Graham Cox

Environmentally Sensitive Areas: incrementalism or reform?

Abstract This paper examines the origins of Environinentally Sensitive Areas in the U.K. and the political context of their formulation and implementation. A detailed case study of the designation of the Somerset Levels ESA is provided. Conflict between farmers and conservationists erupted in the Levels in the aftennath of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. The paper shows how the uneasy truce, which emerged with the progress of management agreements under the 1981 Act, developed into an enthusiasm among farmers for conservation notifications when the ESA policy was introduced in 1986–1987. Farmers came to see some of the financial benefits of compensatory environmental policies especially in the context of declining levels of agricultural support. Political harmony on the Levels is threatened, however, by renewed concern over environmental changes caused by a general lowering of the water levels in recent years. The problem of water levels is, in part, a consequence of the activities of the Internal Drainage Boards, whose independence and, in some cases, undemocratic character remains a serious problem for environmental management on the Levels. Whilst there are many positive features about the ESA policy, in contrast to some aspects of the 1981 legislation, the paper emphasises the need for still greater co-ordination and consistency of policy.

Agriculture : people and policies

1 The State and the Farmer: Perspectives on Agricultural Policy.- 2 Capitalism, Petty Commodity Production and the Farm Enterprise.- 3 Family Enterprises in Agriculture: Structural Limits and Political Possibilities.- 4 The Development of Family Farming in West Devon in the Nineteenth Century.- 5 Part-Time Farming: Its Place in the Structure of Agriculture.- 6 Small Scale Farming in the Northern Ireland Rural Economy.- 7 Landownership Relations and the Development of Modern British Agriculture.- 8 Property-State Relations in the 1980s: an Examination of Landlord-Tenant Legislation in British Agriculture.- 9 Investment Styles and Countryside Change in Lowland England.- 10 British Agriculture Under Attack.- 11 Agriculture and Conservation in Britain: a Policy Community Under Siege.- 12 Agricultural Policy and Party Politics in Post-War Britain.- List of Contributors.

Reasonable creatures: rights and rationalities in valuing the countryside

Abstract Debate on the economic valuation of the countryside is typically polarized between absolutist critics who would deny it any valid role and equally fervid proponents who see its techniques as the only way of integrating the environment into policy making. Such debate is structured by conflicting notions of rights, responsibilities and values, rather than by consideration of the role of technique in practical policy‐making. This paper attempts to take the debate forward and begins by examining the ways in which rights, responsibilities and values have been historically created. The techniques of economic valuation rest on particular conceptions of these, making them irreducibly political, and at the same time their results are often used to justify political decisions. Yet the proper role of technique ought to be to explore options. Provided that the sort of clarification that economic valuation offers is understood, it may, along with other types of technique, be used to open up the decision makin...

‘Reading’ nature: reflections on ideological persistence and the politics of the countryside

Abstract The peculiarly British difference between nature conservation interests, represented by the Nature Conservancy Council, and landscape interests, represented by the Countryside Commission, is seen to have deep historical roots in complex understandings of the natural world which can be revealed by a study of the arts. Both the work of John Constable, and that of Wordsworth and the Lake poets are considered, and Ruskin seen as a figure of great significance.

The state and the farmer: perspectives on agricultural policy

Relations between the state and the farmer are currently the stuff of news headlines. There is an emerging public consciousness that, apart from the nationalised industries, agriculture is the most highly regulated and state supported sector of the economy. Concern has been heightened with the realisation that government involvement has had considerable implications for the organisation and structure of farming, for the welfare of rural communities, for the ecology of the countryside, for the price and availability of food, for nutritional standards, and for international trading relationships.

