we've ascertained that I can carve a cow I can save a lambs life I can do many things that my fellow panelists can't do I haven't written the book and I can't probably speak as well as they do but I can speak up passionately with enormous pride for the people that aren't here tonight that I could count on one hand when I know that there are 6,500 upland farmers in England alone I also know and I want to finish by reading one paragraph if you haven't read this book please read it James Reed banks the days when we walk the sheep back to the fell are the best moments of my year there is nothing like the feeling of freedom and space that you get when you are working with the flock and the dogs on the common land we can do this differently this is not about harping back to the past this is about building a new relationship with agriculture and nature this is about planting more cheese this is about farmers role in mitigating climate change this is about producing nutrient high welfare healthy safe food we are an island nation is 65 million people vote for the farmers tonight they will rise to the challenge give them the chance please vote for farmers and oppose the motion that is put by two people that were the best will in the world their incomes are reliant on writing Armageddon stories that attract ok great sound and now finally for the motion George mami oh well it was very decent of Rory to call for the Highlands of Scotland to be rewarded he might have forgotten that they number among the uplands of Britain so I would like to thank him I would like to thank him for conceding the motion now look I don't object at all to people farming sheep if they want to farm sheep it's a free country let people farm sheep I do object to paying for it I do object to paying for the environmental harm that it causes now post brexit when we lose the European subsidies we're going to have to make some pretty hard decisions about what we are going to fund are we going to spend 3 billion on continuing the subsidy system given that that equates to the NHS deficit or are we going to use it to plug the nhf deficit are we going to start spending money for environmental restoration in places where it makes sense to actually Commission public goods rather than public harms in terms of both ecological restoration and economic restoration we can hear the scare stories Minette plucks out this one case of austere vardoz plasm but there are scores of fantastic highly successful rewilding projects around Europe which are working ecologic Lee working socially working economically bringing back people onto the land and ladies and gentlemen ladies and gentlemen the one thing they have not addressed is how they're going to sustain their vision which is a vision rooted in the past of keeping farmers on the fells given that the incomes are already collapsing with subsidies are they gonna herd them onto the land at gunpoint and force them to keep sheep by contrast what I'm putting forward is a vision which can take place without subsidies without Duras without going back to a romantic imagined past but to a glowing future a future which is richer for people and richer for wildlife thank you and now I can give you the final votes you will remember before when you came in 61% were for the motion 13% were against the motion 26 percent were undecided after the debate 52 percent were for the motion 39% were against and 9 percent were undecided which is a swing against the proposers of the motion or of their argument of 18 percent that's the outcome my job now is simply to say thank you I thought I'm sure you did too that every one minute spoke with eloquence passion demonstrating the extreme importance to everyone involved of this massively significant debate so thank you George mombi Aurora Stuart mark Crocker and the net battles [Applause] and finally on all over hearts on all over house thank you yet again to intelligence squared good night

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 39,013

Keywords: rewilding, rewild, nature, diversity, uplands, rory stewart, minette batters, mark cocker, jonathan dimbleby, george monbiot, countryside, farming, agriculture, plants, beavers, sheep, grazing

Id: BlVifCNDp4k

Length: 91min 31sec (5491 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019

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