Agriculture and conservation in Britain: a policy community under seige

Contemporary analysis of British government suggests that in most sectors of industrial, economic and social policy there exists a ‘policy community’ in which key interest groups enjoy a more or less close partnership with the relevant government departments and statutory bodies in the formulation and implementation of policy. As a result even Parliament itself may play little direct role in the policy process (Jordan 1981, Jordan and Richardson 1982). Moreover analysis suggests that, taken together, a number of factors have meant that over the past decade or so most of these policy communities have faced growing external pressures.

The Farm Crisis in Britain

In some ways it seems misplaced to talk of a farm crisis in Britain. Agriculture continues to hold a privileged position in the national polity and culture. Through the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy it enjoys a high degree of protection from the full rigours of world market forces and, even during eight years of Conservative monetarist policies, agriculture has received fairly mild treatment at the hands of a government intent on curbing public expenditure. Moreover few of the more extreme signs of agricultural depression, such as Britain experienced at the end of the last century and between the wars, are yet in evidence. Despite constant speculation about acreages thought surplus to requirements little land has fallen out of production: on the contrary, reclamation continues at an alarming rate. Recent survey work by the Countryside Commission and the Department of the Environment, for example, shows that the annual rate of hedgerow removal in England and Wales accelerated between 1980 and 1985 to 4000 miles a year compared with 2900 miles a year between 1969 and 1980 (Countryside Commission, 1986).

'Shooting a line'?: field sports and access struggles in Britain.

Abstract With the demise of productivism a new settlement between farmers, landowners and the state is being forged. The new emphasis on the consumption of rural space and the marketing of environmental goods means that access issues are, once again, prominent. The paper seeks to examine the recent history of the relationship between field sports interests and the demand for greater access. Then, drawing upon findings from the Game Management Project, it suggests that such interests do not constitute an especial constraint, whereas increased attempts to commoditise the countryside may, in contrast, be profoundly inimical. The protection and enhancement of particular rights is of more pressing concern than the achievement of a generalised ‘right to roam’.

Book reviews : The politics of the picturesque. Edited by S. Copley and P. Garside. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 1994. xiv + 304 pp. £35.00, cloth. ISBN 0 521 44113 7

far away to the south-west, and from farmers of southern Brazil, displaced by agribusiness and forced to migrate to Rondonia, to Yanomami Indians damaged by gold prospectors in the extreme northern state of Roraima. Despite an index and some footnotes, this is in no sense a scholarly book. It is good journalism, and several chapters were published as magazine articles. The last New World is valuable background reading for serious investigators and a good read for anyone interested in a time and place of such environmental importance. This is because the author saw so much and so many agents of destruction. It is also because the book is refreshingly objective. Margolis meets the environmental villains cattle barons clearing forest to try to make pasture; lawless gold prospectors well aware that their high-velocity pumps and mercury produce ecological devastation; mechanized loggers who plunge into the forest on skidders with individually jointed wheels and water-filled tyres larger than a grown man; charcoal burners feeding the pig-iron smelters along the railway leading to the Carajas iron ore mine. He tells their colourful stories (rather repetitively by the end of the book) and lets each explain the motives and philosophy of his work. Margolis’s own attitude is environmentalist, but only just. He is well aware of the history of the frontier mentality, both in his own United States and more recently in Brazil. This gives him a sneaking admiration and sympathy for those hardy characters who are destroying Amazonia. Margolis admires those who try to manage Amazonia sustainably, by planting exotic tropical fruit, cacao, or pepper, or the handful of active field ecologists like Chris Uhl, studying logging in Para, Philip Fearnside of INPA, the logger-turned-ecologist Harry Knowles, or a Dutch ecologist trying to influence the government of Rondonia. He even has a good word for eucalyptus plantations. But he is sceptical about environmental cant. He despises conference practitioners who know the environmental jargon better than the habitats. He understood the public-relations need for the Indian protest at Altamira in 1989, but was uneasy about the sham side of ’Woodstock on the Xingu’; and he suspected the whimsy of Brazil’s secretary of the environment jos6 Lutzenburger or the showmanship of President Collor de Mello before either of them lost office.